Renaissance art is the painting, sculpture and architecture made in Italy from about 1400, beginning in Florence. Its artists set out to revive the art of ancient Greece and Rome and to show bodies and space as the eye sees them.
The movement reached its summit between about 1500 and 1530, a period called the High Renaissance, with Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael.
Renaissance is the French word for rebirth. What was being reborn, in the minds of the people who made this art, was antiquity: the statues, buildings and books of Greece and Rome, which Italian scholars and artists admired as the best that had ever been made.
Raphael's School of Athens, the fresco at the top of this page, puts both ambitions on one wall. Its subject is a gathering of ancient Greek philosophers. Behind them, a row of great arches grows smaller and smaller toward the back, so that the flat plaster seems to open onto a deep hall.
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The first ambition broke with the past. In the Middle Ages, a picture usually told a story from the Bible or the life of a saint. Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus, painted in Florence around 1485, shows instead a pagan goddess from ancient myth, and it was most likely made for a member of the Medici family, the bankers who ruled the city.
A rebirth named after the fact
Botticelli and the other painters of Florence never knew they were living in the Renaissance. The painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari came close to the word in the sixteenth century, but the name that now covers their whole age was settled long after the last of them had died.
What You'll Discover
What Florence's artists competed for in 1401.
What Brunelleschi proved with a painting and a mirror.
Where a Flemish painter chose to sign his name.
What Michelangelo and Raphael made in Rome.
How the Renaissance ended, and what it left.