Renaissance art is the art made first in Italy, beginning in Florence around 1400, by painters, sculptors and architects who set out to revive the art of ancient Greece and Rome and to show bodies and space as the eye sees them. It reached its high point between about 1500 and 1530 in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, and by then it had spread across Italy and north of the Alps.
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.
Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus, painted in Florence around 1485, shows both ambitions at once. Its subject is a pagan goddess taken from ancient myth, not a saint from the Bible, and it was painted most likely for a member of the Medici family, the bankers who ruled the city. The new art looked to the ancient world for its subjects as well as for its forms.
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The painters of Florence did not know they were living in the Renaissance. The closest they came was the Italian word rinascita, rebirth, which Giorgio Vasari, a painter who wrote the lives of the Italian artists in the sixteenth century, used for the revival of painting, sculpture and architecture. The name of a whole age, with its capital letter and its dates, was given much later, by historians.
The date of 1400 is also tidier than the history. Vasari began his own story a full century earlier, with a painter named Giotto. And the scholars of Florence were reading and copying ancient authors well before the artists joined them.
What You'll Discover
Who turned rebirth into the name of an age.
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.