CategoriesStyles and Movements
Early Renaissance
Italian art of the 1400s, when Florentine artists rebuilt painting and sculpture on perspective, anatomy and the study of antiquity.
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About
The Early Renaissance took shape in Florence in the first decades of the 1400s, on ground prepared long before. Around 1300 Giotto had given painted figures weight and feeling, and Nicola and Giovanni Pisano had studied Roman sarcophagi when carving their pulpits. Around 1415–20 the architect Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated a method of linear perspective, and within a few years artists were using it to construct convincing space.
Masaccio's Holy Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella (around 1427) seems to open a vaulted chapel in the wall, and his figures in the Brancacci Chapel cast shadows from a single light. Donatello's bronze David revived the free-standing classical nude. Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise for the Florence Baptistery (1425–52) set biblical scenes in deep perspective. Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi brought the new clarity to devotional painting, and by the later 1400s the approach had spread across Italy.
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