The Renaissance in Italian painting ran from the early 1400s in Florence to its High Renaissance peak of about 1490-1527 under Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. Its painters joined close observation of nature to classical balance: calm, monumental figures in a unified light and space, while Venice, through Giorgione and Titian, developed a version built on color. Giorgio Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists appeared in 1550, called the whole development a rinascita, a rebirth. He traced it in three ages: the first led by Giotto, the second by Masaccio, and the third begun by Leonardo and crowned by Michelangelo.
In Florence the architect Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated linear perspective with painted panels, and Leon Battista Alberti set down its rules for painters in On Painting (1435). Masaccio applied them in his Holy Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella (about 1427), where a painted coffered vault seems to open the church wall. In the Brancacci Chapel he gave biblical figures solid weight and lit them from a single direction. Most Early Renaissance pictures are tempera on wood panels or fresco. They have crisp outlines, bright, even colors, abundant detail and carefully measured architecture.
In the later 15th century Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449-1492) steered commissions to the leading Florentine artists. Sandro Botticelli, who worked for the Medici, painted mythologies such as Primavera (about 1480) and The Birth of Venus (about 1485), both now in the Uffizi. Their slender figures move in rhythmic, flowing lines across shallow, decorative settings. In Mantua, Andrea Mantegna painted the Camera degli Sposi (1465-1474), where figures peer down from a painted opening in the ceiling. In Venice, Giovanni Bellini adopted oil paint and filled his altarpieces with soft, warm daylight.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), the oldest of the three, dissected bodies, studied plants and light, and let contours melt into smoky shadow, the technique called sfumato. For Ludovico Sforza he painted The Last Supper (about 1495-1498) in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. The apostles react in four groups of three around a calm Christ. Leonardo used an experimental mix on dry plaster instead of true fresco, and the paint was flaking within his lifetime. Back in Florence he began the Mona Lisa about 1503, now in the Louvre, and set the sitter before a landscape that dissolves into blue haze.
In 1503 and 1504 the Florentine republic commissioned Leonardo and the younger Michelangelo (1475-1564) to paint rival battle scenes for the great council hall of the Palazzo Vecchio. Neither mural was finished, but other artists studied and copied the designs. Pope Julius II (1503-1513) then called Michelangelo to Rome, where he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1508-1512. He saw himself as a sculptor and complained in a comic sonnet that he was no painter. His Genesis scenes, among them The Creation of Adam, fill the vault with muscular bodies in twisting poses, modeled as if carved from stone.
Under Julius, Rome became the center of the arts. In 1506 the pope began the new St. Peter’s Basilica to designs by Donato Bramante, and from 1508 Raphael (1483-1520) painted the papal rooms in the Vatican. The School of Athens (1509-1511) gathers ancient philosophers beneath vast classical vaults in a strictly symmetrical space. Raphael’s Madonnas, such as the Sistine Madonna (about 1512) in Dresden, arrange figures in stable triangles with gentle, idealized faces. Later academies took his clarity as their model.
Venice took another path with Giorgione, who died in 1510. He painted small, poetic pictures for private collectors in which landscape and sky count as much as the figures. The subject of The Tempest (about 1508, Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice) is still debated. Titian, who died in 1576, built forms directly from color by layering warm oil glazes, as in the Assumption of the Virgin (1516-1518), which still rises above the high altar of the Frari church. Vasari reported that Michelangelo praised Titian’s coloring but regretted that Venetian painters did not learn to draw first. Critics framed the contrast as disegno against colore.
Leonardo died in France in 1519 as a guest of King Francis I, and Raphael died in Rome in 1520, aged 37. In 1527 the troops of Emperor Charles V sacked Rome and scattered its artists. Already in the 1520s Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino and Parmigianino were bending the balanced style into Mannerism, with elongated figures, crowded space and cool, sharp colors. The frescoes remain where they were painted, but many panels and canvases left Italy. London’s National Gallery, for example, holds Leonardo’s second Virgin of the Rocks and Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-1523).
