ventions unknown to the ancients. It must be stressed
that, while the revival of classical form and content was
central to the Renaissance, naturalism was secondary. It is
because GIOTTO’s profoundly innovatory and naturalistic
style neither derives from nor reflects the values of classi-
cal antiquity that it cannot meaningfully be labeled as a
manifestation of Renaissance art.
Florence was the principal home of literary human-
ism and had also been, for more than a century, the home
of the most innovatory school of painting in Italy before it
became the birthplace of Renaissance painting. These first
stirrings were promoted by a wealthy and erudite bour-
geois ruling class which commissioned works of art both
individually and corporately. Without such patrons as Fe-
lice Brancacci, for whom Masaccio executed the revolu-
tionary fresco cycle in Sta. Maria del Carmine, there
would have been no material basis for the Florentine
awakening which set the tone of most subsequent devel-
opments in Renaissance painting. Although Masaccio’s
Trinity fresco (c. 1427) in Sta. Maria Novella demonstrates
a familiarity with classical forms of drapery and architec-
ture and reveals the power of one-point perspective, the
manifesto of Renaissance painting, Leon Battista ALBERTI’s
treatise Della pittura (1435), was written by a humanist
observer from the Florentine ruling class, rather than a
professional artist. The Florentine painters Fra ANGELICO,
DOMENICO VENEZIANO, Paolo UCCELLO, and ANDREA DEL
CASTAGNOelaborated further on the three essential tools of
the QUATTROCENTOavant-garde: the study of antique re-
mains, use of one-point perspective, and direct observa-
tion of the human body and, especially, the nude.
Gradually these originally Florentine preoccupations
spread more widely in Italy. At Borgo San Sepolcro in the
Marches of central Italy, PIERO DELLA FRANCESCAhad an
appreciation of weight and volume and an understanding
of light effects which far surpassed that of the painters of
Florence, where he was trained. His contemporary, the
Paduan Andrea MANTEGNA, who worked principally as a
court artist of the Gonzaga princes of Mantua, developed
a hard-edged style informed by a meticulous study of an-
tique remains and was the most virtuoso exponent of one-
point perspective of his generation. In Venice, Giovanni
BELLINIevolved a more contemplative manner, combining
classicizing forms and one-point perspective with delicate
light effects, the latter derived partly from Netherlandish
models. In Florence, during the second half of the 15th
century, Antonio POLLAIUOLOrefined the depiction of the
nude in motion and devised tightly structured symmetri-
cal compositions. The last principal element of Renais-
sance style to fall into place, the reunification of classical
form and classical subject matter, did so only towards the
end of the century, in such pictures as BOTTICELLI’s Birth of
Venus (c. 1485).
Many hundreds of miles to the north, in the Nether-
lands, a new school of naturalistic painting was estab-
lished almost simultaneously with the new developments
in Florence. The style of its founder, Jan van EYCK, may be
seen, already fully formed, in his earliest dated work, the
GHENT ALTARPIECEof 1432. Jan’s success depended upon a
seemingly infinite patience in the rendering of the minut-
est detail, embodied by a newly developed method of
painting, in superimposed translucent glazes of oil paint,
which permitted effects of light and texture to be delin-
eated with a fidelity hitherto beyond the reach of artists
working with opaque tempera. At about the same time, in
Tournai, a similar but rather less accomplished style was
formulated by Robert CAMPIN, sometimes known as the
Master of Flémalle. Jan’s pupil, Petrus CHRISTUS, had few
followers, but Campin’s student, Rogier van der WEYDEN,
became the most influential northern painter of the 15th
century.
Abroad, the style of the early Netherlandish painters
was introduced to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland by
Lukas MOSER, Konrad LAIB, and Konrad WITZ, to France by
the Master of Aix, and to Spain by Luis DALMAU. In Sicily
ANTONELLO DA MESSINAwas trained by a Netherlander.
Even the Florentine painters were affected by such works
as Hugo van der GOES’s PORTINARI ALTARPIECE, imported
from Ghent in the late 1470s. Jan van Eyck was something
of an antiquarian in as much as he was intrigued by 12th-
century architecture, but the early Netherlandish painters
had little or no interest in classical antiquity. Nevertheless,
northern painters of the 15th century are best considered
under the “Renaissance” head of account, because they
were contemporary with the Italian avant-garde, were
commonly interested in naturalism, devised the oil tech-
nique subsequently adopted throughout Europe, and fa-
thered the Italianate northern schools of the 16th century.
The term “High Renaissance” is customarily reserved
for the three decades of Italian art from the beginning of
the 16th century to the Sack of Rome in 1527. Central to
this epoch are the earlier works of MICHELANGELO, the ma-
ture period of RAPHAEL, and most of LEONARDO DA VINCI’s
paintings. To this pantheon may be added the Florentines
Fra BARTOLOMMEOand ANDREA DEL SARTOand, with less
assurance, the Venetians GIORGIONEand the young TITIAN.
No northern painters are included, although it may be ar-
gued that Albrecht DÜRER’s work of the period between
about 1500 and 1509 has much in common with what we
traditionally perceive as “High Renaissance” values. The
view of this period as one in which painters in assured
control of the techniques forged in the previous century
attained a pure, classical harmony, free of superfluous de-
tail, may be traced back to that of Giorgio VASARI, whose
Lives was first published in 1550. While the validity of this
concept, which derives from the evolutionary cycle of rise,
maturity, and decay, is highly suspect, it has proved re-
markably alluring. Like the brief “classical” epoch of
Greek art, the High Renaissance remains one of the essen-
tial fixed points in Western art history.ppaaiinnttiinngg 3 35555