A Short History of the Middle Ages Fourth Edition

Plate 8.3: Piero di Cosimo, Venus, Cupid, and Mars (c.1495–1505). For Florentines steeped in Neo-Platonic
ideas, Venus and Mars represented not just ancient mythological lovers but an allegory of the marriage of
opposites—in this case peace and war—that harmonized apparent opposites into one perfect form: harmony.
Here the wakeful Venus’s seduction of Mars has put war to sleep. At the same time, Piero’s painting spoke
to more earthly concerns: women were said to conceive more beautiful children if they gazed at beautiful
forms.

Renaissance artists did not just imitate ancient models; they also strove to surpass

them. Consider the new dome for the cathedral at Florence (Plate 8.4 on p. 310).

The Florentine Opera del Duomo, which was responsible for the upkeep of

Florence’s cathedral, held a competition to decide who would span the huge

octagonal opening above the church. The winner was Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–

1446). Later one of his many admirers, Leon Battista Alberti, himself an architect,

dedicated his book On Painting to Brunelleschi, praising the dome as “an enormous

structure towering over the skies, and wide enough to cast its shadow all over the

Tuscan people, made as it is without any beam or abundance of wooden supports,

surely hard to believe as an artifice that it was done at this time when nothing of the

kind was ever to have been seen in antiquity.”^13