Collection: Early Renaissance

The Early Renaissance covers Italian painting and sculpture from approximately 1400 to 1495, the generation that established the new visual grammar before the High Renaissance consolidated it. Florence dominated the period, beginning with Masaccio's frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, the geometric experiments of Piero della Francesca, and the workshop production of Verrocchio, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Filippo Lippi. The shared project was the unification of figure and space through linear perspective, formalised by Filippo Brunelleschi and codified by Leon Battista Alberti in his 1435 treatise De pictura, and through observed anatomy.

Sandro Botticelli belongs to its closing decade, with the Birth of Venus and Primavera dated to the 1480s. Andrea Mantegna in Padua and the early Venetian school around Giovanni Bellini prepared the ground for the High Renaissance. Northern centres absorbed Italian methods through travelling craftsmen and engraved reproductions.