Collection: Renaissance

Florence, 1401. The wool guild commissioned a competition for new bronze doors of the city Baptistery, asking the seven shortlisted artists to model a Sacrifice of Isaac. Two of the panels survive: Lorenzo Ghiberti's, classical and refined, and Filippo Brunelleschi's, more dramatic and raw. Ghiberti won and spent the next twenty seven years on the first set of doors before starting a second pair he called the Gates of Paradise. The contest is the conventional birthdate of the Italian Renaissance, the moment European art began to think of itself as the heir of antiquity rather than the late phase of the Gothic.

What followed reorganised every part of the painted surface. Brunelleschi formalised linear perspective; Leon Battista Alberti codified it in his 1435 treatise De pictura; within a generation every serious painter in Italy worked inside a measurable geometric space. Masaccio frescoed the Brancacci Chapel and died at twenty six in 1428, leaving panels that Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo would study a hundred years later. Cosimo de' Medici, who controlled what was then Europe's largest bank, invented the modern model of secular patronage, paying for sculpture, architecture, and the recovery of Greek manuscripts at a scale neither church nor crown had matched.

The High Renaissance compressed into roughly twenty five years between 1495 and 1520. Leonardo dissected cadavers in pursuit of anatomy and developed sfumato, a smoke-like blending of tone he used in the Mona Lisa. Raphael, in his short Roman career, finished the Vatican Stanze in his early thirties before his death at thirty seven in 1520. Michelangelo, who told Pope Julius II that he was a sculptor and not a painter, spent four years on the Sistine Chapel ceiling between 1508 and 1512, working largely alone on a programme far more ambitious than the twelve apostles Julius had originally commissioned.

North of the Alps, the parallel revival used oil paint with a precision Italy did not match before 1475. Jan van Eyck and the Bruges workshops built a descriptive density unique to the Northern tradition. Albrecht Dürer carried Italian theory back across the Alps and raised engraving to a new dignity, putting Renaissance imagery into a portable form that any educated household in Europe could own. The prints in this collection trace those exchanges across Quattrocento, Cinquecento, and Northern Renaissance production.