Collection: Renaissance

The Renaissance was a European art movement that ran from approximately 1350 to 1620. It originated in Italy, principally in Florence, before spreading to the Low Countries, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Britain. The movement took classical antiquity as its foundation, integrating Greek and Roman models with new scientific knowledge and the developments of Northern European painting. It marked the transition from the medieval period to the Early Modern age.

Two technical innovations defined Renaissance painting. Linear perspective, formalised by Filippo Brunelleschi and codified by Leon Battista Alberti in the treatise De pictura in 1435, enabled the realistic representation of three-dimensional space on a flat surface. Oil painting, refined by Flemish artists from the 1420s onward and adopted in Italy from around 1475, allowed a precise rendering of light and surface texture. Sfumato, the subtle blending of tones developed by Leonardo da Vinci, and chiaroscuro, the strong contrast of light and shadow, became standard techniques for the modelling of figures.

The High Renaissance, between roughly 1495 and 1520, is the period most strongly associated with the movement. Its central figures were Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, working principally in Florence and Rome. In Venice, Titian developed a parallel tradition centred on colour. North of the Alps, the Early Netherlandish school produced Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hieronymus Bosch, while German painting was led by Albrecht Dürer, who introduced Italian theory to Northern engraving and woodcut.

The development of Renaissance art was supported by new patterns of patronage, in particular the secular commissions of merchant families such as the Medici of Florence, whose banking enterprise funded sculpture, architecture, and the recovery of Greek manuscripts at a scale that neither church nor crown had previously matched.