Early Renaissance

Early Renaissance is an art movement of the 1400–1500 period. The gallery holds 1,654 works in this movement, including works by Lorenzo Lotto, Petrus Christus and Piero di Cosimo. Browse Early Renaissance paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

The Early Renaissance was the first phase of the Italian Renaissance, unfolding across the fifteenth century—the period Italians call the Quattrocento—and centered overwhelmingly on the Republic of Florence. It emerged from a confluence of forces: the humanist revival of classical Greek and Roman learning, the civic pride and immense wealth of a merchant city, and the patronage of banking dynasties such as the Medici, who underwrote artists, architects, and scholars. Where late medieval painting had floated sacred figures against flat fields of gold, a new generation set out to render the visible world as the eye actually perceives it, grounding holy subjects in convincing space, weight, and human emotion.

The movement's defining breakthrough was the rediscovery of linear perspective, demonstrated by the architect Filippo Brunelleschi around 1413 and codified by Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise *On Painting* (1435). Painters built coherent illusions of depth converging on a single vanishing point, modeled bodies with directional light and chiaroscuro, studied anatomy and foreshortening, and quoted the columns, arches, and proportions of antiquity. The young Masaccio (1401–1428) first applied these principles to painting in his *Holy Trinity* fresco in Santa Maria Novella and the monumental, gravity-bound figures of the Brancacci Chapel.

Masaccio formed a kind of founding triumvirate with the sculptor Donatello and Brunelleschi himself. Around them and after them worked a remarkable roster: the Dominican friar Fra Angelico, whose San Marco frescoes fused piety with the new spatial clarity; Piero della Francesca, master of serene geometry; Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445–1510), whose linear grace produced the mythological *Primavera* and *The Birth of Venus*; and Pietro Perugino, later teacher of Raphael. In Ferrara, Ercole de' Roberti and Francesco del Cossa carried the style north—works echoed in our collection alongside Botticelli's *The Adoration of the Magi* and Piero di Cosimo's *The Visitation*.

The Early Renaissance bridged two worlds: it grew out of the Proto-Renaissance of Giotto and the decorative International Gothic, and it laid the technical and intellectual foundation for the High Renaissance of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. Its experiments in perspective, naturalism, and classical revival reset the course of Western art for centuries.