Renaissance

Renaissance is an art movement of the 1400–1650 period. The gallery holds 10,489 works in this movement, including works by Titian, Paolo Veronese and Lorenzo Lotto. Browse Renaissance paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

The Renaissance—from the French for "rebirth," a label the historian Jules Michelet popularized in his 1855 Histoire de France—names the cultural and artistic awakening that began in Florence in the fourteenth century and spread across Europe through the seventeenth. Its engine was humanism, the intellectual movement that, following the mid-fourteenth-century poet Petrarch, took the rediscovered texts of classical antiquity as the measure of cultivated life and placed the individual human being at the center of inquiry. In the wealthy, fiercely competitive city-states of Italy, this revival found ready patrons: the Medici of Florence, whose commissions and academies funded a generation of artists and helped turn a banking dynasty into the great sponsors of Western art.

The decisive visual break with the medieval past came in Florence around 1420, when the architect Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated linear perspective, a mathematical system for rendering depth on a flat surface. The painter Masaccio (1401–1428) was the first to deploy a true vanishing point in fresco, lending solid weight and space to the human figure. Later masters refined a repertoire of techniques: chiaroscuro, the modeling of form through contrasts of light and shade; sfumato, Leonardo da Vinci's smoke-like blurring of outlines; and the increasingly versatile medium of oil paint, which allowed subtler effects of light and texture.

The High Renaissance, roughly the 1490s to the Sack of Rome in 1527, is dominated by three figures: Leonardo (1452–1519), Michelangelo (1475–1564), and Raphael (1483–1520), whose serene, harmonious compositions—seen in our Saint George and the Dragon and The Alba Madonna—epitomize the classical ideal. In Venice a parallel tradition prized color and atmosphere over Florentine line; for nearly four decades Titian, Jacopo Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese vied for primacy, Titian's sensuous mythologies (our Venus and Adonis and Venus with a Mirror) defining the manner. North of the Alps the movement took a distinct, observational turn in painters such as Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525–1569).

The Renaissance's naturalism, classical vocabulary, and elevation of the artist reshaped European art for centuries. Its later phase dissolved into the deliberate artifice of Mannerism—a sensibility the Greek-born El Greco carried to Spain—before giving way to the dramatic energies of the Baroque. Works like Ercole de' Roberti's The Wife of Hasdrubal and Her Children remind us how thoroughly antiquity had become the era's living language.