Renaissance

Renaissance is an art period of the 1400–1650 period. The gallery holds 20,442 works in this period, including works by Titian, Paolo Veronese and Lorenzo Lotto.

The Renaissance — from the French for "rebirth" — was a cultural and intellectual movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century and is conventionally regarded as the bridge between the medieval world and the early modern age. There is broad consensus that it began in Florence, Italy, nourished by a revived study of classical Greek and Roman texts. This humanism, championed by figures such as the poet Petrarch and the Platonic scholars Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, placed renewed value on human dignity, observation, and the achievements of antiquity. Wealthy patrons accelerated the movement: the Medici banking family, beginning with Giovanni di Bicci, funded architecture, philosophy, and painting, helping turn a scholarly current into a sweeping artistic flowering.

Renaissance art is defined above all by the pursuit of natural reality. Artists adopted linear perspective — a mathematical system for creating depth on a flat surface — credited to the architect Filippo Brunelleschi and codified by Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise On Painting. Painters in 15th-century Florence developed realistic proportion, foreshortening, sfumato (the soft blending of tones), and chiaroscuro (dramatic light and shade), while the spread of oil paint allowed richer color and finer detail.

The High Renaissance (roughly 1490s–1520s) produced its most celebrated masters: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), whose Mona Lisa (c. 1503–19) and Last Supper (c. 1495–98) exemplify sfumato; Michelangelo (1475–1564), creator of the David (1501–04) and the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508–12); and Raphael (1483–1520), whose School of Athens (1508–11) distills the period's harmony and classical ideals.

Venice cultivated a distinct strand built on colorito — composition through luminous color rather than line — led by Titian, alongside Veronese and Tintoretto, in works of sensual mythology such as Titian's Venus and Adonis and Venus with a Mirror, Veronese's Venus and Mars, and Lorenzo Lotto's Venus and Cupid. To the north, a parallel Renaissance ran from Jan van Eyck (d. 1441), an early master of oil, to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, whose The Harvesters (1565) brought monumental realism to everyday peasant life.

The Renaissance reshaped Western art for centuries, its naturalism and classicism giving way first to the elongated artifice of Mannerism and then to the dynamic grandeur of the Baroque.