Renaissance means ‘rebirth’ and by the fourteenth century this is exactly what artists began to think themselves a part of – the rebirth of the Greco-Roman world. They were self-consciously rebuilding everything the Ancients stood for, from architecture and science to sculpture and art. For almost 1,000 years painting in western Europe had languished. It was left either to monks to reproduce holy images or artisans to paint simple wall decorations under the direction of their employers.
But the towns of northern Italy were growing rich on international trade, while imported goods and ideas were flooding in and slowly transforming the structure of society. Merchant princes were emerging to challenge the authority of the church. Up until then religion had controlled life as it had done since the Middle Ages. But by 1309 the rising urban middle classes were gaining such power and wealth that the ensuing struggles between them and the papacy led to the pope moving his residence to Avignon in France for nearly seventy years. It was against this shifting backdrop that artists like Giotto in Tuscany began to go beyond what was expected of simple painters, to create magical images like no one had ever seen before. No Classical paintings had been unearthed by the time of the Renaissance, but Classical writers were widely read and from these texts it was known that painting was highly regarded. If the Ancients thought painting was worthy of an elevated place in their world, then it was felt it should have the same in the present one. Giotto was the first artist to approach the naturalism that was written about by the Ancients. He re-founded painting, and his influence on the next generation of Florentine artists is total. But the rising tide of the International Gothic style slowed down changes until Masaccio came along in the 1420s. It’s with him that Renaissance painting really gets going. By now the public was ready to see advances in painting as part of the blossoming of literature, science, commercialism and discovery that was changing the world around them. Artists of all kinds were exchanging ideas.
The brilliant architect Filippo Brunelleschi, working with precise architectural drawings, realized that to give a picture realistic depth all parallel lines should converge on one single vanishing point on the horizon. He had discovered linear perspective, the one great advance that the classical world hadn’t made. Brunelleschi’s friend Masaccio took up his scientific idea and applied it to The Holy Trinity tomb painting and his other frescos. It had never been done before. It revolutionized painting and became the keystone that held western painting together until the end of the nineteenth century. But Masaccio did even more than this. He gave his figures gravity and solidity by shading their contours and lighting them strongly from one light source. He had put together every element that characterized the art of western civilization from that moment onward – the realism of seeing paintings as a window on the world (something particular to Europe), perspective, naturalistic lighting, and shading to create three-dimensionality. But the end of Masaccio’s short life did not close the door on his inventions. His methodical inventiveness and disregard for past convention became the hallmark of Renaissance vigour. In the fifteenth century he was followed in perspective by Uccello and Mantegna and in naturalism by Piero della Francesco and Verrocchio, while all the other artists of the time absorbed the new developments in one way or another. The artists working in the old Gothic style like Gozzoli borrowed from these new fangled ideas to tart up their paintings, but didn’t actively pursue the scientific goals of true Renaissance artists who were trying to build new understandings about art. The next wave of great artists to do that was Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo. They were all active around 1500 to 1520 and defined that period as the High Renaissance. Leonardo had just finished his Last Supper in Milan, which set new standards in realistic picture space and animation. He completely did away with the traditional signposts that identified the disciples, and allowed their individual expressions and groupings to explain the scene instead. His scientific work led to his invention of aerial perspective. In light, the wavelength of the colour blue is shorter than the other colours in the spectrum. This makes distant things like the sky seem blue. By applying this to his landscapes Leonardo created more realistic distant viewpoints. He also improved Masaccio’s developments with light and shade (called chiaroscuro). By building up layer on layer of glazes he softened the harsh outlines, a technique called sfumato (meaning faded or smokey). Both aerial perspective and sfumato are best seen in his Mona Lisa of 1503.
Florence was the capital of the arts, but by 1500 both Rome and Venice were real rivals to Florentine ingenuity. Michelangelo’s dynamic figures in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel influenced painting from the moment they were created. The human figure had never been so fully explored. His young contemporary Raphael, working on smaller scale easel paintings, created balance and subtle harmonies of lighting and chiaroscuro which became the ultimate goal for centuries of European academy painters. These three artists brought painting to such a height that it was beginning to be felt that painting had reached its climax and couldn’t go any further. But that wasn’t the view of the Venetian Titian. He created a completely new way of painting. The outlined figures of Michelangelo, Leonardo’s sfumato and Raphael’s use of subtle chiaroscuro became meaningless to the Venetian, who brought oil painting to its freest and most expressive yet. But not everyone was turning to expressions of emotion. The search was on for the ultimate in beauty in the paintings of the Mannerists like Parmigianino. But the search was an elusive one. Elongated limbs and contrived elegance was a pretty style for a while, but it wasn’t solving anything in painting in the way that perspective, colouring, lighting, solidity, depth and composition had done earlier. It was a dead end. And though powerful individual ideals carried on, like the rampant godly emotionalism of El Greco, the intellectual drive of the Renaissance had passed away by the mid-sixteenth century.
THE PAINTING The advances in Roman art that were lost throughout Europe during the Middle Ages were partly preserved in Byzantine art. Those artists in the eastern Mediterranean who dutifully copied the earliest Christian images were holding on to some vestiges of solidity and perspective, if only by accident. By the thirteenth century the demand for these images across northern Italy had become huge. Cimabue, working in this popular imported style, was on to a good market. He had a major advantage over his artist cousins in Constantinople – he wasn’t Greek orthodox. The religious restrictions that confined them to repeating imagery didn’t apply to him. So like the Greeks who leap-frogged Egyptian art, Cimabue took the best of a foreign, static art and developed it into something wonderful. His Madonna sits enthroned on high. Twice life-size, she is a giant looking down at us. Like the flanking angels she smirks with a palpable sense of superiority. Each figure is painted in new, light, pastel shades and the more realistic skin tones that Cimabue had developed, all surrounded by dazzling gold leaf. It was awe-inspiring. Its once immense power as a religious image may have diminished over time, but it is easy to see how these haughty faces from heaven inspired the masses to worship, and the next generation of artists to paint.
THE ARTIST In thirteenth-century Italy Cimabue became the first ‘star’ painter. In the sixteenth century Vasari began his influential art history, Lives of the Artists, with Cimabue telling us that he let ‘the first light into the art of painting’. His mastery of the Byzantine style and the developments he brought to it made him the talk of Pisa. Fame led to his legendary arrogance and pride. He preferred to destroy his paintings rather than hear them criticized. His obstinate attitudes earned the nickname ‘Cimabue’ meaning ‘ox-head’. But his openness to new techniques, like the innovative sculptures of Nicola Pisano, helped to breath new life into Italian painting. Dante gave him lasting fame, of a sort, when he wrote in his Divine Comedy:
Once Cimabue thought to hold the field,
As painter; Giotto now is all the rage,
Dimming the lustre of the other’s fame.
Unfortunately for Cimabue. Dante was right. Cimabue may have given new life to the old techniques, but Giotto was about to do something much greater.
b. Pisa c. 1240; d. Pisa 1302
Madonna and Child Enthroned with Six Angels, c. 1270
427 × 289 cm (168¼ × 113¾ in)
Louvre, Paris
THE PAINTING If any one series of paintings can be called the most important in the history of western art, it would be Giotto’s in the Scrovegni Chapel. Built by the son of a notorious moneylender who hoped it would atone for his father’s sins, this painted barrel of a room is like a mini Sistine Chapel. The blue, starry ceiling rises above a painted architectural framework of inlaid marble and statue-filled niches. Each panel tells a different biblical story. In this detail Joachim, unhappy with his childless marriage, has gone out with the shepherds to grieve. We see this just as the angel appears to tell him his wife is pregnant, with Mary, Mother of God. What was so new here, and so important, was that Giotto had painted a much more realistic scene than anyone was used to. It’s not just the foreshortening and three-dimensionality, though it is far better than anyone had seen since Classical times. Giotto has also painted emotionally real people, who are more important than the angel’s revelation. His bright, original colouring and feeling-filled characters must have seemed like scenes from real life compared to the rigid, fully frontal Madonnas of Cimabue.
THE ARTIST The old world was swept away by Giotto. Even in his own lifetime he was seen as the most significant thing ever to hit art. He wasn’t working in an artistic vacuum, but it is fair to say the Renaissance began with Giotto. A contemporary writer said he ‘translated the art of painting from Greek to Latin and made it modern’. He was able to translate it because he knew the old style; legend has always put him as a pupil of Cimabue. But its limitations forced him to think up totally new ways of painting. He threw away all the old conventions and created new compositions, which for the first time had real pictorial space, depth and subtle feeling. The blank staring faces of Cimabue were gone forever. Giotto put humanity back into painting and the public loved him for it. He almost single-handedly turned the old view of the painter as a simple craftsman on its head. He showed people that a good artist was a master of original, subtle thought. With Giotto came the celebrity cult of the artist. From now on the history of art becomes not just a list of what was painted when, but the history of great artists.
b. Vespignano, nr Florence c. 1267; d. Florence 1337
The Dream of Joachim, c. 1305
Fresco detail
Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
THE PAINTING Masaccio’s most important work is the fresco series in the Brancacci Chapel, and this is its most famous detail. Florentine artists such as Fra Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael all came to learn from it. It shows his mastery of depth, gravity and form, combined with his ground-breaking new use of light. Look at the shadows cast by the rising sun on Adam and Eve’s bodies and on the ground under them. No one had previously understood that solidity and gravity in painting lay in this use of one true light source. Giotto had moved a step away from Cimabue’s two-dimensionality, but Masaccio actually solved the problem of flatness. He also expressed human emotion in a way that is totally recognizable to us today. As Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden, feelings of shame and despair are in their sobbing, hidden faces and their heavily anguished movements. We hardly even need the spitting voice of God following them out of the gates. But Masaccio’s giant leap into understanding light, solidity and gravity was too advanced for most to follow, and it took another generation before it was fully appreciated.
THE ARTIST The sixteenth-century art historian Vasari categorized painting in three progressive stages, with Giotto, Masaccio and Leonardo as their founders. Masaccio – which means ‘Messy Tom’ because he was too into art to care about how he looked – was to have a profoundly important influence on other artists. He is credited with founding, with Giotto’s influence, the entire Florentine school of painting. Without him Raphael might never have become a great artist. Masaccio understood the new laws of architectural perspective developed by his Florentine contemporary, Filippo Brunelleschi, and with them conquered the problems of perspective in painting for the first time ever. His Holy Trinity tomb fresco, with its classically columned alcove painted on a wall, amazed those who first saw it. To fifteenth-century eyes it looked like a deep room had been created in the church wall, and his dramatic use of perspective spread fast. He also took the breathtakingly realistic new sculptures of Donate Donatello and transferred their sense of solid reality to painting. No one else had managed to do either. But at age twenty-seven, Masaccio was dead (Vasari thought he was poisoned). His titanic talents were gone before he could transform the art of fifteenth-century Florence, and indeed Italy, any further.
b. San Giovanni da Val d’Arno 1401; d. Rome 1428
The Banishment of Adam and Eve, c. 1427
Fresco detail (after 1989 restoration)
Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence
b. nr Vicchio c, 1395; d. Rome 1455
The Annunciation (Cortona Alterpiece), c. 1438
Tempera on panel
175 × 180 cm (69 × 71 in)
Museo Diocesano, Cortona
THE PAINTING In Fra Angelico’s first mature painting, the Archangel Gabriel visits Mary to tell her she is pregnant with the Son of God. He uses his expertise at painting the new architectural perspective to place her in a perfect Classical building. Gold shimmers everywhere, and the angel is a beautiful piece of heavenly propaganda. The gold leaf and hard porcelain faces echo earlier Gothic fashion like Cimabue’s. Fra Angelico knew what the public wanted. It was still the popular taste, so he simply used the parts of it that he liked and stuck them on to the new style, creating a picture full of old-world Gothic symbolism. Outside, the enclosed garden is full of flowers, symbolic of Mary’s virginity. The cobalt-blue sky on the ceiling mirrors her cloak to remind us that she is the Queen of Heaven. On the hill Adam and Eve are thrown out of Eden, and they are the only parts of the picture not painted in brilliant colours. Mary’s child will redeem their original sin and bring them, and us, back to brilliance.
THE ARTIST Fra Angelico was a painter and Dominican friar who became one of art’s most publicly loved characters. Angelico, meaning ‘angelic’, is a fitting nickname. He painted for deeply religious reasons, but he did it, as in this picture, with humility, wearing his learning and considerable skill lightly. He joined the monastery of San Marco in Florence when he was only seventeen and stayed there, painting frescos, all his life.
b. Florence c. 1397; d. Florence 1475
The Battle of San Romano, 1432
Tempera on panel
182 × 319 cm (72¾ × 125½ in)
National Gallery, London
THE PAINTING This is one of the most striking and enigmatic of all Renaissance paintings. It looks like a surreal Gothic fantasy of toy soldiers. When Florence destroyed the Siennese knights at San Romano in 1432, Lorenzo ‘The Magnificent’ Medici had the battle commemorated with this picture, as part of a set of three huge paintings that hung in his bedroom at the Medici Palace. The soldiers are led from a brilliant white charger; a lance skewers the armour of the one on the right, and there are broken and lost weapons everywhere. But the lance shards aren’t randomly placed. They pull us straight into a scene of calculated perspective, each lance drawing us to the distant central vanishing point. Uccello’s fallen knight in the left corner is a virtuoso performance of foreshortening, looking rather odd to us but amazingly new in 1432. This picture, however, has always looked unnatural. Uccello followed a dream of perfect perspective, and filled it with old-fashioned Gothic brilliance without any of the realistic lighting of Masaccio.
THE ARTIST Uccello was a true eccentric, completely obsessed with perspective. He famously told his wife, when refusing to go to bed with her, that perspective was his favourite mistress. He died a pauper because of this single-mindedness, as one of the true founders of the Renaissance, dedicated to ideas not commissions. Uccello’s intellectual, medieval fantasies struck a chord with twentieth-century viewers. He has never been so popular, being lauded first by the Cubists, then the Surrealists.
THE PAINTING This is the first painting of a kind that dominated religious art for centuries. For the first time the Madonna and Child are placed with the other people in the room, not enthroned above them. The throne is still there, but the artist can’t bring himself to use it. The Virgin walks down to us, as much a part of our world as the kneeling saints. Filippo Lippi liked the tradition of making her larger than life, so he ignored the new developments in perspective and made her bigger than the saints. He used perspective perfectly in the background because it suited him, although it confined him to one distant viewpoint. To compensate for this constraint, the space is filled with angels, looking in all directions like day-dreaming school kids. Their colours and wings intentionally break up the harsh sense of depth. It is as if he is saying, ‘I’m better than your rules, and here’s the proof’. He didn’t care what people thought, in art or in life. He was looking for his own answers to the questions of art, and borrowed where he liked. We can see Masaccio in the solid monumentality of the figures, and the delicate faces are developed from the Gothic style that still seems stiff in the faces of Fra Angelico’s Cortona Alterpiece. (Filippo Lippi’s faces later became the trademark of his pupil Botticelli.) This incredible mixture of influences shows a Renaissance artist struggling to find the perfect path.
THE ARTIST Filippo Lippi was a friar by accident rather than vocation. Brought up in a convent as an orphan, he was inspired to paint by watching Masaccio do his best work in the convent’s Brancacci Chapel. He stayed and took orders, but it didn’t take him long to have an affair and two children with a nun. Putting his intimate knowledge of her body to good use, he used her as a model for most of his Madonnas. The devout life and work of Florence’s other painting friar, Fra Angelico, now seemed all the more ‘angelic’. Filippo Lippi never married, but still managed to use his influence with the Medicis to get Pope Pius II to absolve his, and the nun’s, monastic vows. His colourful autobiography mentions his kidnap by Moorish pirates, while there is also an account of his captivity and torture in the Medici Palace for embezzling funds. He escaped through a window with a rope made from his sheets.
b. Florence c. 1406; d. Spoleto 1469
The Barbadori Alterpiece. 1437–38
Tempera on panel
217 × 244 cm (85½ × 96 in)
Louvre, Paris
THE PAINTING Piero della Francesca’s greatest fresco is the monumental but serene Legend of the True Cross. In this panel the Roman Emperor Constantine sleeps in his camp the night before a critical battle with Maxentius. His bodyguard sits at his bed, while two perfectly uniformed Roman soldiers balance the picture. They look like stage-hands holding open the curtains. In the Emperor’s dream an angel told him that if he fought the battle as a Christian he would win the day. The dream is the supposed reason for the Roman Empire’s conversion to Christianity. Not wanting to distract us from the grandeur of the story, the artist sets the whole scene up with just a tent, four figures and an angel. What is really new here is the sense of light and shade, used to give everything solidity and depth. The angel appears in a flash of light. The guards don’t notice, as it is Constantine’s dream. The angel is not in a position people would have recognized. It is foreshortened at a difficult angle and its face is hidden. Only the urgently pointing finger and outstretched wing tell us who it is. Piero della Francesca combined Masaccio’s lighting and depth with Uccello’s perspective, and pointed the way to the High Renaissance for artists like Michelangelo.
THE ARTIST Like Botticelli, Piero della Francesca fell out of history almost as soon as he died. He was influential to many north Italian artists but the public forgot him. Even the Renaissance art historian Vasari couldn’t find much to say about him. Unlike other Tuscan artists he wasn’t drawn to big artistic centres like Florence. A small-town man, he stayed in his beloved Borgo San Sepolcro, painting it in his landscapes and serving there as a councilor. He painted in other small towns across Tuscany, but then gave up painting to stay at home and write perspectival and mathematical theory. For centuries most of his paintings were tucked away in far-flung churches, which could explain his obscurity. Like that other perspective theorist, Uccello, he was only recognized in the twentieth century as a towering figure of the Renaissance. The monumentality of his figures and the light crispness of his colours woke people up to his art. Or maybe unconsciously it has got more to do with our post-Cubist eyes and affinity with the Surrealists that his tough and austere paintings appeal so much more to us today.
b. Borgo San Sepolcro c. 1410–22;
d. Borgo San Sepolcro 1492
The Dream of Constantine,
from The Legend of the True Cross cycle, c. 1452–57
Fresco, 329 × 190 cm (130 × 75 in)
San Francesco, Arezzo
THE PAINTING Lorenzo the Magnificent, who commissioned Uccello’s Battle of San Romano and imprisoned Fra Filippo Lippi for embezzling, is in the middle of this caravan of incredible pomp. Idealized as a handsome young king – which he certainly wasn’t – he glitters in gold on a perfect stallion. The painting is part of his tiny chapel in the Medici Palace, and stands out as one of the century’s best-loved paintings. Dressed up as a religious theme, as the three kings on their way to Bethlehem, this painting is actually all about the power and wealth of the Medici family. With Lorenzo at its centre, the parade is a who’s who of fifteenth-century society, including his friend Constantine XI who died when his empire fell to the Turks six years earlier. The whole thing was painted to flatter the Medici’s quasi-royal status and to help their papal ambitions. Lorenzo was busy pulling strings to get his son Giovanni made pope, which he managed a few years later with the help of grand displays like this painting. The artist even put his own portrait in the background. His painting style was very popular all over northern Italy. The combination of old and new filled a void left between the old Gothic style, used for the mountains, and the ultra-modern perspective paintings from which the foreground figures borrow their sophistication. That said, this painting is undeniably beautiful. It doesn’t matter to us that the rabbit and dog up the mountain are bigger than the hunter. It is populist art, painted with skill.
THE ARTIST Gozzoli was a pupil of Fra Angelico but wasn’t interested in following his path. Fra Angelico’s art was in the service of religion and had a humble integrity that was always admired. Gozzoli’s motives were different. He mixed up styles that he thought would sell – and they did. He knew a lot of the new techniques but was not too bothered about what they meant for art. Gozzoli was the last painter in the most developed and glitzy Gothic style. He managed to give the Florentines the traditional Gothic they still loved, but improved it with new tricks of perspective, solid volume and lighting, making them feel that they were keeping up with new trends without having to understand where Renaissance art was really going. He didn’t challenge anyone or pose hard questions, which made him popular in his lifetime, but he had no artistic followers.
b. Florence c. 1421; d. Pistoria 1497
Journey of the Magi, 1459
Fresco detail
Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Florence
THE PAINTING The colour and stature of Sebastian’s body echoes the cold dignity of the Classical column to which he is tied, while his attackers casually stroll up the path. His body has become a pincushion, but his expression is one of unquestioning faith and resignation. This is martyrdom at its noblest. However, Mantegna has manipulated this Roman scene. Sebastian was a praetorian guard in third-century Rome, when there were no ancient ruins in the city. Though we are supposed to see the broken arches as a reflection of Sebastian’s steadfast dignity, to fifteenth-century viewers they were pagan relics always doomed to be destroyed. Only Christianity, embodied in Sebastian, was everlasting. Mantegna uses the revered dignity of Ancient Rome, but reduces it to the folly of pre-Christianity. Death was everywhere in the fifteenth century (the plague hit the population every fifteen years), and Sebastian was the saint for protection against it. So this is a picture about death – Sebastian’s death, the protection he gives from death, and the nobility and salvation that comes from dying a Christian. The religious context and artistic framework might not be immediately obvious today, but the beautifully expressed resignation in the face of death has just as much meaning now as ever.
THE ARTIST Mantegna was one of the most important painters of the fifteenth century. The hardness of his painting reflected his strong character. He lived with his adoptive father who was also his teacher and employer, but broke free by suing him, aged seventeen. One of the first artists to make engravings of his paintings, Mantegna’s progressive work carried the Italian Renaissance into northern Europe where it was taken up by artists like Dürer. He was dedicated to examining everything from the antique world. Other artists followed, and soon the Roman Empire was living again in paintings all across Italy. His style is austere and monumental, reflecting his ideas of antique Rome. Influenced by Uccello’s perspective, Donatello’s solidity and van der Weyden’s crisp, hard detail, Mantegna forged these together with his own antique scholarship to create a strong and influential style. The year after he painted St Sebastian he became court painter to the humanist patron the Duke of Mantua, where he remained for the rest of his life.
b. Isola di Carturo, nr Padua 1430–31; d. Mantua 1506
St Sebastian, 1459
Tempera on panel
68 × 30 cm (26¾ × 12 in)
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
THE PAINTING Verrocchio teamed up with his students Leonardo and Botticelli to make this painting, the last of his career. It became his most famous picture. Its power is in the expressiveness of the characters, especially of Christ and John, and the realism of the bodies and the landscape. It is said that the parts painted by the eighteen-year-old Leonardo were so good that Verrocchio threw down his brush and quit painting forever. What annoyed him so much was the angel on the left (the other one was by Botticelli). The face is delicate and angelic, with glowing skin quite unlike the worn faces of Christ and John, while the dense and fine cascading hair looks as if you could touch it. It seems that Verrocchio left Leonardo to finish the landscape too. It has all the hallmarks of Leonardo’s later works, like the landscape he painted thirty years later in the Mona Lisa. But Verrocchio’s huge talents are clear in his pioneering use of anatomy, evident in the feet and in John’s left arm. The scene is dimly lit, but the light is all coming from the same place, somewhere mid-left. Verrocchio was one of the first to handle this light and shade (chiaroscuro) in a newly sensitive way as it falls on the muscles of the figures.
THE ARTIST Verrocchio can be called the first complete Renaissance artist. He worked in eveny field possible, and was constantly questioning accepted practices and coming up with new ways of doing things. For Verrocchio there wasn’t anything that couldn’t be questioned, improved on and mastered. This optimistic enthusiasm and love of hands-on experiment, together with the success he had in so many areas, must have had a huge impact on his student Leonardo. Not only was he the most important sculptor between Donatello and Michelangelo, but his new style of painting became the basis of Leonardo’s style. Verrocchio, which means ‘true eye’, had an enormous workshop in Florence that dominated in almost every artistic area. His versatility was incredible, and included sculptures in stone, bronze and terracotta, as well as paintings and metalwork. Verrocchio himself concentrated on sculpture. His extraordinary tour de force is the tough old warrior of his Colleoni on His Mount in Venice. People have sometimes overlooked his advancement of painting because Leonardo’s genius eclipsed him.
b. Florence 1435; d. Venice 1488
Baptism of Christ, 1470–73
Tempera on panel
177 × 151 cm (69¾ × 59½ in)
Uttizi Gallery, Florence
THE PAINTING Ghirlandaio had a gift for story-telling. This is a section of his most interesting and important commission, a major fresco cycle for the Tornabuoni family chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Instead of attempting to re-create a scene from biblical times, like Verrocchio did in his Baptism of Christ, Ghirlandaio painted the people he knew in fifteenth-century Florence. The clothes are taken straight from life and could have been seen on any Italian street. The room could be part of a fashionable palace, with the panelling, columns and painted, dancing putti demonstrating how up-to-date and stylish it was. Instead of showing the Virgin Mary’s birth as some sort of miraculous event to be honoured, it looks like any birth in Italian high society. Only women are in the room, with the midwives and servants gathered around Mary, while visiting relations pour down the stairs to congratulate the new mother, St Anne. It is all very homely and natural. Ghirlandaio was an excellent portrait painter, in the style of Filippo Lippi, and these women would be known faces to viewers of the time. He takes us into a deep space by mirroring, at the back of the room, the columns that frame the frescos at the front, and by including the staircase that leads us into a far-away corner.
THE ARTIST Ghirlandaio was a member of an old family of craftsmen and artists. Perhaps it was because he had a start in Verrocchio’s workshop, where be may have worked with Leonardo and Botticelli, that he outstripped everyone else in the family firm and went on to run it. As head of a growing workshop his fame spread to Rome, and in 1481 he was summoned to help with work on the Sistine Chapel, some thirty years before Michelangelo got there and transformed it. He took his influences from his tutor Verrocchio, and from Filippo Lippi and Masaccio. He also liked to imitate the style of Netherlandish painters like Hugo van der Goes, swapping their northern Gothic architecture for the new Renaissance classical buildings but keeping the cluttered and finely detailed parts. Ghirlandaio’s talents, however, were not enough for one of his gifted apprentices who thought his workshop lacked a certain visionary genius. The sixteen-year-old Michelangelo, after three years of learning the techniques of the trade, left Ghirlandaio to study the antique sculptures in the palace of the Medici family.
b. Florence 1448–49; d. Florence 1494
Birth of the Virgin, 1486–90
Fresco detail
Santa Maria Novella, Florence
THE PAINTING Venus, the goddess of love and fertility, is born. In the late fifteenth century most educated people knew something about the classical world. They felt that the ancients, who had known so much about science and art, were better than they were, so their myths took on a special significance. To believe in them would have been heretical, but the combination of ancient mystery and being able to show off how clever you were by knowing about them was a powerful mix. And Venus, the classical embodiment of beauty herself, had the added advantage of being all about sex. Here she floats across the sea, pushed along by two gods of wind, who hint at her purpose by their sexual embrace. Nudity in Renaissance art stood for purity, and her modest pose – taken from the newly excavated ancient statue Venus Pudica – symbolizes sacred love. As she reaches the shores of earth a nymph prepares to cover her up. By covering her purity she becomes earthly, sexual love. Despite taking the pose from a statue, Botticelli is more interested in the outlines of art than anything else, and his Venus looks as flat as a paper cut-out. He was ignoring the solid figures of Masaccio and Mantegna. This unreality just adds to the painting’s otherworldliness, as do the flat tempera paint and light colour. Setting the agenda for the stylization of the Mannerists he made the neck too long, and the shoulders and left arm are all wrong. He didn’t need reality, he wanted to make a goddess. He succeeded.
THE ARTIST This painting probably best sums up the Renaissance in the popular imagination, yet the man who gave it to us died poor and almost forgotten. For most of his career Botticelli (meaning ‘little barrel’) was famous and successful, and during the 1480s he was Florence’s most sought-after artist. He was kept so busy that he spent his whole life in the city, leaving only once to help paint the Sistine Chapel with Ghirlandiao, in 1481. But by the time Leonardo came back to Florence from Rome in 1500 Botticelli’s outline painting was already looking outdated. With the High Renaissance, led by Raphael and Michelangelo, exploding soon after his death, Botticelli’s work was eclipsed and consigned, until the end of the nineteenth century, to the dustbin of fifteenth-century art. Now he is seen as the finest artist of linear design in Europe.
b. Florence 1444–45; d. Florence 1510
The Birth of Venus, c. 1485
Tempera on canvas
172.5 × 278.5 cm (68 × 109¾ in)
Uffizi Gallery, Florence
THE PAINTING This is one of the most memorable portraits of all time. It is a painting about power, but a more subtle kind or power than the sort displayed in the vainglorious portraits of the crowned heads of Europe. This is the Doge, elected leader of the Republic of Venice. When this was painted he was one of the world’s most important men, but Bellini manages to show him as a wise, fatherly figure, full of humanity and dignity. It is a powerful symbol of enlightened democracy, and shows the high regard in which the individual was held during the Renaissance. The face’s bone structure and shadow-filled wrinkles and curves give a sense of solidity, while a warm sensitivity is brought out by the blues and various silvers gently working together. This is echoed in the pink gold of his clothes. His rich costume doesn’t make him look showy or take away from his dignity; its symmetry strengthens the impression of a cool, balanced mind. This is a brand new way of painting a person. The background isn’t a decorative landscape to fill the space. Bellini understood that there wasn’t anything better than colour to move people, and he used it in wedges in pictures like this. Venetian art is all about vibrant colour and a wild feeling for the paint itself. And though he is still painting with tiny, perfectly positioned brushstrokes of incredible detail, he has used the new oil paint to bring brilliant sparkling light to Venetian art.
THE ARTIST Bellini changed painting in Venice forever when he popularized oil paint in place of the traditional, flat, egg tempera paint. Van Eyck had perfected oil paint in the Netherlands. Seeing what this was going to mean for painting, Bellini had his huge workshop changed over to it. killing off tempera for good and changing the course of Venetian art. His early style was like that of his brother-in-law, Mantegna, but he replaced his sharp style with a new atmospheric one. The expressive way he used light and colour changed Venetian art completely. He is the father of the Venetian style of painting, with its love of feeling and colour. Even though he never travelled far outside Venice, he turned it from an artistic backwater to a city to rival Rome and Florence. His direction was followed by the next generation of Venetian artists, his pupils Giorgione and Titian.
b. ?Venice 1431–36: d. Venice 1516
Doge Leonardo Loredan, c. 1501
Oil on panel, 61.6 × 45 cm (24¼ × 17¾ in)
National Gallery, London
THE PAINTING This painting is one of the biggest puzzles in the history of art. While Leonardo’s Mona Lisa has a questionable grin that no one agrees about, The Tempest has nothing at all that anyone has ever agreed about. A thunderbolt cracks over a town as trees rustle in a wind that is about to become a violent gale. The light in this thunderstorm gives this scene an anxiousness unlike anything ever painted. Giorgione ran with Bellini’s idea that colour was the most important part of a picture for expressing emotion. The fact that this painting creates a feeling of eerie disquiet shows how he mastered atmosphere in paint. A naked woman feeding her child stares us right in the eye – do we know her? She is certainly not the Virgin Mary, who would never be depicted naked. Why doesn’t she care about the male figure leaning provocatively towards her? We are part of a triangle of staring people – he looks at her, she looks at us, and we look at them both. Some think the painting is an allegory, with the virtues of strength (the man) and charity (the feeding woman) under threat from fortune (the storm). This does not explain the ancient wall with broken columns, nor why the male figure was originally female (visible by x-ray). The atmosphere is so strong that it demands some sort of explanation, but perhaps Giorgione would think we were wasting our time over something that he dreamt up to create a feeling, changing it as he went along.
THE ARTIST Rather like the painting, Giorgione himself remains a bit of an enigma. His career only lasted fifteen years, during which he signed nothing, and we only know of a handful of pictures that are actually by him. But he has always been considered one of Europe’s most important artists. Rather than what we can see of his paintings, it is what we know of his ideas about painting and what they contributed to Italian art that matters most. Using Bellini’s new light and colour he took atmosphere to its logical conclusion, painting emotionally charged pictures that didn’t rely on any story, unlike religious art. He also changed the role of patronage, painting non-religious pictures for private people rather than churches. His student Titian, Venice’s most important sixteenth-century artist, was to cany on Giorgione’s teachings and, with his vast output and influence, change Venetian painting forever.
b. Castelfranco c. 1477; d. Venice before 1510
The Tempest. c. 1506
Oil on canvas
82 × 73 cm (32¼ × 28¾ in)
Galleria dell’ Accademia, Venice
THE PAINTING The Mona Lisa is one of the most famous paintings in the world, and theories have always accompanied it. Is she actually a man? It is true that Leonardo brought out the female side of his male subjects, the way that Michelangelo made his women manly, but there were nude sketches of her as a woman. Her famous smile suggests that they were lovers, but she was married and Leonardo was most probably gay. But without reliable records, anything is possible, and Leonardo did keep this picture all his life. It had a huge influence, especially in France, home to the painting since Leonardo moved to the court of Francis I in 1516. Her body is at an angle while her head is almost frontal – this was a brand new pose for portraiture. The flesh tones make a strong vertical line, balanced by the horizontal landscape behind. Oddly unequal, the landscape is laid out with aerial perspective. The colour and clarity of the distance fades, like reality, the further away you look. This was one of Leonardo’s advances. He also built up layers of lightly coloured varnish to create the mysterious shadowy depth of her skin, and pioneered sfumato, where the tones of different things are blended together to lose hard outlines. In 1549 the art historian Vasari said she ‘seemed to be real flesh rather than paint’. Unlike Botticelli’s Venus, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa is a real person in a real setting.
THE ARTIST The illegitimate son of a peasant girl from the little town of Vinci, Leonardo became the archetypal Renaissance man – artist, scientist and thinker. His intellectual curiosity led him into countless areas, but he was on to the next subject so quickly that he left most of his projects unfinished. Science, engineering, philosophy and aviation were all areas that he sketched and wrote about, in mirrored handwriting to hide his work. He drew helicopters and airplanes, the diving suit and the tank. These were too far ahead of their time to be understood, but he did significantly add to other disciplines in his lifetime. In anatomy he dissected thirty bodies and understood the growth of children in the womb. Some artists proved they were more than craftsmen, but Leonardo invented the artist as genius, changing how art and artist were viewed forever. Like Giorgione, Leonardo didn’t actually paint that many pictures, but the influence of those he did paint is enormous.
b. Anchiano, nr Vinci 1452; d. Amboise, nr Tours 1519
Mona Lisa, 1503–06
Oil on panel, 76.8 × 53.3 cm (30¼ × 21 in)
Louvre, Paris
b. Florence 1472; d. Florence 1517
Noli Me Tangere, c. 1508
Oil on canvas
57 × 48 cm (22½ × 19 in)
Louvre, Paris
THE PAINTING Behind the figures of Christ and Mary Magdalene we see Christ’s earlier resurrection from the tomb. The action is played out on a theatrical stage-set of a landscape receding into the distance, a device Bartolommeo learnt from Leonardo. It is a balanced image, even with Christ to one side – Bartolommeo was a master of asymmetrical composition and colour. If Christ looks a little effeminate to our eyes it is because the figure is painted in contrapposto, where one part of the body is twisted in the opposite direction to the other to create more movement. Religious painting is often underscored by death, but Bartolommeo paints this with all the colour and feeling for life that are implied by Christ’s resurrection and His promise of eternal life.
THE ARTIST Changing his name from Baccio to Fra Bartolommeo, in 1500 Bartolommeo quit art, burning any paintings with nudes in them and entering Fra Angelico’s old monastery. He had come under the influence of the charismatic religious leader Savonarola, who was burnt at the stake for his revolutionary preaching. However, Bartolommeo took up painting again in his new home, perhaps due to his superior forcing him into it in the service of the church, or because he was inspired by Fra Angelico’s wall paintings. He understood and continued Leonardo’s compositional styles, his soft sfumato technique and his distantly blurring aerial perspective. To this he added brilliant Venetian colouring in the new oil paint, bringing new life and colour to Florentine art.
b. Venice c. 1485–86; d. Rome 1547
The Death of Adonis, c. 1512
Oil on canvas
189 × 285 cm (74½ × 112¼ in)
Uffizi Gallery, Florence
THE PAINTING Adonis lies dead, killed by a boar when hunting. It is the accident that Venus dreaded but she is too late. She sits with Cupid and her nymphs, her face screwed up in anguish, holding which has just been cut by a thorn. The blood drips onto some white roses, turning them red forever. It is the classical tale of love and death, but without the physical attributes. There is no spear, no hunting horn and no sign of Venus’s chariot. Piombo tells the story only through poses. The masculine nymphs were borrowed from Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, but their flesh is softer, like Raphael’s. The landscape is from Giorgione, and Piombo even includes the symbol of his Venetian background, the Doge’s Palace. It’s as if he is boasting to his new Roman patrons: ‘I’ve got everything your Michelangelo and Raphael have, and I’m a brilliant Venetian!’
THE ARTIST Piombo fused the best art of Venice and Rome, and after Raphael’s death in 1520 he became Rome’s most important portrait painter. As soon as he reached Rome, Piombo made friends with Michelangelo. This friendship, not coincidentally, helped his career. At the top of the Roman social ladder was the pope. Piombo became very close to him and was made Keeper of the Papal Seals – the ‘Piombo’, hence his nickname. It was a very well paid and work-free job. With good income and the pope’s ear Piombo hardly painted, and finally lost Michelangelo’s friendship when he attempted to control his work through the pope.
THE PAINTING This is the triumph of Raphael’s youth, painted when he was only twenty-one. St Joseph, identified by his flowering rod, puts a wedding ring on the Virgin’s finger. They are surrounded by a balanced group of men on one side and women on the other, their heads all turned at different angles (showing off Raphael’s mastery of his early teacher Pietro Perugino’s style). The action-filled foreground only takes half our attention. We are forcefully drawn back, through the perfectly lined perspective, by the grid paving that ends in a temple dominating the skyline. The open door and arches take us even further back into the misty landscape behind. Raphael has proudly signed the temple, pointing the way to taking over from his cousin Donato Bramante as architect of St Peter’s in Rome ten years later. The lively sense of action and perfect balance, all lit by soft yellow sunlight, make this one of Raphael’s most admired paintings.
THE ARTIST Raphael grew up in the court of Urbino, where his father was court painter, but following The Marriage of the Virgin it looked like the ambitious Raphael had outgrown Umbria. He moved to the flourishing artistic capital of Florence, dropping some of his early style and picking up new developments from Michelangelo, Leonardo and Ghirlandaio. Where Michelangelo turned away from court life and concentrated on art, Raphael became a social mover as well as an artistic prodigy. He built up a steady output of exquisitely delicate and well-balanced Madonnas, bathed in the light of the midday sun. With this and his sociability he became so famous that by 1508 he had been summoned to Rome to decorate the pope’s private apartments. His frescos reflect his mature style, that incorporated something of the grandeur of his rival Michelangelo. His paintings, and the prints that were made of them, have influenced artists for centuries. According to the sixteenth-century art commentator Vasari, Raphael died prematurely at thirty-seven because he ‘pursued his amorous pleasures beyond all moderation’ and this time he had been ‘even more immoderate than usual’. Vasari also says that Raphael was to be made a cardinal. Whether or not this is true, the fact that it was mentioned at all, for a mere painter, proves just how far the artist had been brought by the High Renaissance trio of Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo.
b. Urbino 1483; d. Rome 1520
The Marriage of the Virgin, 1504
Oil on panel
170 × 118 cm (67 × 47¼ in)
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan
THE PAINTING Still one of the most powerful images ever painted, The Creation of Adam forms the central panel of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. In this monumental composition, God touches life into the languid body of Adam. His other arm holds back the life of the heavens, which seems to want to spill on to Earth from the red oval opening. The complexity of the ceiling’s design and the monumental brilliance of its execution, where every interwoven panel is a celebration of humanity, are Michelangelo’s tour de force. It is full of bodies – some biblical, others false sculptures holding up the roof, and many nude. The artist explored his beloved male nude in every imaginable pose. It is a uniquely energetic painting, where every part writhes with movement. It was an incredibly hard fresco to paint. Four years on his back up a scaffold left Michelangelo physically and psychologically battered. Even though he thought of himself as a sculptor, he managed to paint his view of Christianity in the most important chapel in Christendom, and its influence changed art forever.
THE ARTIST After an apprenticeship with Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo lived and worked with the powerful Medici family, befriending future popes and rulers. The Medici were thrown out of Florence when Michelangelo was nineteen, and at this time he travelled across northern Italy and to Rome. He sculpted the Pièta in the Vatican for a French cardinal, before resettling in Florence in 1501. Here he carved David, the most important sculpture since, or perhaps including, antiquity. The fame of his colossus of male heroic beauty instantly catapulted him to stardom. Noble and triumphant, it captured everything that the Florentines wanted to see in themselves. In 1505 Pope Julius II summoned him to Rome to create a magnificent tomb. The commission lasted on and off for forty years, and Michelangelo described the small-scale outcome as the tragedy of his life. Leader in painting and sculpture, he also added architecture to his list of achievements by taking on St Peter’s in Rome, which was built mainly to his designs. Michelangelo created the idea of the solitary, sombre genius of a universal artist struggling with inner demons to create the best art in every field. This was not at all like the urbane Raphael, who was paid ten times the amount Michelangelo got for the Sistine ceiling for some tapestries that once hung beneath it.
b. Caprese 1475; d. Rome 1564
The Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1508–12
Fresco detail
Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome
THE PAINTING Cupid incestuously fondles the breasts and kisses the lips of his naked mother, Venus. Cupid is usually depicted as an infant, but that wouldn’t have been much use to Bronzino here, so he has made him adolescent. With flushed cheeks Venus lustfully gazes at him, her tongue about to enter his mouth and her arms outstretched. In one hand she holds the golden apple won for her unparalleled beauty, and in the other her fingers suggestively stroke the shaft of Cupid’s arrow. Foolish Pleasure throws rose petals over the couple, not noticing the thorns piercing his foot. The masks at his feet are of a nymph and a satyr, ancient figures of lust. To the crime of incest Bronzino adds an illusion to sodomy, with Cupid’s quiver carefully poised at his buttocks. But this isn’t simply a bawdy display of sex. It’s a cautionary tale of excess. The horrific figure behind Cupid is Jealousy, but also a syphilitic man in agony. The new-world disease was rife in Europe. The beautifully masked Deceit holds a sweet honeycomb in one hand, hiding the truth of the barbed tail in the other hand. Cupid crushes a dove – the ancient symbol of fidelity – underfoot. The blue silk covering that makes their opalescent skin shimmer so brilliantly is being ripped away by Time, who will uncover the real horrors of deceitful lust for all to see. It is a moral for a lustful world, but a world that we must voyeuristically enter to understand. This hypocritical joke and its triumphantly secular and sexual content appealed to the profligate Francis I of France, who was probably given the picture by Bronzino’s patron, Duke Cosimo di’ Medici.
THE ARTIST Bronzino (meaning ‘bronze coloured’ or ‘tanned’) was the master of Florentine painting in the mid-sixteenth century and one of its best portrait painters. His slick and beautiful interpretation of Michelangelo’s figures and his development of the Mannerist style kept him busy at the Medici court for the rest of his life. His use of paint was flat and luminous, opaque blocks of colour that gave an unsettling reality to the strong angular poses of his sitters. In his pictures the Medici saw a reflection of themselves that the mirror was too honest to show. There was a style to Bronzino’s art that seemed knowledgeable, assured, strong and swaggering – everything that the Medici wanted.
b. Monlicelli. nr Florence 1503; d. florence 1572
Allegory with Venus, Cupid and Time, c. 1545
Oil on panel
146 × 116 cm (57½ × 46½ in)
National Gallery, London
THE PAINTING This is one of Correggio’s most advanced pictures. Ovid’s classical story of sex is painted with incredible imagination and skill. Throughout the Renaissance and up into the nineteenth century, classical mythology was the only acceptable way western art could portray sexual subjects. This painting comes from a set of four, the Loves of Jupiter, painted for the Duke of Mantua as a present to Charles V of Spain. Ruler of the gods and husband to Juno, Jupiter had a string of sexual liaisons with other characters. He seduced them by coming to them in different forms, shown in this series where he appears to Io as a cloud, to Leda as a swan, to Danae as a shower of gold, and to Ganymede the shepherd boy as an eagle to carry him off. Here he envelops Io’s body, materializing in human form as he begins to kiss her. Io is in a state of abandoned ecstasy. This blatant but refined eroticism is totally new to art. Io’s finely outlined form is balanced between the brown of the bank and the grey of Jupiter, with her left leg guiding us in a sensuous diagonal across her body and the painting. There is no shyness or confused meaning here. Correggio has painted a true erotic moment, which is why the work is as powerful now as ever.
THE ARTIST Incredibly Correggio was hardly known outside Parma, and he died in relative obscurity. It was only after his death that he achieved fame and influence. Outside Venice, Correggio was northern Italy’s most important painter in the first half of the sixteenth century. He absorbed the influences of Mantegna and, after a stay in Rome, of Raphael and Michelangelo. Back in Parma he developed his own lively naturalism and filled its church domes and ceilings with his most important frescos. He invented the three-dimensional illusion where fabulous visions of heaven seem to stretch into the sky, with hundreds of saints and angels twisting in layers of clouds, wings and brilliant golden light or – as a contemporary and incomprehending priest said – ‘a stew of frogs’ legs’. This trompe l’œil (‘tricking the eye’) inspired countless imitators in the following century of Baroque art. His paintings had a profound impact on the French Rococo 200 years later, where his art was considered as important as Raphael’s. Boucher’s nudes are a direct result of Io’s fleshy, natural eroticism.
b. Correggio c. 1489; d. Correggio 1534
Jupiter and lo, c. 1532
Oil on canvas
163.7 × 70.5 cm (64½ × 27¾ in)
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
THE PAINTING This painting may look to contemporary eyes as if it was painted by someone who couldn’t draw. Who are these strange people and what kind of artist wanted to paint them with spider hands and swan necks? Every body part is unnatural in some way. The ideal of the female body was much more curvaceous during the Renaissance than it is now, but the proportions of the Virgin’s shoulders to her hips are impossible. The Christ Child is an infant but looks three feet tall. This painting dates from the height of Mannerism, a style which attempted to create the most beautifully elegant things, regardless of reality. The artist could transcend the beauty of nature and capture the essence of beauty itself. It began in Botticelli’s Venus and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and fast developed throughout Italy. Michelangelo even changed architecture with it, like the classically incorrect columns here with which Parmigianino has created an off-centre horizon. The Virgin’s body follows an elegant S-curve, but she is unnaturally propped up. Her small head on an impossibly long neck, without shoulders, mimics an Italian saying about how a woman should look like a classical vase, such as the one held by the long-legged angel. Everything is contrived.
THE ARTIST Parmigianino grew up in a painting family in Parma, under the shadow and influence of Correggio, and by the age of fourteen he was already producing accomplished pictures. Correggio’s stylish visions of youthful beauty weren’t enough for Parmigianino, however. He wanted something new, so he created his own rules of feminine beauty and took Mannerism to its ultimate conclusion. Called the new Raphael for his energetic, skilled and original views on beauty, his influence across Europe was vast. He was the acknowledged leader of Mannerism, and his drawings and etchings spread his ideas to a whole generation, even in northern Europe, who continued to strive for unreal beauty. But in Rome people began to see Mannerism as novel and artificial rather than deeply beautiful, and many denounced Parmigianino’s work. The Renaissance historian Vasari said that he ‘seemed an angel rather than a man’, which might explain his obsession with beauty. But his handsome looks, his mind and finally his life went, aged thirty-seven, caused by the dangerous chemicals he used as an alchemist. During the madness that took over his last year he was imprisoned for not finishing a commission.
b. Parma 1503; d. Casalmaggiore 1540
Madonna of the Long Neck, c. 1535
Oil on panel
219 × 135 cm (86¼ × 53 in)
Uffizi Gallery, Florance
THE PAINTING For this picture, Titian set out to re-create the heights of painting from the ancient world. There weren’t any antique paintings known in sixteenth-century Venice so Titian relied on the translated description of the second-century writer Philostratus, who saw a painting like this in Naples. Titian creates the island of Andros with a diagonal wedge of green and another of blue, interwoven with the flesh tones of the figures. Bacchus has taken his yearly trip, by the distant boat, and makes a river of wine flow from the elderly god on the hill. The party has already started; the revellers dance, drink, talk and play music in a rhythmic oval that takes our eye effortlessly through the whole scene. Some figures, like the central reclining man, are taken from Michelangelo. Others are from antique sculpture, like the urinating putti, a symbol of fertility leadingy placed next to the resting nymph. She holds her emptied wine bowl and waits for Bacchus to come. She symbolizes sensual pleasure but Titian also makes her body work as an arc, bringing our eye back up and into the scene to look again at the shimmering fabrics and glowing flesh that are so natural in his landscape.
THE ARTIST Variously called the greatest Venetian painter of the sixteenth century, any century, or even the greatest painter ever, Titian has never lost critical favour. He developed an entirely new way of painting that didn’t just rely on draughtsmanship, but used the texture and colours of his oil paint. During his early apprenticeship with Bellini he learnt the value of oils and colours to transmit atmosphere and mood; he took this and redefined Venetian art with it. Without him the painterly style of Rubens, Delacroix and countless others wouldn’t have come about. He built his own strong style, exploding with bold energy, on to the moods and mysterious landscapes from his early work with Giorgione. Titian composed pictures with colour rather than forms in mind, so figures really started to look at home in their landscapes and not like cut-outs placed in a scene. When most of Europe was following the elegant, but soon to be obsolete, ideals of Mannerism, Titian fused the monumentality of Mantegna and Michelangelo with his own wild freedom. He locked the whole thing together with thick flashes of colour, and created not just a style but an entirely new direction for painting.
b. Pieve de Cadore c. 1485–90; d. Venice 1576
The Bacchanal of the Andrians, c. 1523–24
Oil on canvas
175 × 193 cm (69 × 76 in)
Prado, Madrid
THE PAINTING Veronese was the most gifted decorative painter of the Venetian Renaissance. High on the grand gilt ceiling of the Doge’s Palace he painted a series of pictures glorifying his adopted city. Here Venice sits in gold embroidered silk, wrapped in royal ermine. At her feet Peace, with her olive branch, and Justice, with her sword, pay homage. In Plato’s Republic, Justice held together the ideal city, and Venice was the self-conscious heir to his perfect city-state. Peace to the Venetians was something that had to be fought for. Veronese painted this to be seen twenty feet up on the ceiling, so if you look up at it, rather than down, it makes much more sense. We are standing further down the steps, looking up at Venice, enthroned dizzyingly in the sky. This would have triggered heavenly thoughts of Byzantine Madonnas, like Cimabue’s, that were common to Venetians. It is an incredibly grand thought that a state would have these two great notions of Peace and Justice as servants, but the Venetians in the sixteenth century were a very grand lot, and Veronese played up to their vanity. But the powerful Venice of 1501, when Bellini painted his humane looking Doge Loredan, without any trappings of position, was disappearing fast. The sea route to India had been discovered, ending Venice’s monopoly on trade, and the Turks were taking the eastern Mediterranean from Venice, who lost Cyprus to them in 1570. In this light the popular pomp of Veronese’s paintings seems like a desperate assertion of pride by a slowly waning power.
THE ARTIST Born in Verona, hence his nickname, Veronese was one of the leaders of sixteenth-century Venetian art along with Titian and Tintoretto. But unlike these two, Veronese used colour not to blend forms together, but to separate them. Where Tintoretto painted with atmospheric colour, thickly applied, Veronese used clear, bright light and even paint to give grandeur. The dangerously irreligious way he painted Venice Enthroned brought him to the attention of the Inquisition in 1573 for another painting, The Last Supper. This is an enormous Venetian feast, with dwarfs, dogs, clowns and drunken revelry; Christ seems to be there by chance. Veronese said, with false naïvety, that it was such a big painting he ‘had to fill it with figures’. He famously escaped the Inquisition’s wrath by just changing its title to The Feast in the House of Levi, to lessen its importance.
b. Verona 1528, d. Venice 1588
Venice Enthroned between Justice and Peace, c. 1574
Celling panel, Oil on canvas
Doge’s Palace, Venice
THE PAINTING In the forgotten Christian catacombs of the now infidel city of Alexandria, the body of St Mark, patron saint of Venice, is being stolen. Devout Venetians had saved his remains in AD 828. The men checking the body on the right are about to be stopped by the brilliantly lit spirit of St Mark on the left. They haven’t noticed him yet, but the foreground figures have. At the instant St Mark appears, his heavenly presence makes an evil spirit leave the mouth of the falling man and the others jump back in shock. But the man who commissioned the painting, Tomasso Ragone, kneeling piously in his brilliant golden robes, uniquely understands the events. The corpse they are looking for is on the carpet at St Mark’s feet, foreshortened and lying away from us, like Uccello’s fallen knight. All the action happens in a haunting vaulted room that recedes at a strange angle to an obscure opening in the floor. The off-balance perspective makes it less harshly regular than in Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin and it gives everything a new sort of edgy balance. Tintoretto carries on Titian’s colour and handling of paint, but in this covert underground scene he plays them both down to create the dark atmosphere.
THE ARTIST The nickname ‘Tintoretto’ comes from his father’s job dying cloth, and his working-class origins had a unique effect. Until his death he lived in a tiny house in north Venice, only leaving the city once for a brief trip to the mainland. A disregard for money meant that he undercut more expensive artist’s studios and won huge numbers of commissions all over the city. The Doge’s Palace is still covered with some of his best works. He also worked so incredibly fast that other artists who couldn’t compete called him an incapable draughtsman who used colour badly. Neither of these accusations is true but Tintoretto, in the footsteps of Titian, cared much more about the feel of oil paint and the amazing textures and forms he could make with it. He painted directly on the canvas in a free and frantic way, sometimes leaving the details of accuracy to one side in what can look like a frenzied effort to see his ideas finished. He is the heir to Titian’s greatness, but he added to Venetian painterly colour a distinctive edginess of composition, which was a huge influence on El Greco.
b. Venice 1519; d. Venice 1594
Finding of the Body of St Mark, c. 1562–66
Oil on canvas
405 × 405 cm (159½ × 159½ in)
Pinacoteleca di Brera, Milan
b. Candia 1541, d, Toledo 1614
View of Toledo, c. 1597
Oil on canvas
121 × 109 cm (47¾ × 42¾ in)
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
THE PAINTING Until Expressionism came along over 300 years later, this was unlike any other landscape ever painted. Its extraordinary individuality almost makes a mockery of art history. El Greco’s home for forty years, the city of Toledo rises upward, in deathly grey, into the thunderous sky. He has painted it as some sort of post-apocalyptic ghost town. The fields are vividly green but the city itself is monotone, set against the night black of an approaching storm. This was painted when he was most emotionally expressive. El Greco thought that art could bring us beyond reality and help us glimpse spirituality. His death brought these high ideals of the Renaissance to an end.
THE ARTIST One of history’s most original and visionary artists, El Greco fell into total obscurity from his death until the twentieth century, despite his own enormous feelings of artistic self-worth. Born in Venetian-ruled Crete, El Greco (‘the Greek’) painted to the strict formulas of Icon art before moving to Venice, where he fell completely under the influence of Tintoretto’s free style. He saw Tintoretto’s disregard for rules as his way out of painting’s strait-jacket. He transformed his vivid colour and slight Mannerism into his own, totally individual, style. Shunned in Venice and Rome he ended up in the artist backwater of Spain, where his fervent Catholicism could be voiced in wildly colourful and expressive religious paintings, happily commissioned by the locals but rejected at court. He is now considered Spain’s first great painter.
