Early Renaissance art for beginners

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

“Renaissance” means rebirth. In the early 1400s, artists and scholars in Florence looked back to ancient Rome and Greece for models, studied nature with new intensity, and worked out new ways to make a flat wall look like a window. The story of how they did it is one of the great adventures of art, and it is also where much of later Western magic was born.

The word has its own history. Vasari spoke of a rinascita in the sixteenth century, and the historians Jules Michelet in 1855 and Jacob Burckhardt in 1860 made “the Renaissance” a name for a whole age. Medieval people had never forgotten antiquity, so I use the word with care.

Three layers

Historical What works and documents of the time show. Later tradition What later centuries, and later magicians, read into the period. Modern How people use Renaissance images today.

A city of patrons

Historical Florence in the early fifteenth century was a rich city of bankers and wool and silk merchants, governed by a republic dominated by powerful families, above all the Medici. Its guilds and citizens competed to commission public art. In 1401 a competition for new bronze doors for the Baptistery set Lorenzo Ghiberti against Filippo Brunelleschi, and Ghiberti won. Brunelleschi went on to build the great dome of Florence Cathedral.

The window and the vanishing point

Historical Brunelleschi demonstrated linear perspective in Florence around 1413 to 1420, and Leon Battista Alberti wrote down the method in On Painting (1435, with an Italian version in 1436). Parallel lines meet at a single vanishing point, and the picture becomes, in Alberti’s words, an open window. Masaccio’s fresco of the Holy Trinity in Santa Maria Novella, painted in the 1420s, shows a painted chapel so convincing that it seems to cut into the wall. In the Brancacci Chapel he gave Adam and Eve, driven out of Eden, real weight and real grief.

Sculpture comes alive

Historical Donatello’s sculptures stand in contrapposto like ancient statues, but they feel like people from the street. His wooden Mary Magdalene, worn and fierce, is as far from ideal beauty as art can go.

Portraits and private lives

Fra Filippo Lippi, Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement, about 1440. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (89.15.19). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Fra Filippo Lippi, a Carmelite friar with a famously unruly life, painted this double portrait around 1440. A young woman in profile, dressed in jewels and brocade, stands in a room while a man peers in at the window. It probably celebrates a marriage alliance, and it is one of the earliest surviving Italian portraits set in a real interior.

Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra de’ Benci, about 1474 to 1478. National Gallery of Art, Washington, image via Google Arts and Culture. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The young Leonardo da Vinci painted Ginevra de’ Benci around 1474 to 1478, now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the only painting by Leonardo in the Americas. The spiky juniper behind her, ginepro in Italian, is a pun on her name.

Botticelli and the gods

Historical Sandro Botticelli painted ancient gods for Medici circles in the 1480s. His Primavera and The Birth of Venus, both in the Uffizi, show Venus, the Graces and the winds in a dreamy, flowing line. I describe them in words only, since they include nudity, and the Uffizi website has good images.

The esoteric angle

Historical In 1463 Cosimo de’ Medici asked the scholar Marsilio Ficino to set aside his Plato and translate the Greek Corpus Hermeticum, believed to be ancient Egyptian wisdom from Hermes Trismegistus. The translation was printed in 1471. In Three Books on Life (1489), Ficino described how music, images and planetary correspondences could bring helpful influences into a person’s life. This is real history and a major root of later Western esotericism.

Later tradition The historian Frances Yates argued in 1964 that Hermetic magic was central to Renaissance culture. Her thesis has been widely criticized as overstated, but it opened a whole field of study. Some writers read Botticelli’s paintings as Neoplatonic talismans; that is possible, but not proven.

Modern Many modern magicians trace their correspondences back to Ficino. I explore this in lesson 4 of the course.

Try it yourself

Find an image of Masaccio’s Holy Trinity online. With a ruler on a printout, or in your mind, extend the lines of the painted ceiling until they meet. Where is the vanishing point, and at what height would your eye be standing in the church?

Before and after

Before this: Gothic.

After this: High Renaissance.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.