High 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.

Around 1500 the center of Italian art moved from Florence to Rome, where popes commissioned work on a vast scale, and to the courts of Milan and the city of Venice. For about thirty years a handful of artists seemed to solve every problem their predecessors had set: space, anatomy, light, emotion and harmony. Later centuries called this the High Renaissance and treated it as a peak. It is a high point, and also a lot of legend.

Three layers

Historical What the works and documents show. Later tradition The legends of genius and secret meaning. Modern How we use these images today.

Leonardo: the eye and the smoke

Historical Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519) filled thousands of notebook pages with studies of water, plants, flight and the human body. His Last Supper in Milan, painted in the 1490s on a dry wall, began to flake within his lifetime, yet it remains the model for how to show a group reacting to a single moment: “One of you will betray me.”

Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, about 1503 to 1506 and later. Musée du Louvre, Paris, image by C2RMF. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The Mona Lisa, begun around 1503 and worked on for years, portrays Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo used sfumato, soft smoky transitions without outlines, so the corners of her mouth and eyes stay uncertain. Much of its fame is modern. It was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 and recovered in 1913, and newspapers around the world made it a celebrity.

Michelangelo: the body as a soul

Historical Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 to 1564) thought of himself first as a sculptor. His marble David, finished in 1504, became a symbol of the Florentine republic; I describe it in words, since it is a nude. Between 1508 and 1512 he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling for Pope Julius II, with the Creation of Adam, prophets and sibyls, and later the Last Judgment on the altar wall. Vasari’s Lives of 1550 and 1568 made him the hero of the whole Renaissance story.

Raphael: harmony

Historical Raphael (1483 to 1520) painted the School of Athens in the Vatican, about 1509 to 1511, where Plato and Aristotle walk together under a vast vault among the philosophers of antiquity. Plato points up to the world of ideas and Aristotle holds his hand level to this one. It is the clearest picture ever made of what the Renaissance wanted: ancient wisdom in a perfect, ordered space. Raphael died in 1520, only 37 years old, and was buried in the Pantheon in Rome, an ancient temple turned into a church.

Venice and color

Historical Venetian painters worked early in oil on canvas, suited to their damp city, and favored color and light over Florentine drawing. Critics framed it as a debate between colore and disegno. Giovanni Bellini brought warm light to devotional painting, Giorgione painted mysterious landscapes such as The Tempest, whose subject is still debated, and Titian dominated Venetian painting for sixty years.

The esoteric angle

Historical Raphael’s School of Athens and the Sistine sibyls show how much the period honored ancient pagan wisdom alongside Christianity. The Sibyls, prophetesses of the ancient world, were believed to have foretold Christ.

Later tradition The novel The Da Vinci Code (2003) spread the idea that Leonardo hid secrets about a society called the Priory of Sion. The novel is fiction, and the Priory documents were a hoax created in the 1950s and 1960s.

Modern People still love Leonardo as a symbol of curiosity. That is a good use of him, and needs no secret code.

Try it yourself

Find an image of Leonardo’s Last Supper online. Starting at the left, describe each apostle’s gesture: hands raised, pointing, recoiling. Notice how Leonardo grouped them in threes. Where is the calmest place in the picture?

Before and after

Before this: Early Renaissance.

After this: Northern 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.