History of Painting

after last publication

Art and architecture in Florence: AD 1411-1430

Three Florentine friends, an architect, a sculptor and a painter, are recognized in their own time as being the founders of a new direction in art - subsequently known as the Renaissance. In the preface to an influential book on painting, published in 1436, Alberti says that the work of these three has convinced him that the ancient arts can be revived.

They differ considerably in age. The architect, Brunelleschi, is the oldest. The sculptor, Donatello, is about ten years younger. The painter, Masaccio, is about fifteen years younger again, though he is by a wide margin the first to die.

Masaccio and the Brancacci Chapel: AD 1423-1428

In about 1423 a Florentine silk merchant, Felice Brancacci, commissions frescoes for a chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine. His choice of artist is Masolino, who brings into the project a younger colleague, Masaccio. Most of Masolino's frescoes in the chapel have been destroyed or painted over. But those done by Masaccio, before his very early death in 1428, are among the great turning points of the Renaissance.

Masaccio clearly admires the work of Giotto. He adopts the solid manner in which the earlier master depicts character (this can be seen superbly in the figure of St Peter paying the tribute money), and he adds to it two further qualities.


One of these qualities is a new freedom in the expression of emotion. The bodies of the naked Adam and Eve, driven from Paradise, are almost distorted in the intensity of their shame, as seen in the agonized upturned face of Eve.

The other significant new element is an increased ability to create figures with a real sense of air around them. The apostles, hearing Jesus tell them that tribute money should be paid to Caesar, make a freely arranged group in an entirely believable open space flanked by receding buildings on one side and a landscape on the other.


Classical perspective: 15th century AD

The sense of depth achieved by Masaccio is partly thanks to the new Renaissance interest in the science of perspective, which goes hand in hand with the rediscovery of the appeal of classical architecture. Masaccio makes use of both themes in his illustionistic Trinity in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, where the cruficied Christ and other figures appear within a dramatically receding Roman arcade.

The perspective in this painting derives from personal knowledge of Brunelleschi and his work. But after Alberti's treatise of 1436 (De Pictura), the new science becomes widely practised. Indeed perspective becomes something of an obsession with Italian painters of the 15th century.



A genius such as Piero della Francesca uses perspective with exquisite skill and restraint. But Paolo Uccello, famous for his use of the technique, verges on the obsessive in his painstaking arrangement of crossed lances and foreshortened corpses in The Battle of San Romano.

The twin Renaissance interest in perspective and classical architecture can be seen above all in the work of Andrea Mantegna. His Christian scenes take place in totally convincing vistas of Roman buildings, often ruined. And the Dead Christ of about 1485, with the pierced soles of his feet thrust into the face of the onlooker, is the most famous example of foreshortening in the history of art.