Paolo Uccello, born Paolo di Dono, was an Italian painter and mathematician who was notable for his pioneering work on visual perspective in art. In his book Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Giorgio Vasari wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his study trying to grasp the exact vanishing point. Uccello used perspective to create a feeling of depth in his paintings. His best known works are the three paintings representing the battle of San Romano, which were wrongly entitled the Battle of Sant'Egidio of 1416 for a long period of time.
Masaccio, born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, was a Florentine artist who is regarded as the first great Italian painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance. According to Vasari, Masaccio was the best painter of his generation because of his skill at imitating nature, recreating lifelike figures and movements as well as a convincing sense of three-dimensionality. He employed nudes and foreshortenings in his figures. This had seldom been done before him.
Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, known mononymously as Donatello, was an Italian sculptor of the Renaissance period. Born in Florence, he studied classical sculpture and used his knowledge to develop an Early Renaissance style of sculpture. He spent time in other cities, where he worked on commissions and taught others; his periods in Rome, Padua, and Siena introduced to other parts of Italy the techniques he had developed in the course of a long and productive career. His David was the first freestanding nude male sculpture since antiquity; like much of his work it was commissioned by the Medici family.
Andrea Mantegna was an Italian Renaissance painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini.
Andrea del Verrocchio was an Italian sculptor, painter and goldsmith who was a master of an important workshop in Florence.
Jacopo della Quercia, also known as Jacopo di Pietro d'Agnolo di Guarnieri, was an Italian sculptor of the Renaissance, a contemporary of Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and Donatello. He is considered a precursor of Michelangelo.
Siena Cathedral is a medieval church in Siena, Italy, dedicated from its earliest days as a Roman Catholic Marian church, and now dedicated to the Assumption of Mary.
Michelozzo di Bartolomeo Michelozzi was an Italian architect and sculptor. Considered one of the great pioneers of architecture during the Renaissance, Michelozzo was a favored Medici architect who was extensively employed by Cosimo de' Medici. He was a pupil of Lorenzo Ghiberti in his early years, and later collaborated with Donatello.
St. Sebastian is the subject of three paintings by the Italian Early Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna. The Paduan artist lived in a period of frequent plagues; Sebastian was considered protector against the plague as having been shot through by arrows, and it was thought that plague spread abroad through the air.
Cosmê Tura, also known as Il Cosmè or Cosimo Tura, was an Italian early-Renaissance painter and considered one of the founders of the School of Ferrara. He provided a great contribution to the Renaissance in Ferrara.
The Pontifical Basilica of Saint Anthony of Padua is a Catholic church and minor basilica in Padua, Veneto, Northern Italy, dedicated to St. Anthony of Padua.
Tiziano Aspetti (1559–1606) was an Italian sculptor of the Renaissance. He was born in Padua and active mainly there and in Venice. He completed both large and small sculpture in bronze. Among his large works are bronze statues in the façade of San Francesco della Vigna and of Saint Anthony and many other sculptural decorations for the Basilica of Sant'Antonio of Padua.
Niccolò di Giovanni Fiorentino called Nicolas of Florence, was an Italian Renaissance sculptor and architect, active in Venice and Dalmatia.
The Penitent Magdalene is a wooden sculpture of Mary Magdalene by the Italian Renaissance sculptor Donatello, now usually dated to around 1440. The sculpture was probably commissioned for the Baptistery of Florence. The piece was received with astonishment for its unprecedented realism. It is now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence. The wood used by Donatello is that of white poplar.
Giotto di Bondone, known mononymously as Giotto and Latinised as Giottus, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages. He worked during the Gothic and Proto-Renaissance period. Giotto's contemporary, the banker and chronicler Giovanni Villani, wrote that Giotto was "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature" and of his publicly recognized "talent and excellence". Giorgio Vasari described Giotto as making a decisive break from the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years".
Giorgio Schiavone, or Juraj Ćulinović, was a Croatian Renaissance painter, active in North Italy and Dalmatia. He is considered the most important Croatian painter of the 15th century.
The Pietà or Christ's Body Supported by the Virgin Mary and St John the Evangelist is a tempera-on-panel painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini, now in the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo. Dated to around 1455, it is one of his earliest independent works and the prototype for his series of pietàs. It draws on Byzantine icons of the 'imago pietatis', of which there were many examples throughout Venice, and of 'Ritratti di Passione' or 'portraits of the Passion', in which the dead Christ invites the viewer to contemplate his wounds. The crossed arms are drawn from a famous Roman mosaic-icon from Santa Croce in Gerusalemme basilica which was held to be miraculous and had according to legend been commissioned by pope Gregory the Great based on a vision during a mass.
The Santa Croce Crucifix is a polychrome wood sculpture by Donatello, perhaps from c.1406-1408, or 1409–10. If the former is the correct dating, then Donatello was a young artist working in Lorenzo Ghiberti's workshop and beginning to get his own commissions. It is now in the Cappella Bardi di Vernio, just off the left transept of Santa Croce in Florence, Italy.
Italian Renaissance sculpture was an important part of the art of the Italian Renaissance, in the early stages arguably representing the leading edge. The example of Ancient Roman sculpture hung very heavily over it, both in terms of style and the uses to which sculpture was put. In complete contrast to painting, there were many surviving Roman sculptures around Italy, above all in Rome, and new ones were being excavated all the time, and keenly collected. Apart from a handful of major figures, especially Michelangelo and Donatello, it is today less well-known than Italian Renaissance painting, but this was not the case at the time.
Renaissance sculpture is understood as a process of recovery of the sculpture of classical antiquity. Sculptors found in the artistic remains and in the discoveries of sites of that bygone era the perfect inspiration for their works. They were also inspired by nature. In this context we must take into account the exception of the Flemish artists in northern Europe, who, in addition to overcoming the figurative style of the Gothic, promoted a Renaissance foreign to the Italian one, especially in the field of painting. The rebirth of antiquity with the abandonment of the medieval, which for Giorgio Vasari "had been a world of Goths", and the recognition of the classics with all their variants and nuances was a phenomenon that developed almost exclusively in Italian Renaissance sculpture. Renaissance art succeeded in interpreting Nature and translating it with freedom and knowledge into a multitude of masterpieces.
