01 / 10 · 1400–1520
Humanity at the centre, and the rediscovered order and beauty of the classical world.
The Birth of Venus · Read more →In fifteenth-century Florence, bankers, guilds and the Church competed to patronise the arts. Painters studied ancient Greek and Roman sculpture and texts, and turned their gaze from heaven back to earth: bodies gained weight, space gained depth, and pagan myths could stand beside the saints.
The invention of turned the flat panel into a window onto the world. By the early sixteenth century Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael had carried this new language to its height, the moment known as the High Renaissance.
