Chapter 21 The Renaissance in Quattrocento Italy

The Renaissance in Quattrocento Italy

 

 The “Renaissance” is the term historians use to describe the flowering of art and the rediscovery of classical culture that occurred in the 15^th century in Italy. The center of the Italian Renaissance was Florence, where the powerful Medici family patronized artists who were brilliantly innovative in their interpretations of classical forms and themes. Artists such as Donatello, Ghiberti, and Masaccio were inspired by antiquity in works that upheld Catholic faith and celebrated secular figures. Humanist classical themes inform the work of the painter Sandro Botticelli, while architects also adapted classical forms in such buildings as Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti. Works such as Perugino’s Christ Delivering the Keys of the Kingdom to Saint Peter manifest the use of linear perspective, a system codified in the 15^th century. The inventor of linear perspective was Filippo Brunelleschi, though the theory was also expressed in written form by Leon Battista Alberti and Piero della Francesca. The artistic developments in 15^th century Italy laid the groundwork for the artists of the High Renaissance and Mannerism in Cinquecento Italy.