Renaissance Art & Architecture

Under the assaults of historians and critics over the last two centuries, the term ‘Renaissance’ has become a vague and controversial word. Nevertheless, however you choose to interpret this rebirth of the arts, and whatever dates you assign to it, Florence inescapably takes the credit for it.

This is no small claim. Combining art, science and humanist scholarship into a visual revolution that often seemed pure sorcery to their contemporaries, a handful of Florentine geniuses taught the Western eye a new way of seeing. Perspective seems a simple trick to us now, but its discovery determined everything that followed, not only in art, but in science and philosophy as well.

Leading what scholars used self-assuredly to call the ‘Early Renaissance’ is a triumvirate of three geniuses: Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio. Brunelleschi, neglecting his considerable talents in sculpture for architecture and science, not only built the majestic dome of Florence cathedral, but threw the Pandora’s box of perspective wide open by mathematically codifying the principles of foreshortening.