Florentine painting

Florence was the birthplace of the High Renaissance, but in the early 16th century the most important artists, including Michelangelo and Raphael were attracted to Rome, where the largest commissions then were.

This was echoed in the work of Pisan painters in the 12th and 13th centuries, notably that of Giunta Pisano, who in turn influenced such greats as Cimabue, and through him Giotto and the early 14th-century Florentine artists.

The oldest extant large scale Florentine pictorial project is the mosaic decoration of the interior of the dome of the Baptistery of St John, which began around 1225.

Giotto's sense of light would have been influenced by the frescoes he had seen while working in Rome, and in his narrative wall paintings, particularly those commissioned by the Bardi family, his figures are placed in naturalistic space and possess dimension and dramatic expression.

A similar approach to light was used by his contemporaries such as Bernardo Daddi, their attention to naturalism was encouraged by the subjects commissioned for 14th-century Franciscan and Dominican churches, and was to influence Florentine painters in the following centuries.

While some were traditional compositions such as those dealing with the order's founder and early saints, others, such as scenes of recent events, people and places, had no precedent, allowing for invention.

Major commissions, such as the altarpiece for the Strozzi family (dating from around 1354–57) in Santa Maria Novella, were entrusted to Andrea di Cione, whose work, and in that of his brothers, are more iconic in their treatment of figures and have an earlier sense of compressed space.

At that date a competition was held to find an artist to create a pair of bronze doors for the Baptistry of St. John, the oldest remaining church in the city.

[2] During the first half of the 15th century, the achieving of the effect of realistic space in a painting by the employment of linear perspective was a major preoccupation of many painters, as well as the architects Brunelleschi and Alberti who both theorised about the subject.

Brunelleschi is known to have done a number of careful studies of the piazza and octagonal baptistery outside Florence Cathedral and it is thought he aided Masaccio in the creation of his famous trompe-l'œil niche around the Holy Trinity he painted at Santa Maria Novella.

A Florentine speciality was the round or 12-sided desco da parto or birthing-tray, on which a new mother served sweetmeats to the female friends who visited her after the birth.

Both sides are painted, one with scenes to encourage the mother during the pregnancy, often showing a naked male toddler; viewing positive images was believed to promote the outcome depicted.

[5] From about 1450, with the arrival in Italy of the Flemish painter Rogier van der Weyden and possibly earlier, artists were introduced to the medium of oil paint.

The highly flexibly medium of oils, which could be made opaque or transparent, and allowed alteration and additions for days after it had been laid down, opened a new world of possibility to Italian artists.

Painted by Hugo van der Goes at the behest of the Portinari family, it was shipped out from Bruges and installed in the Chapel of Sant' Egidio at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova.

But the most influential aspect of the triptych was the extremely natural and lifelike quality of the three shepherds with stubbly beards, workworn hands and expressions ranging from adoration to wonder to incomprehension.

He studied and drew the flowers of the fields, the eddies of the river, the form of the rocks and mountains, the way light reflected from foliage and sparkled in a jewel.

Simultaneous to inviting the viewer into a mysterious world of shifting shadows, chaotic mountains and whirling torrents, Leonardo achieved a degree of realism in the expression of human emotion, prefigured by Giotto but unknown since Masaccio's Adam and Eve.

Many other Renaissance artists painted versions of the Last Supper, but only Leonardo's was destined to be reproduced countless times in wood, alabaster, plaster, lithograph, tapestry, crochet and table-carpets.

Apart from the direct impact of the works themselves, Leonardo's studies of light, anatomy, landscape, and human expression were disseminated in part through his generosity to a retinue of students.

His first signed and dated painting, executed at the age of 21, is the Betrothal of the Virgin, which immediately reveals its origins in Perugino's Christ giving the Keys to Peter.

The rounded forms and luminous colours of Perugino, the lifelike portraiture of Ghirlandaio, the realism and lighting of Leonardo and the powerful draughtsmanship of Michelangelo became unified in the paintings of Raphael.

This fresco depicts a meeting of all the most learned ancient Athenians, gathered in a grand classical setting around the central figure of Plato, whom Raphael has famously modelled upon Leonardo da Vinci.

The brooding figure of Heraclitus who sits by a large block of stone, is a portrait of Michelangelo, and is a reference to the latter's painting of the Prophet Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel.

Over and over he painted the same plump calm-faced blonde woman and her succession of chubby babies, the most famous probably being La Belle Jardinière ("The Madonna of the Beautiful Garden"), now in the Louvre.

His larger work, the Sistine Madonna, used as a design for countless stained glass windows, has come, in the 21st century, to provide the iconic image of two small cherubs which has been reproduced on everything from paper table napkins to umbrellas.

[14][15] The early Mannerists in Florence, especially the students of Andrea del Sarto such as Jacopo da Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, are notable for elongated forms, precariously balanced poses, a collapsed perspective, irrational settings, and theatrical lighting.

Parmigianino (a student of Correggio) and Giulio Romano (Raphael's head assistant) were moving in similarly stylized aesthetic directions in Rome.

In the same generation, Giorgio Vasari (d. 1574) is far better remembered as the author of the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, which had an enormous and lasting effect in establishing the reputation of the Florentine School.

Leading artists born in the city, and who, unlike others, spent much of their careers there, include Cristofano Allori, Matteo Rosselli, Francesco Furini, and Carlo Dolci.