Renaissance art

[4] The concept of education also widened its spectrum and focused more on creating 'an ideal man' who would have a fair understanding of arts, music, poetry and literature and would have the ability to appreciate these aspects of life.

Giotto, whose greatest work is the cycle of the Life of Christ at the Arena Chapel in Padua, was seen by the 16th-century biographer Giorgio Vasari as "rescuing and restoring art" from the "crude, traditional, Byzantine style" prevalent in Italy in the 13th century.

Brunelleschi, most famous as the architect of the dome of Florence Cathedral and the Church of San Lorenzo, created a number of sculptural works, including a life-sized crucifix in Santa Maria Novella, renowned for its naturalism.

Donatello became renowned as the greatest sculptor of the Early Renaissance, his masterpieces being his humanist and unusually erotic statue of David, one of the icons of the Florentine republic, and his great monument to Gattamelata, the first large equestrian bronze to be created since Roman times.

From 1425 to 1428, Masaccio completed several panel paintings but is best known for the fresco cycle that he began in the Brancacci Chapel with the older artist Masolino and which had a profound influence on later painters, including Michelangelo.

Piero della Francesca made systematic and scientific studies of both light and linear perspective, the results of which can be seen in his fresco cycle of The History of the True Cross in San Francesco, Arezzo.

One of the most significant painters of Northern Italy was Andrea Mantegna, who decorated the interior of a room, the Camera degli Sposi for his patron Ludovico Gonzaga, setting portraits of the family and court into an illusionistic architectural space.

The "universal genius" Leonardo da Vinci further perfected the aspects of pictorial art (lighting, linear and atmospheric perspective, anatomy, foreshortening, and characterisation) that had preoccupied artists of the Early Renaissance in a lifetime of studying and meticulously recording his observations of the natural world.

He perfected his technique in depicting it, while in his early twenties, by the creation of the enormous marble statue of David and the group Pietà, in the St Peter's Basilica, Rome.

His commission by Pope Julius II to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling resulted in the supreme masterpiece of figurative composition, which was to have profound effect on every subsequent generation of European artists.

In Northern Italy, the High Renaissance is represented primarily by members of the Venetian school, especially by the latter works of Giovanni Bellini, especially religious paintings, which include several large altarpieces of a type known as "Sacred Conversation", which show a group of saints around the enthroned Madonna.

His contemporary Giorgione, who died at about the age of 32 in 1510, left a small number of enigmatic works, including The Tempest, the subject of which has remained a matter of speculation.

The earliest works of Titian date from the era of the High Renaissance, including the massive altarpiece The Assumption of the Virgin, which combines human action and drama with spectacular colour and atmosphere.

Titian continued painting in a generally High Renaissance style until near the end of his career in the 1570s, although he increasingly used colour and light over line to define his figures.

Gardner's Art Through the Ages identifies Michael Pacher, a painter and sculptor, as the first German artist whose work begins to show Italian Renaissance influences.

According to that source, Pacher's painting, St. Wolfgang Forces the Devil to Hold His Prayerbook (c. 1481), is Late Gothic in style, but also shows the influence of the Italian artist Mantegna.

Gardner relates this mastery of the graphic arts to advances in printing which occurred in Germany, and says that metal engraving began to replace the woodcut during the Renaissance.

"[11] Britain was very late to develop a distinct Renaissance style and most artists of the Tudor court were imported foreigners, usually from the Low Countries, including Hans Holbein the Younger, who died in England.

For inspiration, painters in both Italy and northern Europe frequently turned to Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend (1260), a highly influential source book for the lives of saints that had already had a strong influence on Medieval artists.