Renaissance

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Italian painters and sculptors set out to recover the art of ancient Rome and ended by surpassing it. In Florence Brunelleschi worked out linear perspective, Masaccio gave figures real weight and Donatello real bodies; by 1500 Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael had made the High Renaissance in Florence and Rome, and Titian was building pictures from colour in Venice. North of the Alps, Jan van Eyck and the Flemish painters reached the same realism by another road, through oil paint and microscopic detail, and Dürer brought the two traditions together. After 1520 the Mannerists stretched the balanced forms of the masters into something elegant and strange.

What to look for: a single vanishing point, figures modelled in light and shade, classical buildings and calm, balanced groups; in the North, glowing oil colour and every hair and reflection painted.

12,069 works in the quiz. Play a round on Renaissance.

Artists

Leonardo da Vinci · Michelangelo · Caravaggio · Raphael · Hieronymus Bosch · Albrecht Dürer · Sandro Botticelli · Titian · Pieter Brueghel the Elder · Hans Holbein the Younger · Donatello · El Greco · Jan van Eyck · Andrei Rublev · Filippo Brunelleschi · Anthony van Dyck · Salaì · Giorgio Vasari · Lucas Cranach the Elder · Fra Angelico · Giuseppe Arcimboldo · Jacopo Tintoretto · Benvenuto Cellini · Andrea Palladio · Nicolas Poussin · Piero della Francesca · Andrea del Verrocchio · Sofonisba Anguissola · Giovanni Bellini · Francesco Melzi

Best-known works

“Mona Lisa” — Leonardo da Vinci, 1503
“The Birth of Venus” — Sandro Botticelli, 1485
“The Garden of Earthly Delights” — Hieronymus Bosch, 1480–1490
“The Last Supper” — Leonardo da Vinci, 1494–1498
“The School of Athens” — Raphael, 1512
“The Creation of Adam” — Michelangelo, 1511
“Arnolfini Portrait” — Jan van Eyck, 1434
“Lady with an Ermine” — Leonardo da Vinci, 1490
“The Ambassadors” — Hans Holbein the Younger, 1533
“Primavera” — Sandro Botticelli, 1480–1485
“Venus of Urbino” — Titian, 1538
“The Tower of Babel” — Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563
“The Last Judgment” — Michelangelo, 1536–1541
“Sistine Madonna” — Raphael, 1512
“Judith Beheading Holofernes” — Caravaggio, 1599
“View of Toledo” — El Greco, 1596
“Medusa” — Caravaggio, 1597
“The Tempest” — Giorgione, 1506
“Salvator Mundi” — Leonardo da Vinci, 1500
“Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe” — Albrecht Dürer, 1500
“The Wedding at Cana” — Paolo Veronese, 1562
“The Hunters in the Snow” — Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1565
“The Ugly Duchess” — Quinten Metsys, 1513
“Vitruvian Man” — Leonardo da Vinci, 1490
“Trinity icon” — Andrei Rublev, 1412
“Pine Trees” — Hasegawa Tōhaku, 1580
“The Battle of Alexander at Issus” — Albrecht Altdorfer, 1529
“The Burial of the Count of Orgaz” — El Greco, 1586
“Sleeping Venus” — Titian, 1509
“Rudolf II as Vertumnus” — Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1591