Early Renaissance Sculpture and Painting

Florence in the 1400s was a city of bankers, wool merchants and guilds, and they competed to pay for art. Sculptors, painters and architects studied ancient Roman ruins and the new rules of perspective, and the result is called the Early Renaissance ("rebirth," meaning the rebirth of ancient learning).

In sculpture, Lorenzo Ghiberti spent 27 years, from 1425 to 1452, making a pair of gilded bronze doors for the Baptistery of Florence, with ten large square panels of Bible stories. Michelangelo, it is said, called them worthy to be the Gates of Paradise, and the name stuck. Ghiberti used perspective in metal: figures in front stand out in high relief, while buildings and hills behind sink into low relief, so a few centimeters of bronze look deep. The originals are now in a museum; copies hang on the Baptistery. (We do not have an approved picture of them yet.)

Looking closely: Gattamelata. Donatello made this monument to a soldier, Erasmo da Narni, nicknamed Gattamelata, for the city of Padua. Rider and horse are cast in bronze and stand high on a pedestal. The horse steps forward, one front hoof resting on a ball; the rider sits straight and calm in armor, holding a commander's baton. It was the first large bronze horse and rider cast in Italy since ancient times; Donatello knew the Roman bronze of the emperor Marcus Aurelius in Rome.

The friar-painter Fra Angelico placed his Annunciation in a porch whose slender columns and arches follow the new perspective and the new architecture of Brunelleschi.

Looking closely: Piero's portraits. Piero della Francesca, who also wrote on mathematics and perspective, painted the duke and duchess of Urbino in strict profile, like heads on ancient Roman coins, against a landscape that stretches for miles in soft light. Every form is simplified and clear: the duke's red hat is almost a geometric solid.