The Renaissance was a great artistic season inaugurated at the beginning of the fifteenth century and lasted about two hundred years. Let’s discover together the most important Renaissance artists and their works!

The Renaissance season

The study of classical art led the early Renaissance artists to deal with perspective and proportions, two key concepts of ancient artistic culture. Perspective is a method of representation that wants to represent on a flat surface, through a series of geometric rules and mathematical calculations, three-dimensional objects, with height, width and depth.

Until the end of the fourteenth century, painters, including Giotto, had used an intuitive method to represent a space that seemed profound. It was Brunelleschi, between 1414 and 1416,
to develop the geometric laws of the scientific perspective, which was then at the base of all Renaissance painting.

Brunelleschi’s method was soon assimilated by other artists: Masaccio and the sculptor Donatello they immediately put it into practice in their works, while Leon Battista Alberti wrote it, in 1436, in a treatise entitled De Pictura. After him, another painter, Piero della Francesca, great scholar of perspective, he demonstrated with a new treatise how great the potentialities of Brunelleschi’s invention were.

The works of artists of the Italian Renaissance

In Florence, in a corner of the Brancacci Chapel, there is a portrait of a group of artists of the early fifteenth century.

Its author is the painter Masaccio who is portrayed together with the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, the architect Leon Battista Alberti and the painter Masolino. This portion of the fresco shows us some of the most important artists of the Renaissance, men who were able to change the course of art history.

Artists like them in fact offered their personal and particular contribution to the renewal of art and architecture known today as the Renaissance.

Many important artists contributed to the birth and development of the Renaissance, including Fra Angelico (1400-1455), Florentine painter and monk. Fra Angelico used painting to tell, through images, the experience of his intimate relationship with Christ.

The best works of Beato Angelico were made between 1438 and 1447 in the Convent of San Marco in Florence. Here Angelico painted the altarpiece of the main altar first; afterwards, starting from about 1440, he realized a series of over fifty frescoes. Among these, a very delicate Annunciation.

Beato Angelico is undoubtedly one of the most important artists of the early Renaissance and his enchanting works are still full of wonder. This great artist was born in the town of Vicchio in Mugello, around 1395.

The Municipality of Vicchio, in addition to various initiatives (scientific meetings, workshops and events), has designed the installation of a road signs that can guide tourists in the places of Giotto and Fra Angelico and dedicated to the latter the Beato Angelico Museum of Sacred Art.

To deepen and understand the works of the great Renaissance artists, we wait for you at Villa Campestri Olive Oil Resort, in the heart of Mugello!