1400–1600
The Renaissance
In the 1400s and 1500s Italian cities like Florence became bursting with new ideas. Rich families like the Medici paid for artists and scholars who studied ancient Greece and Rome, discovered how to paint perspective, and made science, books and art flourish. The printing press helped the new ideas spread across Europe.
Why artists painted it
The Renaissance was one of the most art-filled times in history. These pictures show the artists, patrons and thinkers who changed the world, from artists' own times and from later painters who looked back in awe.
The Death of Leonardo da Vinci · Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1818
The Death of Leonardo da Vinci
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · 1818
🕰️ Painted about 220 years later
Ingres imagines Leonardo, in his last days in France, dying in the arms of King Francis I, a picture of the friendship between artists and rulers.
Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci · 1503
👁️ Painted at the time
The Mona Lisa's soft, mysterious smile and misty background make her the most famous painting in the world.
The Last Supper
Leonardo da Vinci · 1498
👁️ Painted at the time
Leonardo painted the moment Jesus tells his twelve friends that one of them will betray him, and each gesture shows a different reaction.
The Creation of Adam
Michelangelo · 1512
👁️ Painted at the time
God stretches out a finger toward Adam, and the tiny gap between their hands has become one of the most famous images ever.
The School of Athens
Raphael · 1511
👁️ Painted at the time
Raphael filled a Vatican room with the great thinkers of ancient Greece: Plato points up at the sky of ideas while Aristotle holds out a hand toward the Earth.
The Birth of Venus
Sandro Botticelli · 1485
👁️ Painted at the time
The goddess Venus arrives on the shore on a giant seashell, blown by the winds, in Botticelli's most famous painting of about 1485.
Vitruvian Man
Leonardo da Vinci · 1492
👁️ Painted at the time
Leonardo's famous drawing of a man with arms and legs stretched inside a circle and a square shows the ideal human proportions described by the Roman architect Vitruvius.
Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli
Santi di Tito · 1590
👁️ Painted at the time
Niccolò Machiavelli was a Florentine thinker who wrote The Prince, a book about how rulers really get and keep power.
Portrait of Cosimo the Elder
Pontormo · 1519
👁️ Painted at the time
Cosimo de' Medici the Elder was the banker who made his family the rulers of Florence, and he paid for libraries, churches and artists.
Adoration of the Magi
Sandro Botticelli · 1475
👁️ Painted at the time
Botticelli painted the Three Kings visiting Jesus and gave the kings the faces of the Medici family, the rulers of Florence, and put himself in the crowd.
Portrait of Girolamo Savonarola
Fra Bartolomeo · 1498
👁️ Painted at the time
Girolamo Savonarola was a fiery preacher who held Florence in his grip in the 1490s, burning books, mirrors and paintings in his Bonfire of the Vanities.
The Execution of Girolamo Savonarola
Florentine painter · 1498
👁️ Painted at the time
Girolamo Savonarola, the preacher who ruled Florence for a few years, is hanged and burned in the main square in 1498 after losing the support of the people.
Lady with an Ermine
Leonardo da Vinci · 1490
👁️ Painted at the time
A young woman, Cecilia Gallerani, holds a white ermine, which was a symbol of purity, in one of Leonardo's few portraits of a woman.
Dante in Verona
Antonio Cotti · 1879
🕰️ Painted about 280 years later
The poet Dante, in exile from Florence, passes some women in Verona while they whisper that he has been to hell, a joke on his great poem the Inferno.