Early Renaissance Europe: 1450 - 1500

This was a golden age in the visual arts, from the late work of Donatello in the 1450s to the emergence of Dürer around 1500. It is widely associated with famous painters - Botticelli, Mantegna, Bellini, Leonardo da Vinci, Memling and Bosch - but there were also talented sculptors and architects such as Riemenschneider, Verrocchio and Alberti, and countless anonymous artists working in a range of media from goldsmiths’ work to manuscript painting and tapestry, all encountered on this course. It is an era of tradition and innovation. While religious life provided the context for a continuing demand for altarpieces, devotional objects and tombs, growing interest in classical antiquity encouraged new art forms and subjects. New styles and techniques travelled between Florence and the rest of Italy, Flanders and the rest of Europe. Alongside established elite patrons, the wealthy urban middling class fuelled demand for domestic artworks, while the invention of printing generated new markets for images and books, and radically transformed the reach of art and ideas.