Florence had a cathedral with a hole in the roof
The cathedral in FLORENCE was begun in 1296 and designed around a DOME wider than anyone in Europe knew how to build. For decades the building stood finished except for an open octagon over the altar, 43 metres across, and nobody could say how it would ever be closed.
Filippo Brunelleschi won the commission in 1418 with a method he refused to fully explain. Instead of building a huge wooden frame to hold the masonry up while it set, he laid the bricks in a herringbone pattern that locked each ring in place as it rose, and built two shells, one inside the other, to save weight. He also designed the hoists that lifted the stone. The dome went up without supporting scaffolding from the ground, and it is still the largest brick dome ever built.
The money came from bankers
The MEDICI were a banking family, and the Renaissance in Florence ran substantially on their money. A PATRON paid for a chapel, an altarpiece or a statue for reasons that mixed faith, civic pride and plain advertising — a wealthy family's coat of arms went on the finished work, and sometimes the family appeared in the painting as onlookers at a Bible scene.
Contracts were specific. They set the deadline, the size, the number of figures, and often the quality of the pigment — ultramarine blue, ground from lapis lazuli brought from Afghanistan, cost more than gold, and patrons wrote into the agreement exactly how much of it they expected to see. ART was a commissioned product, and the artist was a supplier.
A painter was trained like a plumber
There was no art school. A boy of twelve or so was apprenticed to a master's WORKSHOP and spent years grinding pigments, preparing panels and copying, before he was trusted with anything that mattered. LEONARDO trained this way in the workshop of Verrocchio, and the story goes that he painted an angel in his master's Baptism of Christ so well that Verrocchio gave up painting.
Most big works were team efforts. A FRESCO had to be painted onto wet plaster, one day's patch at a time, before it dried — the joins between days can still be counted on the Sistine ceiling. MICHELANGELO painted that ceiling standing on a scaffold he designed and craning his neck backwards, and wrote a bitter comic poem about what it did to his spine. RAPHAEL ran a workshop of around fifty assistants in Rome.
Old books, new questions
HUMANISM was the scholarly movement underneath all this: recovering CLASSICAL Latin and Greek texts, many brought west by scholars leaving Constantinople, and treating human life and achievement as a proper subject of study in its own right. It shaped the art directly — the MARBLE nude returns as a serious subject, drawn from ancient sculpture, and buildings borrow Roman columns and proportions.
PRINTING spread the texts. Gutenberg's press in the 1450s meant a scholar in one city could read the same edition as a scholar in another, which had never been possible with hand-copied manuscripts. The SONNET travelled north from Italy the same way. The rest of the grid holds the PAINTER, the CANVAS that gradually replaced wooden panels, SCULPTURE, the INVENTION notebooks and the idea of GENIUS itself. Our artists page follows the painters forward.