The Fifteenth Century in Italy is known as the Quattrocento, a period in the Renaissance when classical ideas were revived and the world of artistic expression shifted to a new emphasis on the human being and human life. Ideas developed during the first half of the Quattrocento were carried through by various artists during the second half and into the Cinquecento. Florentine artists developed their work from the ideas of Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Masaccio in both painting and sculpture. Florentine art in the first half of the fifteenth century was marked by a new style being produced by its originators. This style began with sculpture and then spread to architecture and painting. In his book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Michael Baxandall analyzes the way the art world developed in artistic and commercial terms and how the production of art was related to other social and commercial movements and changes of that period.
The Renaissance is a period seen as a rebirth of learning on the classical model. The modern conception of the Renaissance actually derives from the nineteenth century in the work of Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, who published a pioneering work in 1860 in which he saw the Renaissance as almost purely cultural, as the work of a small Italian elite pioneering a new attitude toward human beings. They now saw human beings as people who had suddenly acquired a new consciousness of their own uniqueness and individuality. We now know that the Renaissance had three dimensions, historic, economic, and cultural. Historically, there was a new interest in the remote past, especially that of Greek and Roman antiquity, and also a tendency to reject the more recent past we now call the Middle Ages. This was fed in Italy by a number of revivals of Roman buildings and the occasional piece of sculpture. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 brought a flood of scholarly refugees to Italy, and the...