Curated playlist
Italian Renaissance painters
- Leonardo da VinciLeonardo da Vinci wrote most of his notes in mirror-image cursive, right to left.
- MichelangeloMichelangelo said he lived like a poor man, yet he was worth about 50,000 gold ducats.
- TitianTitian painted his own face into a prayer against the plague. The plague reached Venice, and he died in 1576.
- RaphaelRaphael painted Michelangelo into The School of Athens as Heraclitus.
- Filippino LippiEvery workshop in Florence closed for a day when painter Filippino Lippi died in 1504. His mother was a nun.
- Paolo VeroneseFacing the Inquisition in 1573, painter Paolo Veronese refused to repaint his Last Supper. He renamed it instead.
- Leon Battista AlbertiAt twenty, Leon Battista Alberti wrote a comedy that fooled a famous printer.
- MasaccioMasaccio drove a nail into a wall to draw perspective lines with string. His Holy Trinity fresco still shows the marks.
- Sandro BotticelliIn 1811, no buyer wanted Botticelli's The Mystical Nativity. In 1857, more than a million people saw it in Manchester.
- Italian Renaissance paintingGiotto, a shepherd boy from the hills north of Florence, started Italian Renaissance painting.
- Neri di BicciNeri di Bicci recorded every painting order his Florence workshop took. His diary filled 189 pages from 1453 to 1475.
- QuattrocentoThe Quattrocento is a century named after a number. Italians say quattrocento for four hundred, a shortened echo of millequattrocento, the word for the year 1400. Historians took that clipped numeral and stretched it over every cultural…
- Jacopo de' BarbariJacopo de' Barbari left behind more spellings of his name than certainties about his life. Documents and contemporaries call him de'Barbari, de Barberi, Barbaro, Barberino, Barbarigo or Barberigo, and these are only some of the variants.…
- Andrea MantegnaAndrea Mantegna's teacher mocked his first frescoes as figures "like men made of stone."