Quattrocento

• 1. Introduction

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  The 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 and artistic event in Italy between 1400 and 1499. The label is odd, because it names no style, no ruler and no movement. It simply marks a hundred years on the calendar. So what was packed into those years that earned them a name of their own? Which cities carried the energy, and what were their painters and sculptors reaching back toward? And would the artists themselves have recognised the period that history later drew around them?

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• 2. Money Over Land

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  Before the Quattrocento, much of Europe was a patchwork of small and turbulent fiefdoms. Slowly these coalesced into larger and steadier nation states, each ruled by a monarchy. Italy followed its own path. Urban centers rose there, filled with merchant and trade classes strong enough to defend themselves. The measure of wealth shifted in the process. Money replaced land as the thing that counted, and a growing number of serfs became freedmen. Feudalism was in decline, and its fading cleared the ground for social, cultural and economic change. That change would show up first in the busiest cities, which is where the century's story turns next.

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• 3. Five Cities and a Fall

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  Rome, Florence, Milan, Venice and Naples are the cities most closely tied to the Quattrocento. Together they are seen as the hinge between the medieval world and the Italian Renaissance. The century also carried a shock from far outside Italy. Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire during this period. Elsewhere, in Central Asia, a separate flowering was underway at the same moment. Scholars have compared it with the Timurid Renaissance. Seen this way, Italy's rebirth was one of two cultural surges running side by side across the same decades, far apart on the map.

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• 4. Looking Back to Rome

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  Art in this century moved in two overlapping phases. The late Middle Ages left behind International Gothic, the most prominent style at the start. Around 1425 the early Renaissance began. The start of the High Renaissance is generally placed somewhere between 1495 and 1500, right at the century's close. Along the way, artists put aside many inherited traditions. Byzantine decorative mosaics fell away, along with Gothic and other Christian media. Stained glass, frescoes, illuminated manuscripts and sculpture in the older manner went the same way. In their place came the forms of classical Roman and Greek art. The century's makers were not inventing from nothing. They were borrowing from antiquity.

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• 5. Artists Without a Label

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  Fifty names appear on the standard roll call of Italian artists from this era. Among them are Donatello, Filippo Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. The list also includes Lorenzo Ghiberti, Paolo Uccello, Giovanni Bellini and Domenico Ghirlandaio. Yet sorting any one of them into a box is risky. The Quattrocento overlaps with part of the Renaissance, so calling someone a Quattrocento artist or a Renaissance artist would be inaccurate. These people probably never thought of themselves as belonging to a school or a period at all. A contemporary view survives in a poem written for the Duke of Urbino by Giovanni Santi, the father of Raphael Sanzio. It names 27 prominent painters of the fifteenth century, a list drawn up by someone who lived among them.

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