51 Pieces from the Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly transformed intellectual life in literature, philosophy, art, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, and searched for realism and human emotion in art. Here are 51 pieces or glimpses of the Renaissance, that gives us a slight view of this amazing era.

1. The School of Athens

The School of Athens, or Scuola di Atene in Italian, is one of the most famous paintings by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael.

2. The Miraculous Draught of Fishes

By Raphael, this is one of his 7 remaining Cartoons for tapestries.

3. The Creation of Adam

By Michelangelo, The story of Adam and Eve as told in the first, second and third chapters of Genesis. In the first of the pictures, and one of the most widely recognised images in the history of painting, Michelangelo shows God reaching out to touch Adam. From beneath the sheltering arm of God, Eve looks out, a little apprehensively.

4. St. John the Baptist

St. John the Baptist is an oil painting on walnut wood by the artist Leonardo da Vinci. Completed from 1513 to 1516, when the High Renaissance was metamorphosing into Mannerism.

5. The Last Supper (1594)

Jacopo Comin, 1518 – 1594, was one of the greatest painters of the Venetian school and probably the last great painter of the Italian Renaissance. A comparison of Tintoretto's final The Last Supper with Leonardo da Vinci's treatment of the same subject provides an instructive demonstration of how artistic styles evolved over the course of the Renaissance. Leonardo's is all classical repose. The disciples radiate away from Christ in almost-mathematical symmetry. In the hands of Tintoretto, the same event becomes dramatic, as the human figures are joined by angels.

6. The Last Supper (1498)

By Leonardo da Vinci

7. Miracle of the Slave

By Jacopo Tintoretto. It portrays an episode of the life of St. Mark, patron saint of Venice, taken from Jacopo da Varazze's Golden Legend. The scene shows, in the upper part, the saint intervening to make invulnerable a slave which was going to be martyrized for his veneration of a saint's relics.

8. The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden

Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Mone (1401 – 1428), was the first great painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance. His frescoes are the earliest monuments of Humanism, and introduce a plasticity previously unseen in figure painting. The expulsion from the garden of Adam and Eve, from the biblical Book of Genesis chapter 3.

9. The Adoration of the Magi

The Adoration of the Magi is an early painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was given the commission by the Augustinian monks of San Donato a Scopeto in Florence, but departed for Milan the following year, leaving the painting unfinished.

10. The Birth of Venus

The Birth of Venus is a painting by Sandro Botticelli. It depicts the goddess Venus, having emerged from the sea as a full grown woman, arriving at the sea-shore (Venus Anadyomene motif). The painting is currently in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

11. Cosimo the Elder

By Sandro Botticelli, The man is gazing at the observer and holding up a medal bearing the profile of the head of Cosimo de' Medici, who died in 1464.

12. St. Augustine in His Studio & in His Cell

St. Augustine is the subject of two paintings by the Italian Renaissance master Sandro Botticelli.

14. Dante by Giotto di Bondone

There is a story that Dante visited Giotto while he was painting the Arena Chapel and, seeing the artist's children underfoot asked how a man who painted such beautiful pictures could create such plain children, to which Giotto, who according to Vasari was always a wit, replied "I made them in the dark."

15. St Mark's Body Brought to Venice

16. Perseus Rescuing Andromeda

By Piero di Cosimo, Piero's mythical compositions show the bizarre presence of hybrid forms of men and animals.

17. Saint Anthony with pig (Piero di Cosimo)

By Piero di Cosimo

During his lifetime, Cosimo acquired a reputation for eccentricity—a reputation enhanced and exaggerated by later commentators such as Giorgio Vasari, who included a biography of Piero di Cosimo in his Lives of the Artists. Reportedly, he was frightened of thunderstorms, and so pyrophobic that he rarely cooked his food; he lived largely on hard-boiled eggs, which he prepared 50 at a time while boiling glue for his artworks. He also resisted any cleaning of his studio, or trimming of the fruit trees of his orchard; he lived, wrote Vasari, "more like a beast than a man".(wikipedia)

18. Lady in Yellow

By Alesso Baldovinetti’s, The profile was used for portraits by many painters of the Early Renaissance.

19. The Queen of Sheba Meeting with Solomon

Piero della Francesca (c. 1415[1] – October 12, 1492) was an Italian artist of the Early Renaissance.

20. The Baptism of Christ

The Baptism of Christ, 1474-1475, Verrocchio and Leonardo Davinci.

21. Palaeologus

By Benozzo Gozzoli (c. 1421 – 1497) was an Italian Renaissance painter from Florence.

22. The Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist

By Leonardo da Vinci.

23. Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa (also known as La Gioconda) is a 16th century portrait painted in oil on a poplar panel by Leonardo da Vinci during the Italian Renaissance. The work is owned by the Government of France and is on the wall in the Louvre in Paris, It is perhaps the most famous painting in the world.

24. The Temptation of St. Anthony

By Hieronymus Bosch, The Temptation (or Temptations) of St. Anthony is an often-repeated subject in history of art and literature, concerning the supernatural temptation reportedly faced by Saint Anthony the Great during his sojourn in the Egyptian desert.

Modern Spanish painter Salvador Dalí drew a great deal of inspiration from Bosch's work, which had many of the features that acted as precursors to Dalí's own surrealism.

25. John the Baptist in the Wilderness

By Geertgen tot Sint Jans (c. 1465 – c. 1495), Like most painters of his time, he painted with oil paint on wood panels. His paintings depict scenes derived from the New Testament and belong to the early Dutch School.

26. The Moneylender and his Wife

By Quentin Matsys (1466 – 1530), A satirical tendency may be seen in the pictures of merchant bankers (Louvre and Windsor), revealing their greed and avarice.

27. Isabella of Portugal

By Rogier de le Pasture (1399/1400 – 1464) is, with Jan van Eyck, considered one of the greatest exponents of the school of Early Netherlandish painting.

28. The Battle of Issus/Alexander

By Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480 near Regensburg – 12 February 1538 in Regensburg) was a German painter, printmaker and architect of the Renaissance era, the leader of the Danube School in southern Germany, and a near-contemporary of Albrecht Dürer. He is best known as a significant pioneer of landscape in art.

29. The Raising of Lazarus

By Sebastiano del Piombo (1485–1547).

30. Pope Leo X and his cousins, cardinals Giulio de' Medici and Luigi de' Rossi.

By Raphael.

31. Lorenzo di Medici

By Raphael.

32. Raphael with Friend

By Raphael.

33. Raphael, self-portrait

By Raphael.

34. The Tribute Money

By Masaccio.

35. Filippo Lippi & pupils

By Filippo Lippi (1406 – 1469), also called Lippo Lippi, was an Italian painter.

36. Figure of a Saint

By ALBA, Macrino d' (c. 1460-c. 1528), was an Italian painter. Macrino d'Alba worked mainly in the city of Alba but his paintings can be found in Turin, Rome, and in the Certosa in Pavia.