The Atlas / Periods
The Periods of the Renaissance
Three centuries of European painting, divided into four periods. From the Florentine quattrocento to the late Venetian and Northern masters.
c. 1400–1490
Early Renaissance
Florence finds the new language.
The Early Renaissance, centred in Florence, is the period of discovery — the moment when the technical apparatus of Renaissance painting was assembled. Brunelleschi's linear perspective, Masaccio's sculptural volumes, and Botticelli's lyric mythologies established the foundations on which the entire tradition would be built.
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c. 1490–1527
High Renaissance
Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael.
The High Renaissance is the brief, intensely concentrated culmination of the Italian Renaissance — roughly a single generation, working in Florence and Rome, in which Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael produced what Vasari called the "third and perfect manner." The period is defined by harmony, idealisation, and a pictorial ambition without precedent.
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c. 1527–1600
Late Renaissance / Mannerism
The classical ideal under pressure.
The Late Renaissance, often labelled Mannerism, is the period of stylistic experiment and emotional intensification that followed the Sack of Rome in 1527. Where the High Renaissance pursued harmony and resolution, the painters of the Late Renaissance pursued complication, elongation, and psychological tension.
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c. 1400–1600
Northern Renaissance
Oil, detail, and the bourgeois gaze.
The Northern Renaissance ran in parallel with the Italian throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with its own painters, patrons, and technical priorities. Jan van Eyck's oil technique, Albrecht Dürer's integration of Italian ideals with Northern precision, and Pieter Bruegel's monumental treatment of peasant life define the tradition.
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