Renaissance Painters

A Renaissance painter was not, in the modern sense, an artist working alone in a studio. He was a craftsman, an intellectual, a courtier, an engineer, a theologian, and a businessman. He ran a bottega — a workshop with apprentices, assistants, and a steady production of commissions. He depended on patronage from the church, the courts, and the merchant elites of the Italian and Northern cities. He read, or at least absorbed, the classical authors who underpinned the period's intellectual project.

The painters indexed below are the figures around whom the art history of the Renaissance is organised. The Italian masters — Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Caravaggio — share the canonical stage with the Northern painters — Jan van Eyck, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein the Younger, Pieter Bruegel the Elder — and with the earlier generation who built the technical and conceptual scaffolding: Giotto, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca.

Each entry below links to a full Atlas page covering the painter's life, working method, major paintings, technical contribution, and place in art history.