Renaissance & Beyond

It begins in Florence, and it begins with money. The Medici were bankers who became the most consequential art patrons in European history — funding Brunelleschi's dome, commissioning Donatello's bronze David, and keeping Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and the young Michelangelo under their roof at the same time. To walk the Uffizi is to walk through their collection: Botticelli's Primavera and Birth of Venus, painted for the family's private pleasure; Leonardo's Annunciation; Raphael's portraits of popes and merchants. The dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, completed in 1436 without scaffolding using a technique Brunelleschi invented and refused to explain to anyone, is still the largest masonry dome ever built. Florence is not a city that happens to contain Renaissance art. It is a city the Renaissance built.

Venice took the Renaissance and made it sensuous. Where Florentine painting was about line and structure, the Venetians — Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese — were interested in light, colour and the shimmer of silk. The Scuola Grande di San Rocco, where Tintoretto spent twenty-three years covering every wall and ceiling with scenes of overwhelming scale and drama, is one of the great artistic experiences in Europe; most visitors walk past it on the way to the Frari. In the Veneto, Palladio's villas — the Villa Rotonda, the Villa Barbaro at Maser — introduced a classical geometry to domestic architecture that would echo through English country houses and American plantation homes for the next three centuries.

Michelangelo was formed in Florence under Medici patronage, but his greatest work pulled him to Rome. The Pieta in St Peter's Basilica, carved when he was twenty-four, has a surface finish so refined that later generations refused to believe it was marble. The Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted lying on scaffolding between 1508 and 1512, is the most ambitious single artistic undertaking of the Renaissance — nine scenes from Genesis across five hundred square metres of curved plaster, completed in four years. A century later, Bernini transformed Rome into the capital of the Baroque: the colonnade of St Peter's Square, the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in Santa Maria della Vittoria — a city rewritten in marble and light. In Vienna, the Habsburg emperors answered with their own Baroque ambition: the Belvedere, the Karlskirche, the Schonbrunn Palace, a city that still carries the confidence of an empire at its height.

The arc from the Medici's Florence to Baroque Rome to Enlightenment Vienna is not a textbook sequence — it is a journey you can make, slowly, stopping where the light is right and the crowds have thinned. The greatest works are not always in the greatest museums. Sometimes they are in a side chapel, behind a velvet rope, with no one else in the room.