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The Greatest Artistic Masterpieces
Michelangelo's David (Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence): The Big Guy himself, the perfect Renaissance nude, masterpiece of sculpture, icon of homosexual camp, and symbol of Italy itself.
Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus (Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence): Venus on the half shell. The goddess of love is born from the sea; a beauty drawn in the flowing lines and limpid grace of one of the most elegant masters of the early Renaissance.
Leonardo da Vinci's Annunciation (Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence): A young Leonardo had already figured it all out in this painting, with classical details, graceful figures, and his patented sfumato technique of blurring all edges and fuzzing the background to achieve a remarkably realistic illusion of depth and perspective.
Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise (Battistero, Florence): In 1401, young Ghiberti won a sculpture competition to craft the doors of Florence's Baptistery. Fifty-one years later, he completed his second and final set, boosting the Gothic language of three dimensions into a Renaissance reality of invented space and narrative line. Art historians consider that 1401 competition to be the founding point of the Renaissance. Michelangelo looked at the doors and simply declared them "so beautiful they would grace the entrance to Paradise."
Filippo Brunelleschi's Dome (Duomo, Florence): Florence's noble orangey-russet cupola reigns over the town in perfectly engineered immensity. When the cathedral was built, all the learned architects in town agreed the space was far too large to support a dome. Brunelleschi revived the secrets of Rome's ancient Pantheon to prove everyone wrong.
Masaccio's Trinità and the Cappella Brancacci (Santa Maria Novella and Santa Maria della Carmine, Florence): The greatest thing since Giotto. Masaccio not only redefined figure painting with his strongly modeled characters of intense emotion and vital energy but also managed to be the first painter to pinpoint precise mathematical perspective and create the illusion of depth on a flat surface. The world's first perfecter of virtual reality.
Fra' Angelico's Annunciation (San Marco, Florence): This is the summation of the devout friar's exacting early Renaissance style -- a graceful Mary, a deep cloistered space, and a carpet of wildflowers behind the rainbow wings of the angel Gabriel, communing intensely with the Madonna.
Pisano Pulpits (Duomo, Siena; Sant'Andrea, Pistoia; Baptistery and Duomo, Pisa): Between father Nicola and son Giovanni, Gothic sculpture was first invented and then refined, bringing a new emotional language and volume to sculpture and turning hard stone into fluid grace.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Allegory of Good and Bad Government (Museo Civico, Siena): This is the single greatest piece of secular art to survive from the Middle Ages. Ambrogio's depiction of the effects of good government on the town is a detailed encyclopedia of a medieval urban utopia.
Duccio's Maestà (Museo dell'Opera Metropolitana, Siena): This is the painting on which the Sienese school was founded -- ranks of angels on glittering gold and a masterful Gothic comic book on the life of Christ in square-foot panels.
Rossellino's Pienza: Many Renaissance artists painted their idea of the perfect city; Rossellino was the only architect who actually got the funding to build one. Pope Pius II used his money and power to remake the central square of his home village in the image of Renaissance order, proportion, and grace. A papal bull has ensured that not a whit has changed over the centuries.
Piero della Francesca's Resurrection of Christ (Museo Civico, Sansepolcro): Piero's dead-on geometric perspective and exquisitely modeled figures helped make this haunting work the model for all later depictions of the Risen Christ. This is quite possibly the only fresco whose reputation as the "best painting in the world" actually saved it from Nazi bombs during World War II.
Giotto's Life of St. Francis (Basilica di San Francesco, Assisi): This fresco cycle shocked the painting world out of its Byzantine stupor and thrust it full tilt on the road to the Renaissance. Giotto perhaps did more groundbreaking work in this one church than any other single painter in history, bringing a realism, classicism, concept of space and bulk, and pure human emotion that parlayed humanist philosophy into paint. These frescoes were damaged in the 1997 earthquakes that destroyed other works in the church, but restoration was completed in November 1999.
Luca Signorelli's Last Judgment (Duomo, Orvieto): Having recently emerged from years of restoration, Signorelli's signature piece uses the separation of the blessed from the damned as an excuse to display his mastery of the human nude. Michelangelo studied this seminal work before having his own go at the subject in the Sistine Chapel.
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