Renaissance

It began in Florence, where money from the Medici bank paid for art that served neither church nor king alone. In the first half of the 1400s, painters and architects such as Brunelleschi worked out how to make a flat wall look like real space; Masaccio's Tribute Money is built around a single vanishing point.

Ideas also flowed the other way. Oil paint reached Italy from Flanders around 1450, and because it could be made opaque or transparent and reworked for days, it let painters render textures that fresco and tempera could not. When Hugo van der Goes's huge altarpiece arrived in Florence from Bruges in 1483, its shepherds with stubbly beards and work-worn hands made such an impression that Domenico Ghirlandaio promptly painted his own version.

The High Renaissance, the short peak of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael, is usually said to end in 1520 with Raphael's death. In Italy, painters such as Raphael built calm, balanced groups with clear forms and easy composition; his Madonna of the Meadow sets its three figures in a pyramid.

North of the Alps the movement came later and kept a Gothic accent, spread by universities and the printing press. Dürer, who went to Venice twice, carried Italian ideas home and turned the engraving and the woodcut into major art forms that crossed Europe as prints. His Adam and Eve borrows its idealised bodies from classical sculpture but sets the garden in a northern forest.