Leonardo da Vinci Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519, Old Style) was an Italian Renaissance scholar who dabbled in many trades – painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. More than any other person of his day, Leonardo da Vinci embodied the ideas of Renaissance humanism and has often been described as the best example of a “Renaissance Man.” He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. Born in Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice, and he spent his last years in France at the home awarded him by King Francis I. Leonardo was primarily known for his work as a painter. Among his works, the Mona Lisa is the most famous and most parodied portrait and The Last Supper the most reproduced religious painting of all time, while Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is arguably his most famous sketch. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number because of his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, compose a contribution to later generations of artists only rivaled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo. In addition to his work as a painter, Leonardo da Vinci is revered for his technological ingenuity. His notebooks contain drawings and descriptions of a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, and he outlined a basic theory of plate tectonics. He made important discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings and they had no direct influence on later science.

Leonardo da Vinci  “Vitruvian Man” “Mona Lisa” “The Last Supper”

Michelangelo Michelangelo Buonarroti (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564) was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer who had a tremendous influence on the development of Western art. Despite attempting little outside of the arts like Leonardo da Vinci, his versatility and adaptability in the disciplines he took up was so great that he is often considered to be an example of an Italian Renaissance man, along with fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci. Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist in his lifetime, and a number of his works in painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in existence. His output in every field during his long life was extraordinary; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Preferring to work as a sculptor, two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted from marble before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential works in fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. In addition to his work as a painter and sculptor, Michelangelo was also an architect who helped plan and construct a number of buildings. At 74 he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peter's Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan, the western end being finished to Michelangelo's design, the dome being completed after his death with some modification. In a demonstration of Michelangelo's unique standing, he was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. Two biographies were published of him during his lifetime; one of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries. In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino ("the divine one"). One of the qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.

Michelangelo “David” St. Peter’s Basilica  The Sistine Chapel: The Creation of Adam

Raphael Raphael (April 6 or March 28, 1483 – April 6, 1520), also known as Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired by people for its clarity and ability to emphasize human greatness. Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period. Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large workshop, and despite his death at 37, a large body of his work remains. Many of his works are found in the Apostolic Palace of The Vatican, where the frescoed Raphael Rooms were the central, and the largest, work of his career. The best known work is The School of Athens. After his early years in Rome much of his work was self-designed, but for the most part executed by the workshop from his drawings. Raphael was extremely influential in his lifetime, though outside Rome his work was mostly known from his collaborative printmaking. After his death, the influence of his great rival Michelangelo was more widespread until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Raphael's more serene and harmonious qualities were again regarded as the highest models.

“Wedding of the Virgin” Raphael “The School of Athens” “Wedding of the Virgin”

Donatello Donatello (circa 1386 – December 13, 1466), also known as Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, was an early Renaissance Italian artist and sculptor from Florence. He is remembered for his work as a bronze sculptor and his work in bas-relief. Over the course of his life, Donatello created numerous bronze statues and bas-reliefs that mostly showed religious figures and scenes from the Bible. Donatello’s most famous sculpture is his bronze David, which he was commissioned to do by Cosimo de' Medici, the foremost art patron of his day. This is now Donatello's most famous work and at the time of its creation, it was the first known free-standing nude statue produced since ancient times. Conceived fully in the round, independent of any architectural surroundings, and largely representing an allegory of the civic virtues triumphing over brutality and irrationality, it was the first major work of Renaissance sculpture.

Donatello Bas-Relief “David”

Brunelleschi Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 – April 15, 1446) was one of the greatest architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance who is best remembered for his studies of linear perspective and engineering the dome of the Florence Cathedral. However, his accomplishments also include other architectural works, sculpture, mathematics, engineering and even ship design. Brunelleschi’s most famous work is the construction of the dome of the Florence Cathedral. Santa Maria del Fiore was the new cathedral of Florence and no one had any idea about how to build its dome since it was to be larger than anything that had been built since the days of the Roman Empire. In 1419, the wool merchants' guild held a competition to solve the problem and Brunelleschi eventually won the commission to design the dome. Brunelleschi would spend most of his life designing and building the dome. To complete it, Brunelleschi used more than 4 million bricks in the construction of the dome and invented a new hoisting machine for raising the materials needed for the dome, a task no doubt inspired by republication of Vitruvius' De Architectura, which describes Roman machines used in the first century AD to build large structures such as the Pantheon and the Baths of Diocletian, structures still standing which he would have seen for himself. He also issued one of the first patents for the hoist in an attempt to prevent theft of his ideas. Brunelleschi kept his workers up in the building during their breaks and brought food and wine up to them. He felt the trip up and down the hundreds of stairs would exhaust them and reduce their productivity. In a further attempt to motivate the workers, he gave them diluted wine, similar to that given to pregnant women at the time.

Brunelleschi

Lavinia Fontana Lavinia Fontana (August 24, 1552 – August 11, 1614) was one of the first female painters in the Renaissance. Born in the city of Bologna, she learned to paint from her father and was expected to continue the family business. Her earliest work was painted when she was 23 and while it has been lost, many of her other works survive to this day. Early in her career, Lavinia was most famous for painting upper-class residents of her native Bologna. Later on, she created paintings of male and female nudes and large scale religious paintings. While her youthful style was much like her father's, over time her style of painting changed. There are over 100 works that are documented, but only 32 signed and dated works are known today. There are 25 more that can be attributed to her, making her body of work the largest for any female artist prior to 1700. She was elected into the Accademia di San Luca of Rome (an association of artists in Rome), and died in that city on August 11, 1614.

Lavinia Fontana “Newborn Baby in a Crib” “Self-Portrait at the Clavichord”