nections between these two aspects of the Renaissance will always remain difficult to pin-point, but there are many parallels. Both go a long way back. If the decisive change in fifteenth-century painting was the invention of perspective, equally important developments had taken place as far back as the early fourteenth century with Giotto's innovations in spatial representation and the mastery of the art of fresco painting. The embellishment of the city, to some extent interrupted after the Black Death, was now taken up by a battery of new artists, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti, Masaccio, and the polymath Alberti foremost among the many. To the cathedral Brunelleschi added the majestic cupola, a brilliant technological feat as well as the purest expression of harmony; façades were added to the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Novella and others; new buildings such as the Churches of Santo Spirito and San Lorenzo rose. There were also a host of private patrician patrons--of the building and decoration of chapels, later of individual paintings. Painting saw the achievement of greater realism, wide experimentation with colour, perspective, and proportion, and the vogue of classical iconographical themes; sculpture saw a new sensitivity to movement and proportion, and in-theround, as opposed to bas-relief, work became the norm.
The excitement all this generated is attested by the speed with which Florence's reputation spread and other patrons tried to woo its chief stars. By the mid-fifteenth century the centre of attention had shifted to Rome, where under several popes, and principally Nicholas V, the next generation of erudite and often temperamental scholars gathered, bringing blatantly secular and often quite risqué culture to the heart of the papacy. There followed several popes with impressive performances as Renaissance princes; Pius II, previously the humanist Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Paul II, who directed attention to reviving the physical appearance of Rome itself, and Sixtus IV, who in addition to his warlike record also gathered several humanists to his court. But by this time the movement was truly pan-Italian. The Venetians, Milanese, and Neapolitans all had humanists in their pay and artists working under commission, and culture was an area in which lesser
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