In the wake of the revolution initiated by Giotto, artists and patrons envisaged new paths for painting, now encouraged to abandon the conventional style of religious abstraction and to reflect aspects of the real world. In the panorama of Italian and European culture, 15th-century Florence enjoyed an exceptionally privileged position: with its bold new concepts of space, its purposeful exploration of nature, and its revitalized approach to antiquity, it fulfilled all the cultural premises of the Renaissance. Brunelleschi and Alberti were credited with a discovery destined to give a new dimension to the medieval conception of space: perspective. Until then artists had tended to use foreshortening, and although objects were represented in depth, they were not mathematically related to the surrounding space. The fragile grace of Giotto was wholly superseded by Masaccio, with his massive, monumental figures. Donatello, nurtured on classical culture and motivated by an extraordinary gift for narrative, proclaimed the values of the human body and personality. The study of anatomical dissection provided artists with a new scientific instrument for understanding the workings of the human body.
 

Desiderio da Settignano, Mary Magdalen,
polychrome wood, 1455,
Santa Trinita, Florence.

 Donatello, The Feast of Herod, 1423-25, gilded wood, baptysmal font of the Baptistery, Siena.
A master of perspective and moulding techniques, the sculptor achieves a powerful contrast between the foreground figures and the receding background levels.

Lorenzo Ghiberti, Stories of Joseph, after 1439, Porta del Paradiso, Baptistery, Florence.
By now emancipated from medievalism, Ghiberti espoused the perspective principles developed by Brunelleschi and Donatello, affirming, both as a theorist and an artist, the intellectual quality of art.