In the development of the Renaissance style, as distinguished from the
Gothic, the example of Graeco-Roman art played an important part.
Humanism, the taste for the literature and history of the ancients,
awakened the interest of Italian artists in the monuments of their
forgotten past, and led them to seek, in the surviving remains of Roman
architecture and in the scanty examples of ancient sculpture and painting
that chance had brought to light, the secret of beauty.
The attitude of the Early Renaissance toward the antique differed from
that of the Late Renaissance. In the former period (XV century),
enthusiasm for the art of an unfamiliar past, romantically dreamed of,
rather than archeologically reconstructed, did not lead to that sterile
imitation which came with wider knowledge and greater technical facility
in the late days of Renaissance art. Artists of this period were
disciples rather than imitators. Grandiose and formal, the Late
Renaissance (XVI century) lost the child-like, romantic enthusiasm of the
earlier period for classical art. Sculptors and painters not only sought
forms which should recall the antique, but also turned eagerly to Greek
and Roman mythology for their subjects. As the Renaissance drew to a
close, artists began to borrow not only from the antique but also from the
great masters of their own Golden Age, Leonardo (1452-1519), Raphael
(1483-1520), Michelangelo (1475-1564), Correggio (1494-1534), and Titian
(1477-1576). In this futile eclecticism the Renaissance came to an end.
[Madonna and Child. The Master of the San Miniato Altar-piece]