Giunti Universal Atlas - Renaissance

When in 1436 Leon Battista Alberti wrote the second edition of his treatise on painting "in the Tuscan language" and dedicated it to Filippo Bruneileschi, he acknowledged both the homeland and the main mover of that which was already being called "rinascenza." And today, like in Alberti's time, Bruneileschi, Donatello and Masucio are considered the originators of the Renaissance. That which these artists designed, sculpted, formed or painted was an expression of a new manner of conceiving Man and Nature and the relationship of the microcosm of the one with the macrocosm of the other, as the philosophers and men of letters of the time theorized. Man, made of soul and body was placed at the center of the perceptible earthly sphere. There thus arose in him a need to observe, to define and to represent visible and imaginable reality according to empiriral, scientific principles, in order to later idealize it or attribute to it symbolic values. All this is revealed by Masaccio in the frescoes in Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence (c. 1427), and is revealed equally, but in a different language, by Jan van Eyck in his polyptych the Adoration of the lamb (1432). The dates are close; one is Florentine, the other Flemish. The homo novo of the Renaissance, whether a member of the lay burgeoisie. interested above all in attaining economic standing, or an aristocrat, interested in giving a more modern face to his estates, continually measured himself against time, life and death