The Italian Renaissance
1401 O.S. – 1527 O.S.66 items
artitalyFrom the Baptistery doors to the Sack of Rome
In the winter of 1401 the cloth merchants of Florence held a competition for a pair of bronze doors. In May 1527 an unpaid imperial army broke into Rome while the pope fled to Castel Sant’Angelo. In between, bankers, popes, dukes and guilds in Florence, Rome, Venice, Milan, Mantua and Urbino paid for the dome, perspective, the David, the Last Supper and the Sistine ceiling, and Venetian printers made books small enough to carry.
Dates as the Florentines wrote them
Every date is in the Julian calendar, the one everybody here used; the Gregorian reform came in 1582.
Florence began its year on 25 March, the feast of the Annunciation: the stile fiorentino. A Florentine document dated 25 January 1503 was written in what we call 1504. Such dates are entered as Florence wrote them, and Timescrolly puts them in the right year: Michelangelo’s birth, the bonfire of the vanities and the meeting about where to put the David. Venice began its year on 1 March (more veneto); its January and February dates have been moved to a 1 January year by hand.
How it is laid out
Periods: the Medici under Cosimo and Lorenzo, Savonarola’s Florence, the Italian Wars, the pontificates of Julius II and Leo X, and the long works: two sets of Baptistery doors, the dome, the Sistine ceiling.
Threads to filter by:
painting,sculpture,architecture,patronage,books,religionandwar.The map: single buildings in Florence, Rome, Venice and Milan, and the courts of Urbino, Mantua and Padua.
Items
The competition for the Baptistery doors
Masaccio dies in Rome at twenty-six
Alberti’s On Painting
Pope Eugene IV consecrates the cathedral
The Council of Florence reunites the churches
Michelozzo begins the Palazzo Medici
The Foundling Hospital takes its first child
Brunelleschi dies
Leonardo is born at Vinci
Donatello’s Gattamelata is set up in Padua
Benozzo Gozzoli paints the Medici chapel
Ficino translates Hermes for the dying Cosimo
Printing comes to Venice
Verrocchio’s golden ball crowns the dome
Michelangelo is born at Caprese
The Duke of Urbino’s studiolo
The Pazzi conspiracy
Raphael is born in Urbino
Pico’s nine hundred theses
Lorenzo de’ Medici dies at Careggi
Aldus prints his first dated book
The Battle of Fornovo
The bonfire of the vanities
Savonarola is hanged and burned
Aldus prints the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
Aldus’s pocket Virgil in italic type
Artists meet to decide where the David goes
The David is unveiled at the Palazzo Vecchio
Bellini’s San Zaccaria altarpiece
The Laocoön is dug up in a Roman vineyard
The first stone of the new St Peter’s
The first half of the ceiling is shown
The Medici return to Florence
The Sistine ceiling is unveiled
Machiavelli writes The Prince
Aldus Manutius dies
Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso is printed in Ferrara
Luther’s Ninety-five Theses
Titian’s Assumption is unveiled in the Frari
Leonardo dies at Amboise
Raphael dies at thirty-seven
The Battle of Pavia
The Sack of Rome
Florence throws out the Medici again