The 14 Greatest Artists of the Italian Renaissance

Fourteen names from one Florentine century, and no two people rank them the same way. Sculptors and painters, dome-builders and draughtsmen, all in one field.

1

Leonardo da Vinci

Painter of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and the era's definitive polymath.

2

Michelangelo

Sculptor of the David and painter of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

3

Raphael

Painter of The School of Athens and the most imitated draughtsman of the High Renaissance.

4

Sandro Botticelli

Florentine painter of The Birth of Venus and Primavera.

5

Titian

Venetian master whose handling of colour shaped European painting for centuries.

6

Donatello

Florentine sculptor whose bronze David was the first free-standing nude since antiquity.

7

Piero della Francesca

Painter and mathematician whose geometry underpins the era's calmest pictures.

8

Filippo Brunelleschi

Engineered the dome of Florence Cathedral and codified linear perspective.

9

Fra Angelico

Dominican friar whose San Marco frescoes fuse devotion with new spatial clarity.

10

Giovanni Bellini

Founder of the Venetian school and teacher of both Titian and Giorgione.

11

Andrea Mantegna

Mantuan painter of extreme foreshortening and archaeological precision.

12

Tintoretto

Venetian painter of vast, theatrically lit canvases done at ferocious speed.

13

Paolo Uccello

Obsessive perspectivist behind the three panels of The Battle of San Romano.

14

Andrea del Verrocchio

Sculptor and workshop master who trained Leonardo, Perugino and Lorenzo di Credi.