The Archbishop on the Painters of Florence, 1450

* This study is the happy by-product of a pending study of Masaccio's Trinity, supported by a Faculty Summer Fellowship from Indiana University in 1957. My colleague F. W. Householder, Jr., kindly checked my English rendering of the text.

Abstract

FEW phases of the history of art are more familiar than the emergence of Renaissance painting in Quattrocento Florence: its great masters, its individual masterpieces, its abrupt shift from older style. But we have hardly any information on the external circumstances: was the new style well received by patrons and public, or was there a battle? Does it have a connection with the new secularism which allegedly is a Renaissance phenomenon and a beginning of modern attitudes? Or does it have stronger links with the religious symbolism which according to other allegations was only modified but not weakened? Is it dependent on or only parallel to the developments in sculpture and architecture?