Few epochs in the history of art occupy so central a position in western achievement yet so strongly resist the neat distinctions of period and categorisation as the fifteenth century. Suspended between two pan-European artistic styles (a Parisian-centred Gothic and a Roman-based High Renaissance and Early Baroque), and straddling two historical epochs (‘the late Middle Ages’ and ‘the Renaissance’), the arts of fifteenth-century Christendom, known variously as ‘late medieval’, ‘early Renaissance’, ‘late Gothic’, even ‘florid’ and ‘flamboyant’, present a confusing and extraordinarily heterogeneous picture. The period saw one of the most profound changes in visual language in the history of western art, from the late Gothic formalities of the so-called International Style of c. 1400, to the accomplished naturalism of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. In a Europe fragmented by complex political units and sharpening differences in vernacular languages, the fifteenth century is remarkable for an acute diversity of artistic styles. And cutting across these divergences of tradition and experience is the fundamental split between the neo-classical language of Quattrocento Italy and a vigorous Gothic style north of the Alps which went on resisting antique forms well into the sixteenth century. The ambivalences in that north-south divide add their own complications to any definition of fifteenth-century art as a whole. Burckhardt’s classic attempt to distinguish the Italian Renaissance from the Middle Ages and the ‘Gothic north’ remained successful so long as it stayed within the stylistic categories of artistic language and pointed to the decisive revival of antique forms. But when it moved into more dubious historical categories, such as ‘The Development of the Individual’ and ‘The Discovery of the World and of Man’, it prepared the way for Huizinga’s false contrast between a ‘waning’ fifteenth-century northern culture - its essentially late medieval art coloured by courtly aestheticism and morbidity — and an optimistic, individualistic and progressive Italian Renaissance. These confident polarities have long been undermined by our awareness of the fruitful exchanges between Italian Renaissance art and contemporary Netherlandish painting, and by our perception of the continuities between medieval and Renaissance culture, both in the periodic revivals of Antiquity throughout the Middle Ages (Erwin Panofsky’s ‘renascences’), and in the persistence of medieval habits of mind among even the most progressive of Renaissance artists and patrons.
In his biography of Andrea Mantegna, Vasari defined the art of the later Quattrocento with an observation that could apply to the whole century: ‘at that time accomplished artists were setting themselves to the intelligent investigation and zealous imitation of the truths of Nature’. The fifteenth century established a new relationship between ‘art’ and ‘life’ which served to undermine the distinctions between both. Art transformed the face of fifteenth-century Europe. It marked the critical stages of life, from baptism to death; it articulated the public life of cities as fountains, crosses and street statues, and, less permanently, as the fantastic machinery of outdoor theatricals (plate 6); it broke out from its old, elite setting in church and castle, to decorate the houses of the bourgeoisie with diptychs and devotional panels; it cluttered churches with fonts, pulpits, sacrament houses, tombs and colossal altarpieces (plates 1, 3, 17, 21); it established new, more popular, genres of graphic illustration and printing. In turn, as life permeated into all branches of art, so art began to explore, with a new accuracy and logic, the diversity of the world. Artists developed a more analytical, more strictly scientific attitude to nature, and fashioned more sophisticated tools for its expression. The new reality these painters recorded belonged, of course, to many categories other than nature. The overt goal of fifteenth-century painters and theorists towards ‘naturalism’ and mimesis was profoundly modified by the complex of techniques, values and beliefs — many of them still imbued with medieval conventions — which they brought, often half-acknowledged, to the act of representation. Nevertheless, the most profound changes in fifteenth-century art seem to have been triggered by new techniques of rendering optical reality. The simultaneous discovery, at the beginning of the century, of a systematic linear perspective in Florence, and of the full possibilities of oil painting and aerial perspective in Flanders, launched European art from the two schools — the Italian and the Flemish — which were to dominate it for the next 200 years.