The High Renaissance: Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael

Leonardo da Vinci, trained in Florence in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, brought to painting an unprecedented fusion of scientific observation and technical innovation, most famously through his development of sfumato, a technique of blending tones and colors so gradually, without visible outlines, that forms seem to emerge from and dissolve into shadow. This effect is seen at its most refined in the Mona Lisa, painted in Florence in the early sixteenth century and generally identified, following a note by the Florentine official Agostino Vespucci, as a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of the merchant Francesco del Giocondo, though the painting's enigmatic smile and hazy, dreamlike background landscape have made it the most analyzed portrait in Western art. Leonardo's Last Supper, painted around 1495-1498 on the refectory wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, captures the moment Christ announces that one of the Apostles will betray him, organizing the twelve disciples into four dramatically reacting groups of three around a calm central Christ; Leonardo's experimental mural technique, however, began deteriorating within his own lifetime. Underlying all of Leonardo's art was an intense program of empirical study, including hundreds of anatomical drawings based on dissections of human cadavers, undertaken to understand the body's structure well enough to represent it convincingly, alongside investigations of botany, geology, hydraulics, and flight recorded across thousands of pages of notebooks, exemplified by his famous Vitruvian Man diagram of ideal human proportions.