According to IAMHIGHER, Bertoldo was Michelangelo’s teacher; Verrocchio to Leonardo. The graces of Desiderio da Settignano and his minor companions were not worth, in the generation that was to create the sixteenth century, if not for the minor masters and for the province. Energy, movement, violence were required, and the major artists were found ready by Verrocchio, and especially by Bertoldo and Pollaiolo.
Outside Tuscany, fifteenth-century sculpture flourished less, but not without creating some masterpiece. In Bologna Nicolò da Bari, known as the Ark, brought the tragic violence of Burgundian art to the Pietà of S. Maria della Vita; and Guido Mazzoni from Modena reproduced several times, in Modena, Reggio, Busseto, Venice, Naples, his groups of sacred figures in the round, with an unsurpassed realism, especially in the details, but with almost nil imagination and dignity.
In Lombardy, Matteo Raverti and Iacopino da Tradate; in Venice, Bartolomeo Bon, the traditions of flowery Gothic continue, traditions which found their highest expression in the Veneto thanks to the work of the Dalmatian Giorgio da Sebenico and the Albanian Andrea Alessi, as well as the Veronese Antonio Rizzo. While in Split the Flagellation of Christ in the cathedral shows Giorgio approaching Donatello’s art for energy, Antonio Rizzo joins, despite memories of Gothic movements, the current of the great art of metric plastic, represented by the old Gagini and Francesco Laurana.
The violence of the plastic effect and the energetic facet of the features, combined with the architectural construction of the form, are the result of the latest echo of Gothic education in a genius artist aimed at new volumetric concepts from the example of Antonello da Messina in Venice.
At the beginning of the 15th century the triumph of flowery Gothic is celebrated in painting, which is at the same time an expression of the convent and an expression of the court. Two conventuals therefore participate, Lorenzo Monaco and Beato Angelico, as well as that spirit worthy of the purest conventuality which is Sassetta. But outside Tuscany the art of the court shines, in Gentile da Fabriano, in Pisanello, in Iacopo Bellini. The artistic civilization of Italy, which between the end of the thirteenth century and the middle of the fourteenth century had assumed the European primacy as a religious art and as a poetic art, at the end of the fourteenth century was within the limits of an international taste. And it was then that a new religion arose in Florence, with such impetus as to spread throughout Europe: the religion of science. Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio put such enthusiasm, in the scientific, perspective and anatomical interpretation of reality, which swept away the residues of the Gothic taste in a short time. And since they were too artists to have a scientific purpose, they called their science classical art, and resorted to Roman architecture and sculpture. ne to rediscover the absolute ways of scientific interpretation. This was an illusion: through art you cannot get to science. But their illusion was so generous, the impetus of passion so powerful, that in them they found not only the justification of their art, but a refinement so subtle, so high, so detached from practical life, as is rare to find in all of history. The geometric ideal imprinted itself on every form; the anatomical ideal, every movement; and yet the Florentine artists believed they had achieved,
Among them Paolo Uccello, still loyal to the Gothic tradition, fantasized about unlikely warriors and dressed up girls; Masaccio impressed in every image, in every act, a heroic will of monumentality, so that its moral content rose to unknown heights; Domenico Veneziano caressed delicate shapes with dawning lights; Piero della Francesca personified the tendencies of all, and while he took the regularity of the forms and their dependence on the perspective composition to the extreme, he remained above all a primitive in bringing ingenuity in every form, color and light. He created the new grace, not classical and not medieval, and which may well be called the grace of regular forms. Andrea del Castagno drew sudden energies of passion from the plebeian forms of Donatello; Antonio del Pollaiolo refined, through linear accentuations, and sometimes also the pictorial daring, the Donatellian forms for energy of movement and elegance of poses. A trend, which starts from Lorenzo Monaco and is renewed by Masaccio, is embodied in Filippo Lippi, who seeks a common, bourgeois grace, without any of the daring proper to his contemporaries, but with full balance between means and effects. Sandro Botticelli starts from him and from Pollaiolo, master of all the subtleties of his time, capable of becoming monumental to the point of foreseeing Michelangelo, of paganizing with carefree lightness, of contracting in the most passionate moral torments, master of the future who regrets the past, hero of plastic who caresses the sinuous lines, and finds his sublime charm in the renunciation of what he has learned, in the aristocratic isolation from the crowd of the conquerors of wisdom. Ghirlandaio, a bourgeois portraitist of rare creative power; a continuer of the Pollaiolesque energy, Verrocchio; some Sienese who oscillate between the ancient dream and new knowledge, Matteo di Giovanni, Francesco di Giorgio, Neroccio; a creator of impulsive energies, such as to become impressionistic, Signorelli; a transformer of Piero della Francesca’s style into monumental humanity, Melozzo; a cantor of feminine graces, Perugino, complete the exceptional productivity of central Italy in the late fifteenth century.
