Italy

About

Etruscan tombs and Roman wall paintings, portraits and mosaics give Italy a long prelude, but the story most visitors know begins around 1300, when Giotto gave solid weight and human feeling to the frescoes of the Arena Chapel in Padua. In 15th-century Florence, Masaccio used single-point perspective to open a painted chapel in The Holy Trinity, Donatello cast a bronze David, and Sandro Botticelli painted The Birth of Venus (about 1485). Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti carried the High Renaissance to Milan and Rome, while in Venice Giorgione and Titian built pictures from colour and atmosphere.

In Rome, Caravaggio's raking light and Gian Lorenzo Bernini's marble Apollo and Daphne (1622–25) defined the Baroque, and view painters such as Giovanni Paolo Panini later served Grand Tour visitors. Modern Italy launched Futurism in 1909, Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical squares and the humble materials of Arte Povera.