This is a painting that I find absolutely captivating.
It glows with an incredible golden light.
I feel as if I can almost reach out and touch the musician angels.
I love the way that the Christ Child has his chubby little fingers
jammed in his mouth. He looks just like a real toddler.
I'm not the only person who's thought this.
Vasari, who in the 16th century wrote what amounted to
one of the earliest histories of art, was of the same view.
"Masaccio," he wrote, "can be given credit
for originating a new style of painting."
"He produced work that is living, realistic and natural."
Of course, it's not as lifelike
as watching a film or looking at a photograph.
The Virgin Mary seems a bit distant,
and I'm not sure that I find
the Christ Child's body entirely convincing.
But these figures look much more like real people
than those in many earlier Italian paintings.
They have rounded flesh and realistic hair and fingernails.
The space they're sitting in also looks three-dimensional.
This sort of development is a key part of the Renaissance,
this time of new ideas that's been seen as a rebirth of art and culture.
"Renaissance" is a French word that literally means rebirth.
It's a period when Western European art changed radically.
In a relatively short space of time, starting in the late 13th century,
highly patterned, stylised images
gave way to much more naturalistic ones.
For the first time in centuries, artists actively sought
to observe the world around them,
and reflect what they could see in their paintings and sculpture.
The change in the way art looked was dramatic.
But why did it happen at this particular point in history?
Why did some of the key developments happen
in what is now northern Italy? How did the artists know what to do?
The National Gallery's unique collection
of early Italian Renaissance paintings is a great place
to start exploring these questions.
Of course, there isn't one straightforward story to be told.
Art history is rarely a progression in a straight line
from A to B, from unrealistic to realistic art.
What actually happens is nowhere near as neat as that,
and as a result is much more interesting.
At the National Gallery, we pick up the trail in the late 13th century,
in Tuscany and Umbria.
Entering the first rooms of the Sainsbury Wing,
you find yourself in a very particular world,
filled with saints and angels, often with quite similar faces,
and lots of gold and patterned surfaces.
This is the oldest painting in the National Gallery's collection,
Margarito of Arezzo's Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints,
which was made in the 1260s.
It was probably an altarpiece.
Nearly all of the surviving paintings from this period are religious.
It might have stood behind the altar table,
like the painted panels in this picture by Sassetta.
The Virgin Mary and Christ Child dominate the centre of this panel,
much bigger than the other figures since they are the most important.
On either side are smaller squares,
filled with action-packed scenes from the lives of saints.
This one shows St John the Evangelist being freed by an angel
from a cauldron of boiling oil, rescued at the last minute.
Here, we've got St Nicholas saving three youths from execution.
My favourite is this one. It shows St Margaret
being swallowed alive by a dragon while she was in prison.
You can see the bars represented by this grid of lines over the picture.
The story went that the power of her prayer was enough
to force open the dragon's belly, so in the same picture
we also see her tumbling out onto the floor, unharmed.
This miraculous escape made St Margaret
the patron saint of women in childbirth.
This painting has a very distinctive look to it.
The figures are flat, and bounded by thick dark outlines.
The faces look similar to each other. They're a bit like masks.
The spaces inhabited by these figures are not very realistic.
They don't look three-dimensional and there aren't any shadows.
When the painting was bought by the National Gallery in the 19th century,
it was as an example of bad, rather crudely painted art.
The director of the gallery thought
that having this at the start of the collection
would allow the rest of the gallery to show
how much Italian art progressed after the 13th century.
But the flatness, outlines and mask-like faces
weren't the result of a lack of skill at all.
Those features are actually about the strong influence of art
from the Eastern Christian Church, Byzantine art.
Small icons, rather like this one in the British Museum,
had come to Italy over many generations,
sometimes with their makers, too.
This was the result of close trading links,
particularly between Venice and the East.
Their lack of realism is very deliberate.
It's what makes them powerfully symbolic
to the people who still use this kind of icon in prayer.
The Virgin Mary is always supposed to look like this,
an unchanging, wonderful being
who is of a completely different substance to you and me.
This way of painting religious figures was very influential
in Italian art for a long time.
You can see how this painting by an anonymous Umbrian master
shares similar features with the icon.
The same is true, too, of Margarito's painting.
What we see here is deliberately unrealistic.
It's meant to look like another world,
a shimmering golden heaven, where there are no shadows,
because these holy figures do not sit under the same light as us.
The fact that there's a strong symbolic reason
for having art that doesn't look realistic
means it's all the more interesting that painting does then change.
Why does it happen?
Art starts to change in the 13th and 14th centuries in Italy
because society starts to change. Take Florence, where I am now.
This is a city that becomes enormously wealthy at this time.
It has a very profitable textile trade
and it's one of the big European banking centres.
Florentine bankers actually invented cheques, credit,
life insurance, double-entry book-keeping,
and Europe's first single currency, the gold florin.
It may sound boring, but it made them an awful lot of money.
Then, as now, excess money tended to be spent on display,
and this could often mean things like cultural patronage,
art and architecture.
Partly this was for reasons of civic pride.
Rival cities like Florence and Siena vied to outdo each other
in the churches that they built and the art that went in them.
But it also had a lot to do with religion.
These were people who absolutely believed
that their continued health and prosperity
depended on the support of Jesus, Mary and the other saints.
Commissioning expensive, custom-made art
was a way of showing them,
as well as your peers, that you were an extremely devoted person.
This might explain why lots of art is made at this time,
but it doesn't explain why it starts to look different.
That has a lot to do
with changing religious and philosophical ideas at this time.
The 13th century was a time of questioning, change and reform.
Universities were founded, which meant that not all scholars
were part of the controlled world of the monastery.
They started to debate Christian doctrine,
and talked about the very different ideas about the world
expressed in Aristotle's ancient writings
on the natural sciences and philosophy.
These had recently been reintroduced to the West,
via Arab scholars in Spain.
One result of this was that scholars and artists
started to be interested in classical art,
particularly the very realistic-looking sculptures
that had survived from ancient cultures.
Another result was reform in the Church,
and that had a big impact on the way that art came to look.
The call for reform within the Church led to new orders of monks,
who lived frugally and worked with the poor.
The two most important orders were the Franciscans and Dominicans,
the followers of St Francis and St Dominic respectively.
These orders put a great emphasis on teaching
and built new churches within which to do it.
This is the Church of Santa Maria Novella.
It's the Florentine base of the Dominican order.
As you can see, it's huge.
This was partly to fit in lots of people to do their preaching,
but also to keep up with the Franciscans,
who were busy building the Church of Santa Croce across the city
at the same time, in the early 14th century.
The Franciscans and Dominicans believed that art
could help them to teach the central messages of Christianity.
They called for more personal devotion, prayer,
and encouraged people to study and contemplate
the lives of Jesus and the saints.
They filled their churches with paintings,
particularly wall paintings, frescoes,
which told the stories of these exemplary men and women.
Altarpieces made out of painted wooden panels
could also tell these stories, and were a focal point for prayer.
This sort of thing has often ended up in museums like the National Gallery.
They were sometimes dismantled later on to make way for new art.
These panels all show scenes from the life of St Francis.
They were painted in the mid-15th century
by a Sienese artist known as Sassetta.
They're all from an altarpiece made for the Church of San Francesco
in Borgo San Sepolcro, another Tuscan town.
There used to be a big painting of St Francis in the centre,
and then all of these panels were arranged on either side.
The pictures trace St Francis's life,
including good deeds, like donating his cloak to a poor knight.
In the same panel, he's also shown asleep,
dreaming of the order of monks that he would set up.
Here, he's giving up all of his wealth,
taking off his rich clothes and turning away from his earthly father
so that he can devote himself to God's work.
In this panel, he's saving the town of Gubbio from a vicious wolf.
And here, he's receiving the stigmata.
Legend told that St Francis had a vision of a fiery angel,
and wounds appeared on him
in the same places as Christ's hands and feet were nailed.
It's a sign of his faith and his holiness.
You can get engrossed in St Francis's life through these paintings.
I think this is partly because of the amount of detail in each panel.
People knew quite a lot about the life of this particular saint,
because he'd lived relatively recently, in the 13th century.
You could get information about other saints' lives
from new books, like The Golden Legend.
This was an action-packed compendium
of details about different saints and what they'd done.
But I think what really engages me in what this man supposedly did,
how he prayed and helped others,
is the relatively realistic way in which each scene has been painted.
Naturalism, painting something
so that it looks like a realistic illusion of the world around us,
so that it looks like nature, had a great deal to offer monks
and the people they encouraged to commission art.
Look at these two works.
This is the late 13th-century diptych, or two-panelled work,
by an unknown Umbrian artist that we saw earlier.
It shows the Virgin and Child, and the Man of Sorrows,
Christ full of pain, suffering to save mankind.
This is a diptych showing similar subject matter,
made in Northern Europe about 200 years later,
by the workshop of Dirk Bouts.
Which do you think you'd find easier to relate to, to empathise with?
Might you respond more immediately to one rather than the other?
Would it be the more realistic one?
Not everyone will have the same response,
and it's not a question we can easily apply to a 13th-century audience,
since they were so used to looking at and praying in front of
paintings like the Umbrian master diptych.
These less realistic paintings could also communicate pain and emotion
in ways that I still find quite effective.
Line can do that. Look at the agonised shape
of the neck and shoulders of this figure of Christ.
In this late 13th-century painted crucifix, the figures of Christ
and those mourning him are painted in a very simple way
that's still very closely related to Byzantine art.
But the very shape of each simple stylised body
communicates emotion for me to contemplate.
This is the Virgin Mary in blue,
swooning at the sight of her crucified son,
and supported by Mary Magdalene in red.
These two women aren't painted realistically at all,
but the very shape of their bodies provides me
with an emotional connection to the painting.
So, naturalism is by no means the only way to engage viewers
in art intended to be part of prayer and Christian teaching,
as the Franciscans and Dominicans urged.
But, and it's a big but, it is an effective strategy
for getting and keeping the viewer's attention.
And it works particularly well with the little details,
the sort of material written about more and more
in devotional texts designed to help people to pray.
This tiny panel
was painted by another late 13th-century artist, Cimabue.
You can see elements of the older, more stylised approach to painting
as well as clear attempts to paint more realistically.
The faces still have that feel of the Byzantine mask about them.
But Cimabue has tried to paint the throne
as if it's a three-dimensional object.
Some of the drapery has been made to look like real folds of cloth.
There's even the illusion of transparency in parts.
I think the areas where you see
the real advantages of naturalistic painting
are in the way that Cimabue has represented the relationship
between the Virgin Mary and Christ.
Look at how he holds on to her huge hand with his tiny fingers.
There's also this lovely, caring gesture of the angel,
who holds the cushion as if to make sure that he doesn't slide off.
Art in Italy became more and more about
painting the stories of the central figures in Christianity,
the stories of their relationships and actions,
in ways that people could understand,
and to which they could perhaps relate.
Increasingly, artists tried to paint realistic-looking settings,
and to put recognisable emotional reactions
on the faces of figures in their paintings.
This panel was painted by the workshop of Giotto,
who was seen as a real pioneer in this area.
It was part of an early 14th-century altarpiece, and shows the Pentecost.
The 12 Apostles who would spread the Christian message
had gathered together after Christ's Ascension to heaven.
Suddenly, tongues of heavenly fire appeared on their heads.
They were filled with the Holy Spirit.
You can see this symbolised by the white dove flying in the air,
golden lines radiating downwards.
Men from all over the world were amazed to find that they could hear
everything the Apostles said in their own language.
We see the Apostles reacting in different ways
to this miraculous event. One even looks a little alarmed.
Others raise their faces in wonder towards the Holy Spirit,
and some start to converse, to communicate,
starting their mission already.
The most astonished reactions are to be found
in the figures outside the special enclosure of the Apostles.
These men can hardly believe their ears.
Giotto was one of the early Renaissance artists
who really pushed the boundaries of visual representation in his time.
The ideas that he and his workshop developed
were quickly spread around Italy.
He travelled to make art for churches in cities like Florence,
Padua and Milan, and even went as far south as Rome and Naples.
Much of his art was fresco wall painting,
easily visible to other artists in search of new ideas,
and new business.
The National Gallery also has some panels by another artist
who played a major role in developing a more naturalistic way of painting,
Duccio di Buoninsegna.
During the late 13th and early 14th centuries,
Duccio dominated painting in Siena, the city that sought
to rival Florence in terms of power and display.
These three panels are from the predella
of Duccio's most famous work, the Maestà.
It means "majesty" in Italian,
and refers to the fact that this huge altarpiece
shows the Virgin and Child enthroned majestically in the centre.
The predella panels ran underneath the main image at the front,
telling different stories from the life of Christ.
The first of the National Gallery paintings was the first panel
you encountered as you read left to right along the sequence of scenes.
It shows the Annunciation.
The Angel Gabriel appears in Mary's rather beautiful courtyard,
a space decorated by a single pot of white lilies,
which symbolise the Virgin's purity.
He tells Mary that she is going to bear the Son of God.
She is holding a book open at a page where the prophet Isaiah
describes this very event. Mary has been reading this,
and suddenly, the word has been made flesh.
She makes a self-effacing gesture,
and seems almost to back into the open doorway
to her three-dimensional house.
The other two National Gallery panels were originally located
next to each other in the predella
that ran along the back of the altarpiece.
There were images on both sides of this huge painted construction,
some of which were only usually seen by the priests.
The first panel shows Jesus opening the eyes of a man born blind,
watched by a crowd of Disciples and other onlookers.
The action takes place in what looks like a typical Tuscan city,
carefully constructed by an artist who is trying hard to use lines
to create a sense of three-dimensional space.
The background was probably done by a specialist architecture painter
attached to Duccio's studio.
The story is enacted in the foreground.
The Gospel of St John told how Jesus smeared a mixture of mud and spittle
on a blind man's eyes.
When he washed them, his sight was miraculously restored.
Duccio shows the two moments side by side.
There's the same figure, in the same clothes,
exclaiming in wonder when he realises that he can see.
There were several variations at the initial underdrawing stage.
Originally, this man was shown bent over,
washing his eyes in the fountain beside him.
The decision to change his position might have been
a rather innovative way to keep the story, and the eye, moving on.
When you look from this panel to the painting that came next,
you see that they actually work together.
Duccio has designed them so that it looks as if, with his new sight,
the man is able to marvel at the awesome vision
of the Transfiguration of Christ,
when Jesus appeared in radiant glory to three of his Disciples.
It's another new way of telling stories through paintings,
animating the characters so that they appear
to move through a life that's unfolding before our eyes.
It's interesting that Duccio makes innovations like this
in the predella panels rather than the main altarpiece.
It was perhaps easier to be innovative and experimental
in the more marginal parts of the project.
Duccio's Maestà was made for this building,
Siena's cathedral, known as the Duomo.
It took him nearly four years to complete,
and when it was done, in 1311,
the whole town came to a halt to take part in a grand procession.
The painting was paraded first around the campo, the town square,
and then brought here for a special mass.
It was clearly a painting that had a deep religious significance
for the town and also for the artist.
Duccio wrote, on the central panel,
"Mother of God, be thou a source of peace for Siena,
and of life to Duccio, because he painted thee thus."
It is almost like the act of painting itself
is an act of devotion to the Virgin Mary.
At the same time, though, this painting
was very much part of a business transaction.
We think it was the most expensive painting
to have been commissioned at the time.
Duccio had to do certain things, though, in exchange for this.
Duccio had to promise to work only on this commission,
and not to accept any other jobs until it was finished.
He was also supposed to do all of the work himself,
although we know that he followed the usual practice
of any established artist at the time
and did have some of the painting done
by pupils and assistants in his workshop.
The city of Siena was delighted with the result.
The majestic altarpiece, its painted prayer to the Madonna,
was the focus of worship here for nearly 200 years.
The architecture and layout of the city centre of Siena
haven't changed that much over the last 600 years.
They can tell us quite a bit about Tuscan society in the 13th century,
especially about the increasing power of secular groups,
like wealthy merchants.
This is the campo, the city square that Duccio's Maestà
was paraded around before being taken to the cathedral.
One of the striking things about this city
is that it's not all centred on the cathedral.
In fact, all roads seem to lead to the campo.
This whole area was laid out and planned
at the end of the 13th century.
It's interesting because you see both things happening.
There's both a focus on the church,
this is when the Duomo is being expanded and remodelled,
but also a focus on building grand civic spaces like this.
This square is dominated by the building behind me,
the Palazzo Pubblico. It's a huge civic palace.
It actually still houses the city's municipal offices today.
The design of the square actually reflects
both civic and religious ideas.
The decorative brickwork divides it up into nine separate sections.
This both reflects the Council of Nine,
the quasi-democratic group that actually ruled Siena at this time,
and it also has overall, as a shape, a religious symbolism.
The square looks like it's the cloak of the Madonna,
spread out to protect Siena in its embrace.
Rich, powerful businessmen increasingly commissioned art,
and it wasn't always for display in churches.
These frescoes are still in the council hall in Siena,
showing the principles of good and bad government,
as well as giving us a bird's-eye view of the city
as it looked in the 14th century.
Other paintings were ordered for private use in the home.
Eventually, this would create a demand for non-religious paintings,
like portraits, although not quite yet.
This is a private devotional painting from the early 14th century.
It was made by Duccio in about 1315,
and it still has shutters which can be closed
to protect the images of the most important figures inside.
The left shutter shows St Dominic,
so whoever paid for this was probably a Dominican.
On the right shutter we see St Aurea, who was drowned
at the Roman port of Ostia with a millstone around her neck.
The presence of both saints suggests that the patron who ordered this work
might have been Niccolò da Prato, the Dominican Cardinal Bishop of Ostia.
What's really fantastic about this object though is the central panel,
the way that the Virgin and Child have been shown.
There seems to be a really intimate relationship between the two of them.
They look into each other's eyes
and the Christ Child plays with his mother's veil.
Of course, it's still not totally realistic.
Christ is like a miniature toddler,
balancing effortlessly on Mary's arm,
held in place by her unfeasibly long fingers.
But let's just compare it to the Virgin and Child
from Margarito of Arezzo's altarpiece.
These two works are only 50 years apart
but the figures really do look different in the work by Duccio,
much more naturalistic.
One rather unrealistic element that wouldn't have been visible
in this work when it was first made is the greenish tinge to the skin.
Duccio used this green underpaint as an early layer
in the painting process, marking out areas of light and shade
so that the flesh would look more rounded.
Thin layers of flesh-coloured paint were applied over the top,
but these have become transparent, so the green now shows through.
The Virgin Mary may have looked more like this when she was first painted.
Making art during the early Renaissance was a long process
that called for skills developed over many years
spent training in a master's workshop.
Firstly, wooden panels had to be prepared,
smoothed down and painted with many coats of white gesso,
each one sanded to a polished finish.
The basic design was drawn or painted on.
This is known as underdrawing.
Next, any areas of gold were added.
Thin sheets of gold leaf were carefully applied
to a sticky layer of red clay, called bole.
You had to have a very steady hand.
Cennino Cennini, who wrote a handbook on artists' techniques,
advised his readers to refrain from knowing too many women,
as contact with them was likely to make the hands tremble.
The gold leaf was then burnished, rubbed with a smooth stone.
It could be left flat, reflecting the light as a single expanse,
or it could be punched into patterns
by using a tool to make tiny indentations.
Colour came in the form of solid lumps of pigment,
which had to be ground up.
The resulting powder was then mixed with a little water
and something sticky to bind it together.
During this period, it was often egg yolk,
since the idea of mixing pigment with slow-drying oil
hadn't really been developed.
This kind of paint is known as egg tempera.
As egg dries quickly, it has to be painted on in thin layers
with relatively short strokes.
Colours are blended together
by overlapping lots of little brush strokes.
If you look closely at the surface of early Italian Renaissance paintings,
you can see these.
These panels were painted by the Sienese artist, Ugolino di Nerio,
one of Duccio's most gifted followers.
He was one of many artists in the 14th century
who continued to develop more naturalistic ways of painting.
Again, we can see particularly action-packed, dramatic scenes
in the predella panels, such as the betrayal of Christ
and the way to Calvary.
Throughout this part of the National Gallery you can see paintings
that bring out the drama and emotion in religious scenes,
and which try hard to represent them as taking place
in believable, three-dimensional spaces.
This panel, showing the Crucifixion, is by Jacopo di Cione,
painted in about 1368.
You can get really involved in what's going on.
The grief on the women's faces is particularly affecting.
Pietro Lorenzetti has created a really complex space
in this painting of St Sabinus before the Governor Venustianus,
refusing to worship a pagan idol,
and thereby moving a step closer to becoming a Christian martyr.
Lorenzetti has set himself the very difficult task
of showing a vaulted roof receding into the distance.
And he's nearly got it right, but not quite.
In 1342, when this painting was made,
Italian artists didn't yet have the technology
to create the perfect illusion of three-dimensional space
in a flat panel painting.
So, what had changed by the beginning of the next century,
when Masaccio painted the Virgin and Child that we started with?
This was made in 1426, and it's clear that Masaccio knew
how to draw the lines of the Virgin's throne precisely
so that it appears to go back into space.
He's painted the two musician angels in the foreground
as if they're really sitting on the steps up to the throne.
Their lutes are foreshortened, so we see only
what you actually do see when you see a lute from the side.
The long neck of the instrument is hardly visible at all.
That's what gives the illusion of three-dimensional space.
That and the lighting, which creates shadows
that makes the flesh look more rounded.
Masaccio was putting into practice
ideas developed by the architect and sculptor Brunelleschi.
He was famous for having designed and built the dome
that covers the cathedral here in Florence, the Duomo.
This was something that was regarded as a real feat of engineering.
The space that had to be covered by the dome was absolutely enormous.
You can see the building is huge.
Nobody knew quite how it was going to be done.
There was a big competition, and lots of suggestions.
There was one marvellous suggestion
that if you built a huge mound of earth,
you could construct the dome on top.
That would support the dome while it was built.
And you'd get rid of the earth if you'd studded it with coins.
Then you would invite the Florentines in
to pick out the coins and they'd remove the earth.
A bit of a slur, but it shows how the Florentines were seen
as rather money-oriented at this time.
Anyway, Brunelleschi did manage to come up with a system
for building this extraordinary dome.
So we perhaps shouldn't be surprised that he also works out a way
of representing three-dimensional space on a flat surface.
It works on the basis of the observation
that parallel lines will appear to get closer together
the further away they are from the viewer.
Eventually, they converge.
They meet and disappear from view on the horizon.
It's an optical illusion. For example, a real fence
stretching into the distance remains parallel to the ground.
But to a viewer, it looks as if it's met the pavement and disappeared.
In a painting, that's what creates the illusion of depth,
of space that doesn't just go up and down
and across a scene, but also seems to go back into it.
Brunelleschi's system used this observation of converging lines
leading to a vanishing point, or even two vanishing points,
if you want to make the angle more interesting.
As long as the object you're drawing conforms to these converging lines,
you'll get the effect of perspective.
It works for curved shapes as well as straight edges.
They're a bit more tricky, but it's possible.
This was the illusion that artists had been trying to achieve
and now, a precise method had been established.
Brunelleschi's ideas were quickly spread around Italy,
particularly after they were described by a writer named Alberti
who wrote an influential treatise on painting in the early 15th century.
By the 1450s, artists were really getting to grips with the concept.
This is Paolo Uccello's depiction of the Battle of San Romano,
a conflict that took place in 1432,
during which the Florentines defeated their long-term rivals, the Sienese.
We think that Uccello made this version a few years later,
perhaps around 1438 or 1440.
He's made what was actually quite a minor skirmish into a heroic victory,
showing the Florentine leader Niccolò da Tolentino
as a fine military commander on his white horse.
The battle scene at the front is complicated,
as the two armies engage in a tangle of limbs and weapons.
But look how carefully Uccello placed the broken lances on the floor,
so that they all point towards one vanishing point,
hidden somewhere behind the hedge.
Even a fallen knight in armour has been pressed into service,
his body emphasising the perspective lines.
Uccello's done the same thing in this painting of St George and the dragon.
The grass outside the dragon's lair
is growing in carefully manicured squares of lawn,
so that we get those receding lines.
He's also tried to show St George's horse in perspective,
which is perhaps why he seems a bit angular.
It's all been worked out with a ruler.
Uccello was reportedly obsessed with perspective.
Vasari wrote of how his wife used to sit in bed, calling to her husband,
while he laboured over his drawing board into the early hours,
sighing to himself, "Ah, what a sweet mistress this perspective is."
It's probably a story to take with a pinch of salt,
but it does remind us how Uccello had a reputation
as a real pioneer of perspective.
Other artists developed the technique with a bit more subtlety.
This is Piero della Francesca's very carefully composed representation
of the Baptism of Christ, painted in the 1450s
for a chapel in his home town of Borgo San Sepolcro, in Tuscany.
The effect of depth in the painting has been achieved
by having lines winding back through the recognisably Tuscan landscape,
and by placing people and trees at strategic points.
Each one gets smaller as we look further in to the painting.
If you sketched in lines that followed
the tops and bottoms of the trees, for example,
you'd see that they matched invisible guidelines that meet
at a vanishing point just right of the picture, halfway up the panel.
So, when Masaccio painted his Madonna and Child back in 1426,
he was skilfully using a very new technique
for depicting three-dimensional space.
He was also, though, being inspired by other art forms, too.
We can see evidence of Masaccio studying ancient monuments.
Look at the architectural features on the throne.
He studied sculpture, too, both classical and contemporary,
and looked at the ways that light fell on it.
This was central to the development of strategies
for painting bodies that looked solid,
made from apparently rounded forms.
This is the Church of Orsanmichele in Florence.
As you can see, it's covered with sculpture.
When the building was converted from a trade hall and grain store
into a church in the late 14th century,
it was decided that each of the powerful trade guilds
should commission a sculpture for one of the niches on the outside.
Most were made in the early 15th century,
the time when Masaccio was painting,
and an exciting time in Florentine sculpture.
This church must have been like an outdoor gallery
of cutting-edge, realistic sculpture.
This figure of St Mark was made by Donatello,
one of the leading sculptors of the day.
He really developed the art of monumental, free-standing sculptures.
His figures are rounded,
and they often have a lifelike, dramatic quality about them.
Painters learned a lot from what sculptors like Donatello were doing.
There were many exchanges of ideas
between the two art forms at this point.
Some artists worked in both media.
Others made the most of close connections to sculptors.
We know, for example, that Masaccio was friends with Donatello,
such a trusted friend in fact that Masaccio allowed him
to collect payments on his behalf for the altarpiece
whose central panel is now in the National Gallery.
So, all sorts of factors
contribute to the way that art changes at this time.
A new focus on both the ideas and artefacts of antiquity
sparks off debate and suggests a new way for perhaps looking at the world.
We've got cities like Florence and Siena
that are becoming wealthy and expanding.
There are then wealthy merchants
who increasingly decide to commission awe-inspiring art
as a way of both showing their devotion
and also displaying off their status.
New orders of monks promote religious teaching
that's perhaps best served by a kind of art that tells stories,
and which shows human emotion in visually compelling ways.
Artists working in all sorts of media develop techniques that enable them
to create realistic, believable representations of the world,
and to suggest that objects are really there
in three-dimensional space.
So, we do see a real move towards naturalism,
and that's a story we can tell, how that develops.
But it's not the only story. By no means all patrons and artists
wanted to paint completely realistic-looking art,
even once they'd seen the latest techniques in action.
One thing you notice in the National Gallery is that
even though the early Italian art is arranged roughly chronologically,
you don't actually just see paintings
becoming progressively more and more realistic.
Florentine painting is where some big advances in this field were made.
But it's clear from the pictures made there
during the later 14th century and in the early 15th century
that many painters there didn't have total naturalism as their aim at all.
You can see that glorious, intricate patterning
is also very high on the agenda.
This huge painting of Jesus crowning his mother in heaven
was made, we think, by Jacopo di Cione and his workshop.
It stood in the church of San Pier Maggiore, in Florence.
The church was destroyed in the 18th century,
but you can get an idea of what it looked like
from the model that St Peter, San Pier, is holding.
There are some limited moves to represent depth and space here,
but by far the most striking feature of this painting
is the delicate patterning on so many surfaces.
Gold embroidery has been represented
by the artist painting over the top of a gilded area,
and then scratching away the painted layer to reveal the gold underneath.
This technique, called sgraffito, which means "scratched" in Italian,
made it possible to decorate panels
with incredibly detailed gold patterns.
The elegant, ornate throne, and dozens of punched gold halos
stacked up either side, add to the splendour of this work.
We can see similar interests in lots of other paintings
from the late 14th and early 15th centuries.
This is another representation of the coronation of the Virgin,
this time by an artist-monk known as Lorenzo Monaco.
It was made for a monastery, as both an aid to contemplation and prayer,
and also as a sort of corporate identity statement
about this particular order of monks.
They were Camaldolese,
a reformed Benedictine order who wore white habits.
Their founder, St Romuald, is shown on the front row of saints
with the big names, like St Peter, who holds the key to heaven,
and, of course, a sternly approving St Benedict on the other side.
Again, though, it's clear that having dazzling colours
and saints arranged in a repeat pattern is just as important
as some of the more realistic touches here, perhaps even more so.
We can imagine how the robes and wings of the angels
must have shimmered in the light of the candles on the altar beneath.
These beautiful wings belong to the angels
who crowd onto one panel of the Wilton Diptych,
a small portable altarpiece that we think was made in about 1395,
for the English king, Richard II.
He's shown kneeling in worship on the other side.
This isn't technically an Italian work.
We don't know who made it, in fact,
although it might have been an artist who trained in Italy,
since some of the techniques are similar to those of Sienese artists.
It shows, though, that in many cases, naturalism doesn't just take over.
Here, we've got some very realistic details,
like the body of St John the Baptist.
However, they're set within an overall design
that really puts fantastic decorative detail first.
Gentile da Fabriano painted this Virgin and Child,
on loan to the National Gallery from the Royal Collection, in 1425,
the same time that Masaccio was working on his Virgin and Child.
It's very different. Instead of Masaccio's solid, sculptural forms
and precise depiction of three-dimensional space,
Gentile has painted a delicate, decorative panel.
His Christ Child smiles sweetly,
holding a daisy that's symbolic of his innocence.
It's a kind of painting that had a significant market.
Gentile enjoyed considerable success, travelling around Italy
and working for the most distinguished patrons.
So, whilst some artists were definitely interested in naturalism,
we shouldn't assume that all painters were striving towards
a perfectly realistic way of representing the world.
The paintings we've been looking at,
like the cities they were produced in,
were about honour and glory.
Naturalistic painting techniques can certainly serve that purpose,
but so can things like intense colour, patterning and gold.
So when we look at the work of artists like Margarito and Masaccio,
yes, there are certainly lots of differences between them,
but in some senses there's lots of continuity, too.
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