METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART: GALLERIA 609: Central Italian Painting of the High Renaissance

Speranza

Over the course of the sixteenth century, Rome replaced Florence as the center of painting, its cultural patrimony inspiring both Michelangelo and Raphael. The classical harmony and grandeur achieved by those two artists influenced all their contemporaries and remained a model of emulation through the nineteenth century. Their counterpart in Florence was Andrea del Sarto, the "painter without errors" (Vasari). Two defining events were the Sack of Rome by German troops in 1527—a trauma that reverberated throughout Europe—and the definitive establishment in Florence of a princely state under Medici rule in 1537, with Bronzino as its star portraitist. The end of the century saw an attempt to recapture the glory of what had come to be seen as a golden age. Study of the great masters and of nature was the path to greatness.