Livro renascimento ao romantismo

The painters who followed Giotto lacked his genius- they did not possess his incisiveness, his ability to compose, and his dramatic force. They went in for rich details, and overloaded their pictures with charming non-essentials. Cennino, in his famous Craftsman's Handbook (early –what fifteenth century), the only important theoretical treatise of the time, recommended copying from nature as the most perfect guide, though he also recommended the study of good masters. But for a century Italian painters looked more to Giotto and to other earlier painnters than to nature. So while it is true, as Poliziano later wrote of Giotto, ''Lo, I am he by whom painting was restored to life, '' no great steps in advance of Giotto's style were taken until the time of Masaccio in the early fifteenth century, Thus, Niccolo Pisano and Giotto were both great innovators in style, but they had few worthy successors until a number of generations after their time. At the opening of the fifteenth century, Italian architecture, painting, and sculpture were still Gothic. But Jacopo della Quercia and Ghiberti were already at work in a manner that was soon to mark a great change in sculptural style. In the yea 1400, Brunelleschi was twenty-three years old, Ghiberti was twenty-two, and Donatello was but a boy of fourteen. Masaccio was born the next year (1401), and within the following half-century these men revolutionized artistic styles not only for Italy but ultimately fot the whole of Europe.
Ghiberti, like many artists of the fifteenth century in Italy., was trained as a goldsmith and later, besides filling commissions in sculpture, became a consultant for architectural work, a fresco painter, and a designer of stained glass windows. He tells us in his rambling Commentaries how he achieved his style as a sculptor: ‘’ I sought to investigate the way nature functions in art; how images come to the eye. I strove to imitate nature as closely as I could, and with all the perspective I could