Renaissance Oil Painting Reproductions

What is Renaissance art?

Renaissance art is the painting, sculpture and decorative arts of the period of European history known as the Renaissance, which emerged as a distinct style in Italy in about AD 1400, in parallel with developments in philosophy, literature, music, science and technology. Renaissance art took as its foundation the art of Classical antiquity, perceived as the noblest of ancient traditions, but transformed that tradition by absorbing recent developments in the art of Northern Europe and by applying contemporary scientific knowledge, perspective above all. Along with Renaissance humanist philosophy it spread throughout Europe, affecting both artists and their patrons with new techniques and new artistic sensibilities. For art historians, Renaissance art marks the transition of Europe from the medieval period to the Early Modern age.

This collection is the High Renaissance, the Italian 15th and 16th century core of it: Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian and the Venetians. The subjects are the ones the period painted most. The Madonna and child, with or without the infant Saint John. Christ, at every stage from the nativity to the lamentation. The saints, the annunciation, the transfiguration. Classical myth, once patrons were willing to pay for a Venus as readily as for a Virgin. And the portrait, which is where the new attention to a real face and a real distance shows most clearly.

Two things created the look of it. Perspective, applied as contemporary scientific knowledge rather than as a rule of thumb, and the oil medium, which let a picture be built in layers and corrected. Both arrived from the north, which is why the Italian and the Flemish halves of the same century belong in one story: Jan van Eyck was working in Bruges while Florence was still painting in tempera. Renaissance art is what happens when those two techniques meet the art of Classical antiquity.

Famous Renaissance art painters

Five Renaissance painters, each with a collection of their own. The best known names are also the smallest collections, because so little of their work survives: twenty canvases cover most of Leonardo, and eleven cover Botticelli.

• Leonardo da Vinci: the Italian polymath, one of the founding figures of the High Renaissance, with an enormous influence on subsequent artists. 20 works here, which is close to everything attributed to him, including the Mona Lisa and Lady with an Ermine of 1489 to 1491
• Raphael: 81 works, including The Sistine Madonna, commissioned in 1512 by Pope Julius II for the church of San Sisto in Piacenza, and The Transfiguration, his last painting
• Michelangelo: an Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet of the High Renaissance, born in the Republic of Florence and mostly active in Rome from his thirties onwards, whose work was inspired by models from classical antiquity
• Sandro Botticelli: born Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance whose posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century, when the Pre-Raphaelites rediscovered him and stimulated a reappraisal of his work. His paintings are seen to represent the linear grace of late Italian Gothic
• Titian: 194 canvases from Venice, alongside 36 by Vittore Carpaccio, 51 by Giovanni Bellini and 31 by Giorgione. Outside Italy, 47 by Jan van Eyck, whose Arnolfini Portrait of 1434 is the earliest work in our list of the hundred most famous paintings, and 134 by El Greco, a Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance regarded as one of the greatest artists of all time

Famous Renaissance art paintings

Famous Renaissance paintings you can order as oil on canvas.

Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo

The three names the High Renaissance is usually taught through, and the three smallest bodies of work in this part of the catalogue. Leonardo left eight major paintings and a handful of attributions; Raphael died at 37; Michelangelo, a sculptor first, painted very little on panel or canvas at all. Many of the pictures this period is famous for are frescoes, which is a different trade from a painting you can carry. What survives is mostly religious, and most of it was created for a specific wall, altar or patron.

• Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, the most searched painting in the world and the most requested reproduction in this catalogue
• Lady with an Ermine, Leonardo da Vinci, 1489 to 1491
• Salvator Mundi, attributed in whole or in part to Leonardo da Vinci, dated about 1499 to 1510, long thought to be a copy of a lost original under overpainting before it was rediscovered and restored
• St John the Baptist, one of his eight major works
• The Adoration of the Magi, another of the eight, left unfinished
• The Sistine Madonna, Raphael, commissioned in 1512 and probably executed soon after
• St Michael, Raphael, 1518
• The Transfiguration, Raphael, his last painting, commissioned by Cardinal Giulio de Medici as an altarpiece for Narbonne Cathedral
• The Three Graces, Raphael
• La Donna Velata, Raphael
• The Torment of Saint Anthony, his earliest surviving painting, made as a teenager
• Crucifixion, Christ on the cross

Venice and the Virgin

The Venetian school painted the same subjects with more color and less drawing, and the Florentine devotional picture, the Madonna and child in a landscape, is the single most repeated composition of the whole period. Carpaccio is the best value in this group: thirty-six works, a narrative painter as good as anyone in Venice, and a name almost nobody asks for. Sandro Botticelli is the opposite case, a name everyone knows and only eleven surviving pictures to sell, so the ones we have go quickly.

• Venus of Urbino, Titian
• Portrait of Federico II Gonzaga, Titian
• Dream of St Ursula, Vittore Carpaccio
• The Annunciation, Vittore Carpaccio
• The Birth of the Virgin, Vittore Carpaccio
• Portrait of a Knight, Vittore Carpaccio
• San Giovanni Crisostomo Altarpiece, Sebastiano del Piombo
• The Annunciation by Andrea del Sarto, Florence, and the best selling picture in this collection
• The Virgin and Child with Saint John and an Angel, Botticelli
• The Mystical Nativity, Botticelli, the nativity of Christ
• Lamentation over the Dead Christ, Botticelli, the dead Christ with saints
• The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist, Botticelli, the most repeated composition of the century
• The Agony in the Garden, Botticelli, Christ in Gethsemane
• The Last Supper, El Greco, Christ and the apostles at table
• The Disrobing of Christ, El Greco
• The Arnolfini Portrait, Jan van Eyck, 1434, the northern half of the same century and one of the first oil paintings anyone still argues about

Related styles

Early Renaissance paintings are the 15th-century half of the same story, Botticelli included. Northern Renaissance art reproductions are the developments in the art of Northern Europe that the Italians absorbed. Baroque oil paintings follow, from about 1590 onwards.

Frequently asked questions

What is Renaissance art?

The painting, sculpture and decorative arts of the Renaissance, which emerged as a distinct style in Italy in about 1400. It took the art of Classical antiquity as its foundation and transformed it with northern European developments and contemporary scientific knowledge, including perspective.

What is the difference between the Early and the High Renaissance?

Early Renaissance is the 15th century, the generation of Sandro Botticelli and Perugino. High Renaissance is the turn of the 16th, the period of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian. This collection is the High Renaissance; the Early Renaissance has its own, and so does the Northern Renaissance. In life the three overlap: many painters worked across two of them, and a view of one period is rarely a clean line.

Which Renaissance painting is the most famous?

The Mona Lisa, by a wide margin in search volume and in orders. After it, Raphael's Sistine Madonna and Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine. The best known Renaissance images of all are frescoes, painted on a wall and impossible to reproduce as a canvas, so what you can actually hang is the panel and canvas work, which is where this collection lives.