Early Renaissance

Artwork produced in Europe in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries that moved away from the predominant Medieval or Gothic styles of the time—as seen in the abstracted icon paintings of church altarpieces and frescoes—and experimented with forms of naturalism. The political and economic development from feudal states to cohesive city-states, and the rise of powerful patrons that followed, allowed artists like Duccio, Giotto, Nicola and Giovanni Pisano, and Tomaso da Modena to focus on secular portraiture and sculpture.