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Art & CultureScience

The High Renaissance

Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael work within a few decades of each other.

When
Duration
20 years
Known to
± 2 years
Era
Early Modern, Holocene

Leonardo paints the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa and fills notebooks with anatomy, hydraulics and flying machines that were never published. Michelangelo carves the David and paints the Sistine ceiling between 1508 and 1512, working from scaffolding on wet plaster with no possibility of correction. Raphael's School of Athens puts the philosophers of antiquity in a single perspectival space. The concentration in Florence and Rome is extraordinary and brief.

Just before

Just after