Attributed to Lippo d’Andrea, Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints John the Baptist and Nicholas of Bari (c. 1410), courtesy Middlebury College Museum of Art

Over the past several decades, students and connoisseurs of Italian art have come to a fuller understanding of how it evolved, particularly in Florence, which was, incontestably, the locus of the Renaissance. Since Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects was published in 1568, the story has been cast as a progression of momentous innovations, starting with Giotto and culminating with Michelangelo; each generation, over three hundred years, furthered the “ascent” of the arts by virtue of a handful of pioneers like Masaccio, Andrea del Sarto, Raphael, and Leonardo, as well as a few others of perhaps only slightly lesser genius. In this reading, the fulfillment of their collective contributions constitutes the essence of the Renaissance: it was ...

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