Masaccio

Masolino da Panicale was an Italian painter. His best known works are probably his collaborations with Masaccio: Madonna with Child and St. Anne and the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel . Masolino was born in Panicale. He may have been an assistant to Ghiberti in Florence between 1403 and 1407.... In 1423, he joined the Florentine guild Arte dei Medici e Speziali , which included painters as an independent branch. He may have been the first artist to create of oil paintings in the 1420s, rather than Jan van Eyck in the 1430s, as was previously supposed. He spent many years traveling, including a trip to Hungary from September 1425 to July 1427 under the patronage of Pipo of Ozora, a mercenary captain. He also worked in Rome and Todi. He spent his later years, after 1435, working for Cardinal Branda Castiglione in Castiglione Olona.
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Filippo Brunelleschi was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. He is perhaps most famous for his studies of linear perspective and engineering the dome of the Florence Cathedral, but his accomplishments also include other architectural works, sculpture,... mathematics, engineering and even ship design. His principal surviving works are to be found in Florence, Italy. Little is known about the early life of Brunelleschi, the only sources being Antonio Manetti and Giorgio Vasari. According to these sources, Filippo's father was Brunellesco di Lippo, a lawyer, and his mother was Giuliana Spini. Filippo was the middle of their three children. The young Filippo was given a literary and mathematical education intended to enable him to follow in the footsteps of his father, a civil servant. Being artistically inclined, however, Filippo enrolled in the Arte della Seta, the silk merchants' Guild, which also included goldsmiths, metalworkers, and bronze workers. He became a master goldsmith in 1398.
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Giotto di Bondone , better known simply as Giotto, was an Italian painter and architect from Florence in the late Middle Ages. He is generally considered the first in a line of great artists who contributed to the Italian Renaissance. Giotto's contemporary Giovanni Villani wrote that Giotto was... "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature. And he was given a salary by the Comune of Florence in virtue of his talent and excellence." The late-16th century biographer Giorgio Vasari describes Giotto as making a decisive break with the prevalent Byzantine style and as initiating "the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life, which had been neglected for more than two hundred years." Giotto's masterwork is the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, also known as the Arena Chapel, completed around 1305. This fresco cycle depicts the life of the Virgin and the life of Christ. It is regarded as one of the supreme masterpieces of the Early Renaissance.
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