Famous Renaissance Artists, Ranked

Reference
Updated August 15, 2023 19.9K votes 5.2K voters 453.5K views
Over 5.2K Ranker voters have come together to rank this list of Famous Renaissance Artists, Ranked

This list of famous Renaissance artists features images, bios, and information about their notable works. You might also enjoy secret codes hidden in Renaissance art and conspiracy theories about famous Renaissance paintings. All the greatest artists associated with the Renaissance movement are included here, along with clickable names for more details on that particular painter or sculptor. These notable Renaissance period artists are organized by popularity, so the best artists are at the top of the list. If you think the best Renaissance artist isn't as high as they should be then be sure to give them an upvote, as your votes can change the rankings!

Artists during the Renaissance created some of the most important and well-known pieces of art in all of art history. The list of Renaissance artists below includes notable artists of the Renaissance, from Leonardo da Vinci to Michelangelo.

Famous Renaissance painters and artists worked during this period of European history (around the 1400s), creating a distinct style or art that blossomed in parallel with developments occurring in philosophy, literature, music, and science. But who are the most famous Renaissance artists? Who are the best Renaissance artists?

Almost every well-known or influential figure in this movement (which isn't spelled Renissance or Rennaissance, though it's a very trick word to get right) is listed below. Use this factual list to build a whole new one just like it, then re-rank it to fit your opinions on who the best artists in the Renaissance were.

Most divisive: Urs Graf
Ranked by
  • Michelangelo
    1

    Michelangelo

    David, The Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel ceiling
    1,357 votes
    • Age: Dec. at 88 (1475-1564)
    • Art Forms: Sculpture, Painting, Drawing
    Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer of the High Renaissance who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Considered the greatest living artist in his lifetime, he has since been held as one of the greatest artists of all time. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci. A number of his works in painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in existence. His output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted before he turned thirty.
  • Leonardo da Vinci
    2

    Leonardo da Vinci

    Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, Bacchus
    1,960 votes
    • Age: Dec. at 67 (1452-1519)
    • Art Forms: Sculpture, Painting, Drawing
    Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian polymath, painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. His genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci states that while there is much speculation about Leonardo, his vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time. Born out of wedlock to a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, in Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter Verrocchio.
  • Raphael
    3

    Raphael

    Saint George and the Dragon, Sistine Madonna, The School of Athens
    1,011 votes
    • Age: Dec. at 37 (1483-1520)
    • Art Forms: Painting, Drawing
    Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (Italian: [raffaˈɛllo ˈsantsjo da urˈbiːno]; March 28 or April 6, 1483 – April 6, 1520), known as Raphael (, US: ), was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large workshop and, despite his death at 37, leaving a large body of work. Many of his works are found in the Vatican Palace, where the frescoed Raphael Rooms were the central, and the largest, work of his career. The best known work is The School of Athens in the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura. After his early years in Rome, much of his work was executed by his workshop from his drawings, with considerable loss of quality. He was extremely influential in his lifetime, though outside Rome his work was mostly known from his collaborative printmaking. After his death, the influence of his great rival Michelangelo was more widespread until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Raphael's more serene and harmonious qualities were again regarded as the highest models. His career falls naturally into three phases and three styles, first described by Giorgio Vasari: his early years in Umbria, then a period of about four years (1504–1508) absorbing the artistic traditions of Florence, followed by his last hectic and triumphant twelve years in Rome, working for two Popes and their close associates.
  • Donatello
    4

    Donatello

    David, The Crucifixion, Judith and Holofernes
    840 votes
    • Age: Dec. at 80 (1386-1466)
    • Art Forms: Sculpture, Drawing
    Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi (c. 1386 – 13 December 1466), better known as Donatello (English: Italian: [donaˈtɛllo]), was an Italian sculptor of the Renaissance. Born in Florence, he studied classical sculpture and used this to develop a complete Renaissance style in sculpture, whose periods in Rome, Padua and Siena introduced to other parts of Italy a long and productive career. He worked with stone, bronze, wood, clay, stucco and wax, and had several assistants, with four perhaps being a typical number. Though his best-known works were mostly statues in the round, he developed a new, very shallow, type of bas-relief for small works, and a good deal of his output was larger architectural reliefs.
  • Sandro Botticelli
    5

    Sandro Botticelli

    The Birth of Venus, Primavera, The Mystical Nativity
    611 votes
    • Age: Dec. at 65 (1445-1510)
    • Art Forms: Painting
    Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (c. 1445 – May 17, 1510), known as Sandro Botticelli (, Italian: [ˈsandro bottiˈtʃɛlli]), was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later in his Vita of Botticelli as a "golden age". Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then, his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting. As well as the small number of mythological subjects which are his best known works today, he painted a wide range of religious subjects and also some portraits. He and his workshop were especially known for their Madonna and Childs, many in the round tondo shape. Botticelli's best-known works are The Birth of Venus and Primavera, both in the Uffizi in Florence. He lived all his life in the same neighbourhood of Florence, with probably his only significant time elsewhere the months he spent painting in Pisa in 1474 and the Sistine Chapel in Rome in 1481–82.Only one of his paintings is dated, though others can be dated from other records with varying degrees of certainty, and the development of his style traced with confidence. He was an independent master for all the 1470s, growing in mastery and reputation, and the 1480s were his most successful decade, when all his large mythological paintings were done, and many of his best Madonnas. By the 1490s his style became more personal and to some extent mannered, and he could be seen as moving in a direction opposite to that of Leonardo da Vinci (seven years his junior) and a new generation of painters creating the High Renaissance style as Botticelli returned in some ways to the Gothic style. He has been described as "an outsider in the mainstream of Italian painting", who had a limited interest in many of the developments most associated with Quattrocento painting, such as the realistic depiction of human anatomy, perspective, and landscape, and the use of direct borrowings from classical art. His training enabled him to represent all these aspects of painting, without adopting or contributing to their development.
  • Titian
    6

    Titian

    Bacchus and Ariadne, Assumption of the Virgin, Pastoral Concert
    567 votes
    • Age: Dec. at 91 (1485-1576)
    • Art Forms: Painting
    Tiziano Vecelli or Vecellio (pronounced [titˈtsjaːno veˈtʃɛlljo]; c. 1488/90 – 27 August 1576), known in English as Titian ( TISH-ən), was an Italian painter during the Renaissance, considered the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno, then in the Republic of Venice). During his lifetime he was often called da Cadore, from Cadore, taken from his native region.Recognized by his contemporaries as "The Sun Amidst Small Stars" (recalling the famous final line of Dante's Paradiso), Titian was one of the most versatile of Italian painters, equally adept with portraits, landscape backgrounds, and mythological and religious subjects. His painting methods, particularly in the application and use of colour, would exercise a profound influence not only on painters of the late Italian Renaissance, but on future generations of Western art.His career was successful from the start, and he became sought after by patrons, initially from Venice and its possessions, then joined by the north Italian princes, and finally the Habsburgs and papacy. Along with Giorgione, he is considered a founder of the Venetian School of Italian Renaissance painting. During the course of his long life, Titian's artistic manner changed drastically, but he retained a lifelong interest in colour. Although his mature works may not contain the vivid, luminous tints of his early pieces, their loose brushwork and subtlety of tone were without precedent in the history of Western painting.