The Metropolitan Museum of Art Guide to the Collections. Western European Arts, katalógus (1964)
2 Guide to the Collections Early Renaissance 2. Room from the ducal palace at Gubbio, c. 1479-82 style that have succeeded one another in great centers of art and in outlying provincial regions for some five hundred years. The phrase “from the beginning of the Renaissance” is easy to say, but very much harder to define. Some scholars have even tried to prove that the word Renaissance has no exact meaning. Something, however, happened in Florence in the first half of the 15th century — some change in what was considered visually beautiful and in the best possible taste — that eventually affected every kind of art produced in Europe. The new style was only in part the result of the close study and imitation of the antique that has given it its name, renaissance — a rebirth; it was also a reaction against the complexity and extrava-