The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564).

Author Information Baltimore, MD Our propensity to believe that an outline of the human brain is inscribed in one of the most famous paintings of the godhead is both a reflection of the revolution initiated by the Renaissance and a function of how the organ of our humanity psychophysically interprets images. In 1306, Giotto completed a cycle of frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua and signed them, thus forsaking the anonymity of the old art of the Middle Ages and Byzantium and initiating the Italian Renaissance, a period in which the personality of the Western artist became a conspicuous component of his artwork. The figures in Giotto's paintings bore strong resemblances to living models, and the emotive content of their faces was true to life. The rediscovery of Greek and Roman artifacts, with their idealized conception of the human form, and the importation into Europe via Arab scholars of the humanistic works of Greek philosophers prepared the Italian soil for the straightforward assertion of individual identity and the inexorable evolution of the cultural craftsman from artisan to artist. Whereas the primitive simplifications and flatness of Byzantium remained a strong influence on artists in Spain and in the Germanic north, the innovations of Giotto and his successors radically changed the depiction of the human form throughout the south; as a consequence of the discovery of single point perspective before 1413 by the architect Filippo Brunellschi (4), this revolution reached its apogee towards the end of the fifteenth century in the city-states of Florence, Venice, and Rome. Almost two centuries after the completion of the Arena Chapel, artists regularly received commissions for both secular and religious subjects; in each realm they attempted to meld the religious prescriptions of the Catholic