Renaissance
A new art grew out of relearning an antiquity a thousand years gone. It began with a piece of apparatus. In Florence in the 1410s, Brunelleschi stood in the cathedral doorway and bored a hole through a small panel on which he had painted the Baptistery opposite. You looked through the hole from behind and held a mirror up in front of the panel. Take the mirror away and you saw the real Baptistery; put it back and you saw the painted one — and you could not tell which was which. Depth, he had shown, was not a painter's instinct but something you could construct. (The year of the experiment is unsettled: 1413, around 1415 and around 1425 have all been argued.) It took another dozen years to become a painting. Around 1427 Masaccio painted the Holy Trinity on a wall of Santa Maria Novella in Florence: where a wall should be, a room opens into depth. It is generally called the first painting to use linear perspective properly. Then in 1435 Alberti put the method into words in On Painting, and gave the picture a name — an open window. The surface is not a flat panel but a window you can see through. This is where this band reaches the present. A camera, 3D computer graphics, the screen of a game: all of them work by the same central projection as Alberti's window, gathering light to a single point and letting it fall on a plane. Almost every screen you look at today rests on a way of drawing depth that was settled six hundred years ago. Returning to the past is not a backward step but a run-up — the first great instance of a pattern that recurs across this map. A word about timing, too. Leonardo was born in 1452, Michelangelo in 1475, Raphael in 1483. The three of them were alive at once, on the same peninsula. Incidentally the word Renaissance is also said to have been spread by nineteenth-century historians (accounts differ). Names, it seems, are always given by a later age. The same was true of Rinpa in Japan.