the totality of cultural and artistic events and movements that occurred in Italy during the 15th century, the major period of the Early Renaissance. Designations such as Quattrocento (1400s) and the earlier Trecento (1300s) and the later Cinquecento (1500s) are useful in suggesting the changing intellectual and cultural outlooks of late- and post-medieval Italy.

Trecento, for example, is a convenient way of referring to the interval falling between the Gothic and Renaissance periods, an interval of promise and growth that was suddenly aborted by the devastation of the Black Death that erupted in 1348. The Quattrocento was a period of increasing prosperity and steady progression in the arts toward the harmonious balance achieved in the High Renaissance. In concrete terms, the Quattrocento is regarded as beginning in 1401 with a competition to design the east doors for the Baptistery in Florence and ending in 1503 with the election of Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere as Pope Julius II. The Cinquecento delimits a fundamentally different period, one of intense and violent changes in the whole fabric of Italian culture. It refers to the century of the Protestant Reformation, of Spanish and Habsburg political domination, and of the uneasy transition to Mannerism in the visual arts. See also Renaissance.