section_path: Late Middle Ages/Art and architecture
section_name: Art and architecture
paragraph_text: Art and architecture
  
  The wealthiest Italian and French princes regularly hired foreign artists, which led to the convergence of courtly styles. This International Gothic reached much of Europe around 1400, producing masterpieces in sculpture and miniature. Throughout Europe, secular art increase in quantity and quality; the mercantile classes of Italy and Flanders became important patrons during the 15th century, commissioning small portraits and a growing range of luxury items such as jewellery, cassone chests, and maiolica pottery. In France and Flanders, tapestry weaving of series such as The Lady and the Unicorn became a major luxury industry.
  
  Florence emerged as the center of intellectual and artistic life for most of the Quattrocento. The Medici —the city's most influential family—gathered a significant collection of classical sculptures and opened it to local artists. The Tuscan architect Brunelleschi (d. 1446) studied the Pantheon in Rome before completing the plan of the dome of the Florence Cathedral. The use of one-point perspective for creating the illusion of depth was another innovation, demonstrated by reliefs on the bronze door of the Florence Baptistery by Lorenzo Ghiberti (d. 1455). Early Renaissance artists restored the nude and eroticism (including homoerotocism) in artworks such as the bronze statue David by Donatello (d. 1466) and The Birth of Venus by the painter Boticelli (d. 1510). Flemish painters quickly improved their technique. When completing his Ghent Altarpiece, Jan van Eyck (d. 1441) used oil paint to create a translucent surface and tiny bushes to achieve a more lifelike representation of the natural world.
  
  Printing houses throughout Europe began the mass production of inexpensive playing cards and primitive religious images during the mid-15th century. Block books — woodcuts containing illustrations and text—rapidly became popular, with best-sellers including the Biblia pauperum (Paupers' Bible) and Ars moriendi (Art of Dying). Horror stories were widely read, including German booklets describing the cruel acts of Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler (r. 1456–62). The first large illustrated printed book, the Nuremberg Chronicle, was published in 1493.