Michelangelo spent his twenties dissecting cadavers by candlelight in a Florentine monastery. The bodies he was looking at became, fifteen years later, the figures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He always said he was a sculptor, never a painter. The paintings prove him right.

Two hundred years of Italian painting, sculpture, and architecture in the names that still matter — Giotto, Masaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and the three painters who carried the late Renaissance into Venice and beyond.

After Raphael died in 1520, Italian painting got stranger. Necks lengthened, bodies twisted into spirals, colour grew acidic, space stopped behaving. Reading the painters who closed the High Renaissance — Pontormo, Parmigianino, Bronzino, El Greco — and the movement we now call Mannerism.

A naked woman stands on a scallop shell, blown ashore by two flying wind gods, while a maid waits with a flowered cloak. Reading the painting that put a pagan goddess back on the wall of a Christian house in 1485.

Searching for Botticelli's Primavera? This is the painting: roughly 203 by 314 centimetres of tempera on poplar, painted in Florence around 1480 for the Medici family. Nine figures in a flowered orange grove. What the painting shows, why so many figures, and how to bring the fine print home.