Titian painted the Venus of Urbino in 1538 in Venice on commission from Guidobaldo II della Rovere, the 24-year-old heir to the Duchy of Urbino, almost certainly as a wedding gift for his 10-year-old bride Giulia Varano. The 119 × 165 centimetre oil-on-canvas shows a naked young woman lying on a red velvet daybed inside a Renaissance bedroom, looking directly out of the picture at the viewer with calm self-possession.

Pontormo painted the Deposition from the Cross 1525-1528 as the altarpiece for the small Capponi family chapel in the Florence church of Santa Felicita. The 313 × 192 cm panel is the canonical post-Raphael Mannerist break from High Renaissance composition: ten figures in an unstable vertical pyramid, no Cross visible anywhere, no landscape, no architecture, no perspectival depth.

Between 1509 and 1511 Raphael painted a single wall in a small library on the second floor of the Apostolic Palace in Rome. The picture, known as the School of Athens, gathers around fifty philosophers, mathematicians, and astronomers under a colossal vaulted hall. Several of them are portraits of Raphael's contemporaries. The picture is the visual definition of High Renaissance Rome and a private joke between three of the greatest artists of the period.

Most viewers know Botticelli through one painting — Primavera, the green-floor allegory of spring that became the screensaver of Renaissance art. But Botticelli painted for thirty more years after Primavera. The Birth of Venus extended the project. The Mystic Nativity (1500) inverted it. The Calumny of Apelles (1495-99) abandoned it. The painter who finished his career was almost unrecognisable from the painter who began it, and the gap is the story.

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.