Filippo Brunelleschi, the well-educated son of a lawyer, engages first in goldsmith work and sculpture but soon turns to architecture.

Sometime between 1417 and 1420, Brunelleschi, in his early forties, paints two panels demonstrating new schemes of perspective, techniques he may have discovered in his painstaking architectural studies of actual buildings. (These schemes establish the form of all subsequent perspective painting in the Renaissance.)

He receives a major commission in 1419 for the “Ospedale degli Innocenti” (Foundling Hospital).