Before the 15th century in Florence, the guilds had their own highly developed hierarchy with artisans fairly near the top. Visual artists were higher-grade craftsmen, and their work was considered a kind of manual labor. As religious and secular demand for art increased, and conscious reflection on the idea of art started to develop, the Renaissance artisan began to ascend in social rank and art began a transition from rough trade to something worthy of study. Over the decades, the arts would slowly be liberated from the guilds, which regulated most of the business activities in the city, and begin to develop independent professional roots.
"The Origin of the Florentine Style" recently arrived at Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art after an earlier appearance in Tokyo. It gives both a period survey of Renaissance Florence and illuminates developing trends in art and craftsmanship through about 100 works from about 30 or so Florentine galleries and collections.
The Renaissance gave rise to a particular tension between painting and sculpture. Pisano's shallow sculptural reliefs from the early 14th century are like paintings in that they are relatively two-dimensional, site-specific and are viewed in the way paintings are. And painting, in the service of new-found perspective, makes objects appear as if they are in sculptural relief. Leonardo da Vinci had noted that, "The first object of the painter is to make the flat plane appear as a body in relief and projecting from that plane."