The stiacciato is a technique that allowed reliefs to give the feeling of depth by decreasing the overhang of the relief from the background as the subject moves away from the viewer’s point of view.
Alongside the three “fathers” of the Renaissance immediately emerged the figures of a number of artists who, trained in the late Gothic sphere, immediately gave their works of art a Renaissance imprint. The main names are those of Lorenzo Ghiberti (Florence, c. 1380 - 1455) as far as sculpture was concerned and Beato Angelico (Florence, c. 1395 - Rome 1455) for painting. Older than Donatello and Masaccio respectively, the former wanted to give a Renaissance twist to his art still marked by late Gothic elegance and preciousness. The culmination of this modernization process occurs in the reliefs for the Gates of Paradise (1425-1452) of the Florence Baptistery (but the original panels are in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence), where the sculptor applies, on the one hand, Brunelleschi’s scientific perspective (with Brunelleschi he rivaled in 1401 in the celebrated competition for the north door of the Baptistery, seen as one of the founding moments of the Renaissance, but surpassing his rival with a composition stylistically more backward than that of the architect) and on the other the stiacciato invented by Donatello. The stiacciato is a technique that allowed reliefs to give the feeling of depth by decreasing the overhang of the relief from the background as the subject moves away from the viewer’s point of view.