Leonello gives Ferrara considerable distinction in the fields of art and culture as the city comes to represent a lively center of culture and humanism, filled with painters (Pisanello, Bellini, van der Weyden, Mantegna), architects (Alberti), and scholars (centering on Guarino Veronese).

Nicolò III even seems to have come close to obtaining the succession of an Estensi heir to the Milanese states, but he dies suddenly, perhaps poisoned, on December 26, 1441.

Whereas Nicolò III had raised the Estensi state to a high position in Italian politics in spite of its territorial and financial limits, his bastard son and chosen successor, Leonello d'Este, had been educated by the humanist Guarino Veronese, called to Ferrara by his father.

Venetian painter Jacopo Bellini, exposed first to the elaborate, colorful Venetian Gothic style and also assumed to have been in Florence briefly in the 1420s, has received many important commissions for religious works in Venice and in Padua.

His skill as a portraitist is recognized in 1441 when he wins the contest in competition with Pisanello to paint the portrait (now lost) of Leonello.

Jacopo Bellini, born in Venice, had been a pupil of Gentile da Fabriano.

In 1411–1412, he was in Foligno, where with Gentile he had worked at the Palazzo Trinci frescoes.

In 1423, Bellini was in Florence, where he knew the new works by Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masolino da Panicale and Masaccio.

In 1424, he had opened a workshop in Venice, which he is to run until his death in 1470.

Many of his greatest works, including the enormous Crucifixion in the cathedral of Verona (1436), have disappeared.

From about 1430 is the panel with Madonna and Child, in the Accademia Carrara, once attributed to Gentile da Fabriano.

In 1441, at Ferrara, where he was at the service of Leonello d'Este together with Leon Battista Alberti, he executed a portrait of that Marquess, now lost.

To this period belongs the Madonna dell'Umiltà (Virgin of Humility, adored by a prince of the House of Este, 1440), probably commissioned by one of the brothers of Leonello.

Jacopo Bellini's few surviving paintings are strongly Gothic in style.

His drawings exist in two large books: the use of one-point perspective characterizes some of his these; others depict convincingly articulated figures in landscapes and in complicated architectural settings, as exemplified in “The Flagellation,” executed around 1450.

These drawing books (one in the Louvre and the other in the British Museum) are workshop tools, consulted and probably added to by the members of Jacopo's shop, most notably by his two sons.

Ruggiano de Tassis, a member of the Thurn and Taxis families of Venice, begins a private postal system in Italy for the Holy Roman Empire in 1450; it is, in effect, a franchise financed by an annual fee.

Francesco Squarcione teaches several leading painters, including Andrea Mantegna, who comes to study with Squarcione in Padua.

His two (known) works, an altarpiece created at Padua in 1449-52, and his Madonna and Child, painted in about 1455, display Squarcione’s harsh, linear style and his interest in lively movement.

Squarcione, whose original vocation was tailoring, appears to have had a remarkable enthusiasm for ancient art, and a faculty for acting.

Like his famous compatriot Petrarca, Squarcione is something of a fanatic for ancient Rome: he has traveled in Italy, and perhaps Greece, collecting antique statues, reliefs, vases, and other works of art, forming a collection of such works, making drawings from them himself, and throwing open his stores for others to study from.

Based on this collection, he undertakes works on commission for which his pupils no less than himself are made available.

As many as 137 painters and pictorial students pass through his school, established towards 1440 and which becomes famous all over Italy.

Squarcione's favorite pupil is Mantegna, who Squarcione teaches the Latin language and instructs in the study of fragments of Roman sculpture.

While serving his apprenticeship to Squarcione, Mantegna had in 1454 married the daughter of Venetian artist Jacopo Bellini, whose designs he studies, but the art of the sculptor Donatello, who works in Padua from 1443 to 1453, is probably the greatest influence on young Mantegna.

Apparently fascinated by the perspective in Donatello's reliefs at San Antonio in Padua, he employs the new science of linear perspective in his first major project: the decoration, executed in 1449-55, of parts of the Ovetari Chapel in Padua's Eremitani Church.

Mantegna illustrates the “Martyrdom of St. James,” (destroyed in 1944) on the lower register of one wall, calculating a perspective on the basis of the spectator's eye level, which would be slightly below the bottom of the frame.

Figures and buildings thus loom above the ground line and appear to recede up and away from the observer.