Abandoning the conventional treatment of religious themes, the artists began to take delight in motives drawn from everyday experience.

It became the fashion to introduce contemporary costumes, striking portraits, and familiar incidents into sacred subjects, so that many pictures of this period, though worthless to the student of religious art, are interesting for their illustration of Florentine custom and character.

At the same time the painters began to imitate landscape and architecture, loading the background of their frescoes with pompous vistas of palaces and city towers, or subordinating their figures to fantastic scenery of wood and rock and seashore.

Many were naturalists, delighting, like Gentile da Fabriano, in the delineation of field flowers and living creatures, or, like Piero di Cosimo, in the portrayal of things rare and curious.

Gardens please their eyes, and birds and beasts and insects.
Whole menageries and aviaries, for instance, were painted by Paolo Uccello.