Spades are agricultural tools of ancient origin, with a flat blade in line with its shaft, and used for digging. Their closest relative is the shovel with a broader blade for moving loose earth, gravel and snow, and the hoe whose blade is mounted at a right angle to the shaft. In some common applications, such as lifting potatoes and other root crops, a fork with three or more tines is normally preferred.

As a well-known tool for digging, the spade is often associated with the digging of graves, and appears in some religious paintings depicting the imminent interment of Christ’s body following the Crucifixion.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s huge and magnificent Crucifixion from 1565 shows a man digging a conventional grave, as seen in the detail below.

On the left of this detail, two men are gambling with dice in a small rock shelter suggestive of a tomb. To the right of them, a gravedigger has just started his work with a spade.

A spade may also appear in depictions of Christ’s subsequent resurrection, in his appearance to Mary as a gardener, often known by the Latin words from the Vulgate as Noli Me Tangere, “touch me not”, the words attributed to Christ in the Gospels.

In her Jesus Appears to Mary Magdalene from 1581, Lavinia Fontana re-locates this encounter between Mary and Jesus, dressing him in the garb of a mediaeval Italian gardener, and holding a fine gardener’s spade with his left hand.

The eccentric Alessandro Magnasco painted his Noli Me Tangere (1705-10) over a background of ruins made by a collaborator. Christ is shown standing, holding a long-hafted spade with his left hand. Mary is on her knees, a small urn in front of her. Their clothes are rough, and Christ’s appear to be his burial linen, blowing in the wind.

Spades are not uncommon in paintings set in the countryside.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s On Forbidden Roads from 1886 shows one of the core themes of Naturalist painting: itinerant workers making their way through neglected corners of the countryside. These two men are equipped for forestry, with a two-man saw, axes, and spades. Almost hidden among the vegetation at the far left is a third figure, who looks anxiously towards them. Maybe none of them should really be there at all.

There’s a more complex story behind Brendekilde’s People by a Road from 1893. The group at the left are old road-workers, breaking larger rocks into coarse gravel. They lived out under the wooden shelter behind them, as they made their way slowly around the country roads. The woman holds what is either a small shovel or spade used in their work. Standing and apparently preaching to them is a cleanly dressed carpenter, his saw held in his left hand. The building behind them, on the opposite side of the road, is a church, from which a large congregation has just emerged.

One of the most physically demanding tasks of the year was clearing snow in the winter. Brendekilde’s The Rest (1887) shows a younger man taking a short break from cutting a track through to the elderly lady’s farmhouse. The blade of his spade is flat, confirming that it’s used to dig through compacted snow and pile the slabs seen behind him.

In Brendekilde’s Home for Dinner from 1917, a young girl holding some fresh fish stands talking to a man with a spade.

The following year, Brendekilde painted a gardening story, in Afternoon Work (1918). A younger man is out on his finely tilled vegetable patch in front of his thatched cottage, wielding his spade as a weapon. Standing just outside the door, behind him, is his young daughter, and through the window is an older woman, presumably his wife. Both are watching him intently, with an air of fear at what he is about to do. He is about to attack a small crop of molehills that have appeared freshly in the midst of his seedling vegetable plants.

As Europeans and Americans started taking to the beaches, they realised how much fun it is to dig sand and build sandcastles using small buckets and spades.

This is William Dyce’s finely detailed view of Pegwell Bay, Kent, on the coast of south-east England, out of season, at the end of a fine day in early October. Visitors to the beach are wrapped for warmth as well as modesty. In the distance, a group of donkeys are being taken to graze for the night, after the day’s work being hired out for children to ride. In the foreground, at the left, a child holds a spade, although there is precious little sand suitable for sandcastles.

Later in the nineteenth century, at Le Tréport on the Channel coast of France near Dieppe, Évariste Carpentier’s Le Tréport, Bathing Time shows progress in the development of beach costume and culture. A young girl in the left foreground is playing with her bucket and spade, while her older brother is admiring the fashionable young woman parading her new clothes. A far cry indeed from the grave-digger.

The Renaissance modernised the art of the late Middle Ages with realistic images that strived to resemble what we actually see, rather than presenting a world of stereotypes and symbols. This is best seen by comparing paintings of a common theme spanning the period, here those of the Madonna and Child.

Cimabué’s Maestà was painted in egg tempera for the main altar of the church of Santa Trinita in Florence, between 1280-90. Little attempt is made to distinguish surface textures, although some use is made of lightness and pattern in fabrics to depict their folds. Faces are uniform and devoid of expression or emotion, most turned in directions determined by its structured composition. There’s no sign of any landscape or other background, and no impression of reality.

While Ghirlandaio’s Madonna and Child from about 1470-75 was still painted in egg tempera, it’s much more realistic in its approach to the figures and the folds in fabrics. Modelling of the figures is still restrained, and there’s no natural background, but its intent is clearly to resemble a real mother and her infant.

Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia (Madonna of the Chair) from 1513-14 shows a thoroughly real and natural mother with two infants, every surface texture rendered as in life, with wisps of hair, differentiation between types of fabric, and convincing expressions and postures.

Many of the changes seen here in the Renaissance can be elaborated as follows:

• surface texture of skin, hair and fabrics;
• individual faces expressing emotions;
• telling stories using body language;
• individual natural posture;
• realistic landscape backgrounds;
• three-dimensional perspective projection with controlled vanishing points;
• varied composition;
• the air of reality;
• use of oil paints;
• increasing production of easel paintings;
• references to both secular and classical literature;
• introduction of new genres such as landscapes and secular paintings;
• direct patronage;
• independent and secular masters.

Technically the Renaissance provided the painter with all the tools for painting anything that might be seen in life. However, the great majority of paintings were commissioned for religious use, so depicted motifs drawn from the Bible and other Christian writing.

One of the early and most skilled practitioners of oil painting was the brilliant but short-lived Venetian master Giorgione, who has the added distinction of painting what was probably the first landscape painting of the southern Renaissance.

Giorgione’s revolutionary landscape The Tempest from just after 1500 remains enigmatic today, and may have religious references, but it marked the start of a new and wholly secular genre.

Late in the Italian Renaissance, emphasis shifted from its birthplace Florence to other centres such as Bologna and, most of all, Venice, where the effects of colour (Italian colore) came to dominate form and design (Italian disegno).

Jacopo Tintoretto’s Crucifixion from 1565 is over 5 metres (17 feet) high, and 12 metres (40 feet) across, larger than many frescoes of the Renaissance. He makes use of this space with a narrative technique based on the popular ‘multiplex’ form: its single image shows events at more than a single point in time, in an ingenious and modern manner.

Naturally, the painting centres on Christ crucified, but the two thieves executed beside him are not shown, as would be traditional, already hanging from their crosses. Instead, to the right of Christ, the ‘bad’ thief is still being attached to his cross, which rests on the ground. To the left of Christ, the ‘good’ thief is just being raised to the upright position.

Tintoretto’s Annunciation is thought to have been painted even later, in about 1582. Its composition is unusual by any contemporary standards, with natural rendering of brickwork, a wicker chair, and a splendidly realistic carpenter’s yard at the left. This is coupled with an aerial swarm of infants, at the head of which is the dove of the Holy Ghost in a small mandorla. Christ’s origins are here very real, tangible, and contemporary, in stark contrast to most traditional depictions of this scene.

If any single workshop brought the Renaissance to a close and moved on to what has become termed the Baroque it’s that of the Carraccis, initially in Bologna, then in Rome.

Annibale Carracci’s Latona and the Lycian Peasants, probably from 1590-1620, is the first truly masterly painting of this myth told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and for once an easel painting on canvas rather than a fresco. Although not a religious theme, this drew on the other acceptable source of narratives at the time, classical myth.

If there’s one artist who clearly defined the start of a new era it was Caravaggio, who began his career in Milan, but transformed art when he was painting in Rome.

His portrait of Narcissus from 1594-96 demonstrates how the tools of realism could be used in thoroughly secular paintings, but still of classical myth.

Caravaggio wasn’t alone. Among those who adopted and developed his style, the Caravaggists, was Lavinia Fontana, who came from Bologna and worked at the height of her career in Rome. Her Judith with the Head of Holofernes from 1600 also contrasts completely with the tondo Madonna by Raphael at the start of this article.

There was, of course, much more to the Baroque than Caravaggism. In 1604-06, Annibale Carracci and Domenichino (also from Bologna) joined forces in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome to paint this fresco of Perseus and Phineas. As Perseus stands in the centre brandishing the Gorgon’s face towards his attackers, Andromeda and her parents shelter behind, shielding their eyes for safety. The Renaissance was in the past, and Florence was no longer the beacon that it had been.

Signs of change occurred earlier in the north, where the first tentative steps were made towards a broadening of genres.

It was probably Hans Memling (c 1340-1494) who painted one of the first still lifes, on the back of a panel bearing a portrait of a young man praying, in about 1485. It has been proposed that this was part of a diptych or triptych, and could have formed its back cover when folded.

His choice of jug and flowers confirms its religious nature: Christ’s monogram is prominent on the body of the jug, and each of the flowers has specific references. Lilies refer to the purity of the Virgin Mary, the irises to her roles as Queen of Heaven and in the Passion, and the small aquilegia flowers have associations with the Holy Spirit. The eastern pattern on the rug is so distinctive of the artist that these became referred to as Memling rugs.

Coming closer to what was soon to become the Dutch Republic, Pieter Bruegel the Elder founded a dynasty of Flemish artists who broke from the Renaissance mould and started depicting the everyday.

Two of his major paintings from 1565 were formative influences on what was to come in the Dutch Golden Age. The Harvesters is a complete account of the grain harvest in the Low Countries, and Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap below is a pure landscape.

There are no figures particularly close by, and those on the ice are not demonstrating the many different activities they could be undertaking. It also happens that this was one of the first paintings to show Netherlandish people on the ice in the winter, a theme that shortly became very popular, and whose influence extended throughout Europe, across centuries and styles.

By 1600 the techniques of depicting the real world were well understood, and all it required was an abundant trade in art materials including drying oils and pigments, an increasingly wealthy population, seemingly insatiable demand for paintings, and an army of painters. Those all came in the Dutch Republic.