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Why did Renaissance artists object to the gold backgrounds common in Byzantine mosaics?

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Bird mosaic — mosaic Mosaic floor fragment from a synagogue or church, cut stone with mortar from Israel, late 5th–6th century ce; in the Jewish Museum, New York City.

Renaissance artists moved away from the gold backgrounds common in Byzantine mosaics because their aesthetic goals were fundamentally different from the Byzantine tradition. While Byzantine mosaics often utilized gold grounds to create a flat, symbolic, and otherworldly atmosphere, Renaissance artists sought to represent the world as it appeared to the human eye.12

The Renaissance focus on humanism and scientific inquiry led artists to prioritize the creation of believable, three-dimensional space. To achieve this, they developed linear perspective and atmospheric perspective, which functioned as illusionistic devices to suggest depth on a two-dimensional surface.34

By contrast, the gold background of a Byzantine mosaic acts as a flat, non-representational surface that emphasizes the decorative and hierarchical nature of the work rather than a realistic environment. Renaissance painters, such as Masaccio, aimed to treat the painting as a "window to the world," where the observer could participate in the scene. Consequently, the flat, uniform brilliance of gold was replaced by the study of light, anatomy, and rational spatial relationships to better reflect the natural world.2534