Work begins in Florence on Brunelleschi's Pazzi chapel, which encapsulates in miniature the new ideals of Renaissance architecture.

Admiral Zheng He of China leads a fleet of 52 ships, with nearly 30,000 men, to the east coast of Africa.

Some Englishmen see Joan of Arc as truly a witch and as an agent of the devil — a common response to adversity in this age. Joan is captured. The English turn her over to ecclesiastic authorities — the Inquisition — and at the French town of Rouen, then under English rule, Joan is burned at the stake.

Painting by Fra Angelico: The Annunciation of San Giovanni Valdarno, a painting in tempera on panel. It is part of a series of Annunciation panels painted by Fra Angelico in the 1430s. The other two are the Annunciation of Cortona and the Annunciation. The Annunciation of San Giovanni Valdarno was looted from Italy during the Second World War by the Germans and returned to the country via the work of Rodolfo Siviero. It is now held at the Museo della Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie in San Giovanni Valdarno. The scene is composed in a similar manner to the first panel in the series, the Annunciation of Cortona, with some differences. First of all, the composition is divided into two sections rather than three, with the garden reduced to a glimpse through the arches on the left side. Mary and the angel are placed and clothed like the Annunciation of Cortona, with a greater use of light. The illumination arrives consistently from the left, from the garden, to light drapery and the architecture. Fra Angelico used a vanishing point placed inside the house, rather than outside, which concentrates attention on the spectacle of the Annuciation. Like Masolino da Panicale's Annunciation, the scene's space is divided in two by arches on the first floor. The building has a transitional architecture somewhere between traditional pointed, polyptych medieval design and the squared architecture of the Renaissance. At the center of the arches, there is a medallion with a figure of a prophet, who is looking at Mary and holds in his hand a paper that certifies the truth of his prophecy. Unlike many works of the time from Arezzo, the painting depicts a range of rich colors. The colors vary from the green of the garden, to the rose and gold of the angel's clothes, to the blue and red of Mary, ending with the starry ceiling of the portico and the delicate marble decorations of the walls and floor.

Ghent Alterpiece is completed. This very large and complex 15th-century polyptych altarpiece was begun around the mid-1420s and completed by 1432. The altarpiece is one of the most renowned and important artworks in European history. The panels are organized in two vertical registers, each with double sets of foldable wings containing inner panel paintings (visible when opened) and outer panel paintings (visible when closed).
Upper register, opened: The scenes represent the heavenly redemption, and includes the central classical Deësis arrangement of God (identified either as Christ the King or God the Father), flanked by the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist. They are flanked in the next panels by angels playing music and, on the far outermost panels, the figures of Adam and Eve.
Lower register, opened: The central panel of the lower register shows a gathering of saints, sinners, clergy, and soldiers attendant at an adoration of the Lamb of God. There are several groupings of figures, overseen by the dove of the Holy Spirit.
Upper register, closed: The archangel Gabriel and the Annunciation, and at the very top are the prophets and sibyls.
Lower register, closed: The four lower panels of the closed altar are divided into two pairs; sculptural grisaille paintings of St John the Baptist and St John the Evangelist, and on the two outer panels, donor portraits of Joost Vijdt and his wife Lysbette Borluut.

Painting by Domenico di Bartolo: Madonna of Humility, is recorded to be the artist's first-ever commissioned piece of artwork. Renaissance Scholar Bruce Cole refers to Domenico's Madonna of Humility with Angels as "one of the loveliest works of the early Sienese Quattrocento". The composition of the painting is centered with a very volumetrically and triangularly depicted Madonna. Behind her are five angels, who form a semicircle that gives further movement and depth into the painted space. Referring back to several of the Madonna panels by Masaccio that have survived until today, a similarity between them and Domenico's Madonna is that the large figures created dominating geometrical forms that give the overall image a strong sense of sculptural stability and gravity. Art historians also mention that the color palette of the painting is of particular skill and thoughtfulness. The green, pink and blue of the Madonna's robes in contrast with the paleness of the angels' garments and the pale green of the cloth on the infant all come together to display a trait that was peculiar to the Sienese paintings that were produced around the 1400s.

Painting by Fra Angelico: The Annunciation of Cortona, a panel-painting altarpiece or retable. Once housed in the Church of Gesù of Cortona, it is now held at the Museo Diocesano in Cortona. The Annunciation of Cortona was painted by Fra Angelico in 1433–1434, in tempera on panel, 175 cm × 180 cm. This is one of three Annunciations by Fra Angelico on panel (the other two are in the Prado Museum, and the Museo della Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie, in San Giovanni Valdarno. Two others, in fresco, are found in the convent of San Marco, Florence, at the top of the access stairs and the third cell. There are also scenes of the theme combined with Adoration of the Magi at the Museum San Marco, and a diptych in the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria.

Painting by Jan van Eyck: Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?) The inscription at the top of the panel, Als Ich Can (intended as "as I/Eyck can") was a common autograph for van Eyck, but here is unusually large and prominent. This fact, along with the man's unusually direct and confrontational gaze, have been taken as an indication that the work is a self-portrait. Like all van Eyck's portraits, it shows a sharp and detailed analysis of the subject. The painting is a third life-size with the sitter sitting in three-quarters profile. His stubbled face is heavily lined with the onset of middle age, and his eyes are semi-bloodshot. He looks outwards with a piercing gaze, looking directly at the viewer — possibly being the first portrait in a millennium to do so. His weary facial expression is achieved through a combination of his strong nose, tightly pursed wide mouth and the framing of his face by the headdress. The overall expression is of a man, who one scholar says "see things — himself included — in close-up, but without losing track of the bigger picture."

Painting by Jan van Eyck: Arnolfini Portrait, a full-length double portrait, believed to depict the Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his wife, presumably in their residence at the Flemish city of Bruges. It is considered one of the most original and complex paintings in Western art, because of its beauty, complex iconography, geometric orthogonal perspective, and expansion of the picture space with the use of a mirror. According to Ernst Gombrich "in its own way it was as new and revolutionary as Donatello's or Masaccio's work in Italy. A simple corner of the real world had suddenly been fixed on to a panel as if by magic... For the first time in history the artist became the perfect eye-witness in the truest sense of the term". The portrait has been considered by Erwin Panofsky and some other art historians as a unique form of marriage contract, recorded as a painting. Signed and dated by van Eyck in 1434, it is, with the Ghent Altarpiece by the same artist and his brother Hubert, the oldest very famous panel painting to have been executed in oils rather than in tempera. The painting was bought by the National Gallery in London in 1842. Van Eyck used the technique of applying several layers of thin translucent glazes to create a painting with an intensity of both tone and color. The glowing colors also help to highlight the realism, and to show the material wealth and opulence of Arnolfini's world. Van Eyck took advantage of the longer drying time of oil paint, compared to tempera, to blend colors by painting wet-in-wet to achieve subtle variations in light and shade to heighten the illusion of three-dimensional forms.

Cosimo de Medici comes to power in Florence.

(no entry for this year)

(no entry for this year)

Painting by Domenico di Bartolo: Madonna and Child

Painting by Filippo Lippi: Enthroned Madonna and Child,

Painting by Filippo Lippi: Barbadori Altarpiece, now in the Louvre Museum in Paris. It may be considered as a very early sacra conversazione. Gherardo di Bartolomeo Barbadori, who died childless in 1429, left his heritage to the Captains of Orsanmichele for the realization, in the church of Santo Spirito, Florence, of a chapel dedicated to Saint Fridianus. The chapel was built in the old sacristy of the church and in 1433 it was decided to place an altarpiece there. The work was commissioned to Filippo Lippi around 1437, and a letter from Piero de' Medici to Domenico Veneziano, dated 1 April 1438, mentions the altarpiece as having not been finished yet. The painting remained in Santo Spirito until 1810, when it was disassembled and brought to France by the Napoleonic troops. After the 1815 restoration it was not given back.

The Chanca tribe attacks the Inca city-state of Cusco from the north. In defense, the Inca begin to reorganize their governmental system, to expand their alliances and with force to build the Tahuantinsuyu Empire.

Painting by Jan van Eyck: Portrait of Margaret van Eyck, one of the latest of van Eyck's surviving paintings, and one of the earliest European artworks to depict a painter's spouse. Completed when Margaret van Eyck was around 34, it was hung until the early 18th century in the Bruges Chapel of the Guild of Painters. Art historians believe it was once a pendant (diptych) panel for Jan's likely self-portrait in the National Gallery, London. Margaret's portrait is in the collection of the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, Belgium.