Renaissance Art

12 Key excerpts on "Renaissance Art"

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  A History of Europe

  From 1378 to 1494

  • W.T. Waugh(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER XXI

  THE CLASSICAL RENAISSANCE, AND ITS RELATION TO THOUGHT, LETTERS, AND ART IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

  Traditional view of “the Renaissance”

  I T has been customary for historians to speak of “the Renaissance” as one of the great landmarks in the career of mankind. And, in view of the accredited conception of human history, the estimate was justified. For History fell into three clear-cut divisions. There was Ancient History, concerned with the fortunes of Greece from Homer to Alexander the Great and of Rome from Romulus to Marcus Aurelius or thereabouts, and thus dealing with communities which attained great material well-being, technical dexterity, intellectual power, and artistic taste. Then, with the decline of Rome, History entered its second phase—the Middle or Dark Ages, which lasted upwards of a thousand years. The regions comprised in the western half of the Roman Empire were submerged in barbarism. It was, in the words of a modern oracle, “a glacial age of the spirit.” Its literature was dismissed as “monkish,” its art as “Gothic,” its thought, we were told, culminated in the man whose name gave us the word “dunce.” Even after the Romantic Movement of the early nineteenth century had revived a sympathetic interest in the Middle Ages, they were admired because they were romantic, picturesque, or quaint. It was characteristic that medieval architecture was for long most highly appreciated when it was ruined. Even the great scholars who wrote on medieval history in the latter half of the nineteenth century, though they attributed many merits to medieval culture, usually assumed the existence of a great gulf between the Middle Ages and what were called Modern Times—the third Age of History.

  There was a general agreement that what at length lightened the darkness of error and superstition in which Europe had been wandering was the Renaissance, the rebirth of learning and art, moribund if not dead since the barbarians had overwhelmed Rome. Ancient literature, especially that of Greece, was revealed to minds weary of the tyranny of monks and schoolmen. The result was miraculous. “Men opened their eyes and saw.” And, looking at the world freely and directly, not through stained-glass windows, they saw that it was good. Scrutinizing the features and forms of their fellows, they found them worthy of admiration as creatures of flesh and blood, and not merely edifying as immortal souls destined probably for damnation. Their minds and imaginations emancipated, they turned from the trivialities of scholastic disputation to the great problems of life. Traditions, legends, superstitions crashed headlong. Beauty once more awoke. Literature recovered her form and comeliness. Grace and dignity unseen since the age of Pericles sprang into being under paint-brush and chisel. Man strode forth with head erect, ready not merely to endure but to master his fate. It was an inexhaustible theme, and much fine writing was provoked by it.

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  Western Civilization

  Beyond Boundaries

  • Thomas F. X. Noble, Barry Strauss, Duane Osheim, Kristen Neuschel(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Painting and the Arts, 1250–1550 337 High Renaissance Art The high point in the development of Renaissance Art came at the begin- ning of the sixteenth century. Artists in Venice learned perspective from the Florentines and added their own tradition of subtle coloring in oils. The work of two Florentines, Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), best exemplifies the sophisticated heights that art achieved early in the sixteenth century. Leonardo, the bas- tard son of a notary, was raised in the village of Vinci outside of Florence. Cut off from the humanistic milieu of the city, he desired, above all else, to prove that his artistry was the equal of his formally schooled social supe- riors. In his notebooks, he confessed, “I am fully conscious that, not being a literary man, certain presumptuous persons will think they may reason- ably blame me, alleging that I am not a man of letters.” * But he defended his lack of classical education by arguing that all the best writing, like the best painting and invention, is based on the close observation of nature. Close observation and scientific analysis made Leonardo’s work uniquely creative in all these fields. Leonardo is famous for his plans, sometimes prophetic, for bridges, fortresses, submarines, and airships. In painting, he developed chiaroscuro, a technique for using light and dark in picto- rial representation, and showed aerial perspective. He painted horizons as muted, shaded zones rather than with sharp lines. It was Leonardo’s ana- lytical observation that had the greatest influence on his contemporaries. Michelangelo, however, was widely hailed as the capstone of Renaissance Art.

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  Men and Ideas

  History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance

  • Johan Huizinga(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  Vasari was not expressing anything unprecedented either in placing Cimabue and Giotto in the vanguard or in deriving the revival from a return to nature. Boccaccio already had extolled Giotto as he who had brought the art of natural painting to life once more after it had lain buried for many centuries. Leonardo da Vinci commemorated him in the same way. As early as 1489 Erasmus placed the revival of the pictorial arts some two or three hundred years before his 248 MEN AND IDEAS time. According to Diirer it was generally known that painting was "resumed" or "brought to light again by the Romance nations" two hundred years earlier. 12 For him, too, a longing for true nature and a fervent desire for the art and the literature of antiquity were basically one and the same thing. During the seventeenth century the concept of a renascence of civilization seems to have slumbered. It no longer thrust itself forward as an expression of a feeling of enthusiasm at recaptured glory v On the one hand the spirit had grown dis- ciplined and sober, and on the other, more matter-of-fact and less emotional. People had become accustomed to the pro- fusion of the noble, refined form, the moving, solemn word, the fullness of color and sound, the critical clarity of the in- tellect. All this was no longer experienced as a wonderful new triumph. "Renaissance" was no longer consciously a watch- word, and there was not yet any need for it as a technical term in history. When the concept of a birth of culture again won ground in thought it was the critical sense that availed itself of it, as a means of distinguishing historical phenomena. The dawning Enlightenment of the eighteenth century took up the term Renaissance where the generation of the sixteenth century had dropped it. But meanwhile the concept of that rebirth, no longer gravid with the live emotion of the persons who had themselves been its exponents, had become singularly academic and formal, biased, and inaccurate.

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  Western Art History

  • (Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The English Press

    (Publisher)

  The revival of a style of architecture based on classical precedents inspired a corresponding classicism in painting, which manifested itself as early as the 1420s in the paintings of Masaccio and Uccello. • The development of oil paint and its introduction to Italy had lasting effects. • The serendipitous presence within the region of Florence of certain individuals of artistic genius, most notably Giotto, Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, formed an ethos which supp-orted and encouraged many lesser artists to achieve work of extraordinary quality. • A similar heritage of artistic achievement occurred in Venice through the talented Bellini family, their influential inlaw Mantegna, Giorgione, Titian and Tintoretto. Themes Much painting of the Renaissance period was commissioned by or for the Catholic Church. These works were often of large scale and were frequently cycles painted in fresco of the Life of Christ , the Life of the Virgin or the life of a saint, particularly St. Francis of Assisi. There were also many allegorical paintings on the theme of Salvation and the role of the Church in attaining it. Churches also commissioned altarpieces which were painted in tempera on panel and later in oil on canvas. Apart from large altarpieces, small devotional pictures were produced in very large numbers, both for churches and for private individuals, the most common theme being the Madonna and Child . Throughout the period, civic commissions were also important, local government buildings like the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena being decorated with frescoes and other works both secular, such as the Allegory of Good Government , and religious, such as Simone Martini's fresco of the Maèsta . Portraiture was uncommon in the 14th and early 15th century, being mostly limited to civic commemorative pictures such as the equestrian portraits of Guidoriccio da Fogliano

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  The Gate of Appreciation

  Studies in the Relation of Art to Life

  • Carleton Eldredge Noyes(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Perlego

    (Publisher)

  By reference to Giotto and to Raphael I have tried to illustrate the practical application of certain principles of art study. A work of art is not absolute; both its content and its form are determined by the conditions out of which it proceeds. All judgment, therefore, must be comparative, and a work of art must be considered in its relation to its background and its conventions. Art is an interpretation of some aspect of life as the artist has felt it; and the artist is a child of his time. It is not an accident that Raphael portrayed Madonnas, serene and glorified, and Millet pictured rude peasants bent with toil. Raphael's painting is the culmination of two centuries of eager striving after the adequate expression of religious sentiment; in Millet's work the realism of his age is transfigured. As showing further how national ideals and interests may influence individual production, we may note that the characteristic art of the Italian Renaissance is painting; and Italian sculpture of the period is pictorial rather than plastic in motive and handling. Ghiberti's doors of the Florence Baptistery, in the grouping of figures and the three and four planes in perspective of the backgrounds, are essentially pictures in bronze. Conversely, in the North the characteristic art of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is carving and sculpture; and "the early painters represented in their pictures what they were familiar with in wood and stone; so that not only are the figures dry and hard, but in the groups they are packed one behind another, heads above heads, without really occupying space, in imitation of the method adopted in the carved relief." Some knowledge of the origin and development of a given form of technique, a knowledge to be reached through historical study, enables us to measure the degree of expressiveness of a given work. The ideas of a child may be very well worth listening to, though his range of words is limited and his sentences are crude and halting, A grown man, having acquired the trick of language, may talk fluently and say nothing. In our endeavor to understand a work of art, a poem by Chaucer or by Tennyson, a picture by Greco or by Manet, a prelude by Bach or a symphony by Brahms, we may ask, Of that which the artist wanted to say, how much could he say with the means at his disposal? With a sense of the artist's larger motive, whether religious sentiment, or a love of sheer beauty of color and form, or insight into human character, we are aided by a study of the history of technique to determine how far the artist with the language at his command was able to realize his intention.

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  A History of Italy

  • Claudia Baldoli(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The typical Italian relationship between city and countryside fostered links between artistic work and the construction of landscape; close links between water engineers, botanists, gardeners and landscape designers were common. During the Renaissance, Italian technique in these areas had an international dissemination as important as that of painting and the decorative arts. The numerous villas outside Italian cities from Piedmont to Sicily are witness to the relationship between art and nature during and after this period, with endless variations around country estates and the development of the typical Italian garden. However, the Renaissance was fundamentally urban and not rural; even the authors of pastoral literary works lived in towns, though they often retired to country villas in the summer. Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century paintings exemplify this relationship between city and countryside, as many of the landscapes have a geometrical aspect that recalls city architecture, and reflect the fact that artists were required to make statements about their city.

  The manners of Italian aristocrats were imitated in Europe, and nobility of talent was regarded as seriously as nobility of blood: artists such as Raphael Sanzio, Michelangelo and Titian lived like princes, as they were in demand by monarchs all over Europe. One development that was exported was the extensive use of mass communication and propaganda. The princes and elites of the Italian states did not limit propaganda to the written word, but relied also on the persuasive power of images, statues and buildings. The court, in particular, became a theatre, a spectacle of luxury through which princes sought to extend their influence and prestige both within and outside the state, and to maintain control over the local ruling classes. The lifestyle of court society evolved, establishing new norms of beauty and aesthetic conceptions. Despite being a minority movement, during the sixteenth century the Renaissance influenced a large section of the population, in part a result of the invention of the printing press: teachers, artisans and shopkeepers, and a considerable number of women, were involved alongside sections of the elite.

  COURTIERS

  The nineteenth-century historian, Jacob Burckhardt, argued that the achievement in fifteenth-century Italy of such high levels of civilization and elegance served to justify belief in the perfect courtier, not as an ideal but as a reality. The most famous courtier’s manual, by Baldassare Castiglione, Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier), is indeed set in a real court, that of Urbino in 1507, where he lived and began a successful diplomatic career. Born in Mantua province, Castiglione studied Latin and Greek in Milan, where he was educated as a gentleman at the court of Ludovico il Moro; he moved between the courts of Mantua, Milan, Urbino and Rome (with Pope Leo X). When his book was published in 1528, it was already famous at courts throughout the whole of Italy, such was the interest among the Renaissance aristocracy for the subject. It was subsequently translated and disseminated throughout educated European society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Some thirty years later, another work on etiquette became a European bestseller: Galateo

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  Essays and Lectures

  • (Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • The Floating Press

    (Publisher)

  The English Renaissance of Art * AMONG the many debts which we owe to the supreme aesthetic faculty of Goethe is that he was the first to teach us to define beauty in terms the most concrete possible, to realise it, I mean, always in its special manifestations. So, in the lecture which I have the honour to deliver before you, I will not try to give you any abstract definition of beauty - any such universal formula for it as was sought for by the philosophy of the eighteenth century - still less to communicate to you that which in its essence is incommunicable, the virtue by which a particular picture or poem affects us with a unique and special joy; but rather to point out to you the general ideas which characterise the great English Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as far as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as that is possible. I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new birth of the spirit of man, like the great 105 Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments: and I call it our romantic movement because it is our most recent expression of beauty. It has been described as a mere revival of Greek modes of thought, and again as a mere revival of mediaeval feeling. Rather I would say that to these forms of the human spirit it has added whatever of artistic value the intricacy and complexity and experience of modern life can give: taking from the one its clearness of vision and its sustained calm, from the other its variety of expression and the mystery of its vision.

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  Understanding Art

  • Lois Fichner-Rathus(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Human activities are presented as sincere and viable subject matter. There are few examples of such painting before this time, but genre painting will play a principal role in the works of Netherlandish artists during the Baroque period. MANNERISM During the Renaissance, the rule of the day was to observe and emulate nature. Toward the end of the Renaissance and before the beginning of the seventeenth century, this rule was suspended for a while, during a period of art that historians have named Mannerism. Mannerist artists abandoned copying directly from nature and cop-ied art instead. Works thus became “secondhand” views of nature. Line, volume, and color no longer duplicated what the eye saw but were derived instead from what other artists had already seen. Several characteristics separate Mannerist art from the art of the Renaissance and the Baroque periods: distortion and elongation of fig-ures; flattened, almost two-dimensional space; lack of a defined focal point; and the use of discordant pastel hues. JACOPO PONTORMO A representative of early Man-nerism, Jacopo Pontormo (1494–1557) used most of its stylistic principles. In Entombment ( Fig. 17.29 ), we wit-ness a strong shift in direction from High Renaissance Art, even though the painting was executed during Michelangelo’s lifetime. The weighty sculptural figures of Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael have given way to less substantial, almost weightless, forms that balance on thin toes and ankles. The limbs are long and slender in proportion to the torsos, and the heads are dwarfed by billowing robes. There is a certain innocent beauty in the arched eyebrows of the haunted faces and in the nervous glances that dart this way and that past 1 ft. Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

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  Gardner's Art through the Ages

  A Global History, Volume II

  • Fred Kleiner(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  The association of humanism with education and culture appealed to accomplished individuals of high status, and human- ism had its greatest impact among the elite and powerful—the most influential art patrons—whether in the republics or the princely courts. As a result, humanist ideas came to permeate Italian Renais- sance art. The intersection of art with humanist doctrines during the Renaissance is evident in the popularity of subjects selected from classical history or mythology (for example, fig. 21-1), in the increased concern with developing perspective systems and depict- ing anatomy accurately, in the revival of portraiture and other self-promoting forms of patronage, and in citizens’ extensive com- missions of civic and religious art. FLORENCE Because high-level patronage required significant accumulated wealth, those individuals, whether princes or merchants, who had managed to prosper came to the fore in artistic circles. The best- known Italian Renaissance Art patrons were the Medici, the leading bankers of the Republic of Florence (see “The Medici,” page 593), yet the earliest important artistic commission in 15th-century Flor- ence was not a Medici project but rather a competition held by the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and sponsored by the city’s guild of wool merchants. Sculpture In 1401, at a time when Florence was threatened from without, the cathedral’s art directors held a competition to make bronze doors for the east portal of the Baptistery of San Giovanni (fig. 12-30). In the late 1390s, Giangaleazzo Visconti, the first duke of Milan (r. 1378–1395), had begun a military campaign to take over the Ital- ian peninsula. By 1401, when the cathedral’s art directors initiated the baptistery doors competition, Visconti’s troops had surrounded Florence, and its independence was in serious jeopardy. Despite dwindling water and food supplies, Florentine officials exhorted the public to defend the city’s freedom.

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  Culture and Values

  A Survey of the Humanities, Volume II

  • Lawrence Cunningham, John Reich, Lois Fichner-Rathus, , Lawrence Cunningham, John Reich, Lois Fichner-Rathus(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Copyright 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 478 | CHAPTER 14 The High Renaissance in Northern Europe and Spain otherworldly nature of the upper canvas. The emotion is high pitched and exaggerated by the tumultuous atmosphere. This emphasis on emotionalism links El Greco to the onset of the Baroque era. His work contains a dramatic, the- atrical flair, one of the hallmarks of the 17th century. musIc As in the visual arts, the Renaissance produced major stylistic changes in the development of music, but in general, musical development in the Renaissance was marked by a less severe break with medieval custom than was the case with the visual arts. Although 16th-century European composers began to increase the complexity of their style, frequently using polyph- ony, they continued to use forms developed in the High Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance. In religious music, the motet remained popular, set to a religious text. Com- posers also continued to write madrigals (songs for three or more solo voices based generally on secu- lar poems). For the most part, these were intended for performance at home, and elaborate, interweav- ing polyphonic lines often tested the skill of the singers. The difficulty of the parts often made it necessary for the singers to be accompanied instrumentally. This increasing complex- ity produced a significant change in the character of madrigals, which were especially popular in Elizabethan England. None- theless, 16th-century musicians were recognizably the heirs of their 13th- and 14th-century predecessors.

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  A History of Interior Design

  • John Pile, Judith Gura, Drew Plunkett(Authors)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Edifices de Rome Moderne. Ionic pilasters support an entablature band, and above this, a frieze of decorative panels is inserted below the cornice. The ceiling is deeply coffered and richly decorated.

  THE LATE RENAISSANCE AND MANNERISM

  The term Mannerism first came into use in art-historical literature to describe painting that developed a freedom of personal expression within the Renaissance tradition. The term is equally useful in identifying the parallel developments in design. The design of the Renaissance had, by the middle of the sixteenth century, settled into a well-established system of classically based elements. The Roman orders and Roman ways of using them had been codified and made the subject of illustrated books; these showed “correct” ways of producing interiors that were serene and generally simple. As tends to occur when a style has arrived at a well-established norm, some artists and designers came to feel unduly constrained by the set formulae. In painting, the style called Mannerist introduced figures that seem in motion, gestures that appear theatrical, and compositions that are active and complex. In design, Mannerism refers to the use of detail in ways that break away from the rules, that are sometimes eccentric, even humorous in their shifting and distortion of Renaissance serenity. Personal decisions began to take the place of the earlier rules.

  Michelangelo

  Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), one of the greatest and most versatile of Renaissance Artists, imposed his personal modifications on classicism in a way that serves to define the concept of Mannerism. At the solidly High Renaissance Farnese Palace he was responsible for inserting into its sedate façade the small but forceful balcony centered over the main entrance, and for adding the third level in the courtyard that introduces an adventurous variation on the Roman detail of the lower levels.

  At S. Lorenzo in Florence, Brunelleschi’s Old Sacristy discussed above, was balanced by a symmetrically placed New Sacristy designed by Michelangelo, beginning in 1519. The plan is the same simple square with a smaller square scarsella and a dome on pendentives above, as in Brunelleschi’s project; but the treatment of the interior is as active, aggressive, and personal as Brunelleschi’s was serene and classical. Pilasters and moldings in dark gray stone stand out against the white walls. Complex door and blind (false) window elements seem crowded in between the pilasters, and a whole attic story of arches, pilasters, and windows has been inserted below the level of the dome. Michelangelo’s famous Medici tombs stand at either side of the space, giving it its more usual name of Medici Chapel (6.22

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  Gardner's Art through the Ages

  A Global History, Volume II

  • Fred Kleiner(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 598 CHAPTER 21 The Renaissance in Quattrocento Italy interest in employing linear perspective to create the illusion of three-dimensional space, but close scrutiny reveals inconsistencies in his application of Brunelleschian principles. For example, in the Florentine perspective system, it is impossible to see both the ceiling from inside and the roof from outside, as Castagno depicted. The two side walls also do not appear parallel. In placing the figures inside the biblical dining room, Casta-gno chose a conventional compositional format, with Jesus and the apostles seated at a horizontally placed table. The painter derived the apparent self-absorption of most of the disciples and the men-acing features of Judas (who sits alone on the outside of the table) from the Gospel of Saint John, rather than the more familiar version of the Last Supper recounted in the Gospel of Saint Luke. Castagno’s dramatic and spatially convincing depiction of the event no doubt was a powerful presence for the nuns during their daily meals. PAOLO UCCELLO A much rarer genre of Quattrocento Florentine art was history painting. A masterpiece of this secular side of Renais-sance art is Battle of San Romano (fig. 21-23 ) by Paolo Uccello (1397–1475), who trained in the International Gothic style. The large panel painting is one of three that Lorenzo de’ Medici acquired for his bedchamber in the palatial Medici residence (figs. 21-35 and 21-36) in Florence. There is some controversy about the date of the painting because documents have been discovered suggesting that Lorenzo may have purchased at least two of the paintings from a previous owner instead of commissioning the full series himself. The scenes commemorate the Florentine victory over the Sienese in 1432 and must have been painted no earlier than the mid-1430s.

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