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Renaissance Art in Italy
Renaissance Art in Italy
1400-1600)
History, Characteristics, Causes, Techniques
During the two hundred years between 1400 and 1600, Europe witnessed an astonishing revival of drawing,
fine art painting, sculpture and architecture centred on Italy, which we now refer to as the Renaissance
(rinascimento). It was given this name (French for 'rebirth') as a result of La Renaissance - a famous volume
of history written by the historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874) in 1855 - and was better understood after the
publication in 1860 of the landmark book "The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy" (Die Kultur der
Renaissance in Italien), by Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97), Professor of Art History at the University of Basel.
From the early 14th century, in their search for a new set of artistic values
and a response to the courtly International Gothic style, Italian artists and
thinkers became inspired by the ideas and forms of ancient Greece and Rome.
This was perfectly in tune with their desire to create a universal, even noble,
form of art which could express the new and more confident mood of the
times.
ART HISTORIANS
For the leading scholars and critics Above all, Renaissance art was driven by the new notion of "Humanism," a
of Renaissance painting, drawing philosophy which had been the foundation for many of the achievements (eg.
and sculpture, see:
Bernard Berenson (1865-1959)
democracy) of pagan ancient Greece. Humanism downplayed religious and
Kenneth Clark (1903-83) secular dogma and instead attached the greatest importance to the dignity
Leo Steinberg (1920-2011) and worth of the individual.
Detail showing The Son of Man from
The Last Judgement fresco on the
wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome,
(1536-41) by Michelangelo. One of
the great works of Biblical art in
the Vatican.
In the visual arts, humanism stood for (1) The emergence of the individual
figure, in place of stereotyped, or symbolic figures. (2) Greater realism and
consequent attention to detail, as reflected in the development of linear
perspective and the increasing realism of human faces and bodies; this new
approach helps to explain why classical sculpture was so revered, and why
Byzantine art fell out of fashion. (3) An emphasis on and promotion of
virtuous action: an approach echoed by the leading art theorist of the
Detail showing the face of Venus Renaissance Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) when he declared, "happiness
from the Birth Of Venus (c.1486) cannot be gained without good works and just and righteous deeds".
By Botticelli. One of the great
examples of mythological painting
of the Florentine Renaissance. The promotion of virtuous action reflected the growing idea that man, not
fate or God, controlled human destiny, and was a key reason why history
RELIGIOUS ARTS
Despite its humanism, the Italian
painting (that is, pictures with uplifting 'messages') became regarded as the
Renaissance produced numerous highest form of painting. Of course, the exploration of virtue in the visual
masterpieces of religious art, in arts also involved an examination of vice and human evil.
the form of architectural designs,
altarpieces, sculpture & painting.
Increased Prosperity
However, more positive currents were also evident. In Italy, Venice and
Genoa had grown rich on trade with the Orient, while Florence was a centre of
wool, silk and jewellery art, and was home to the fabulous wealth of the
cultured and art-conscious Medici family.
Paradoxically, the weak position of the Church gave added momentum to the
Renaissance. First, it allowed the spread of Humanism - which in bygone eras
would have been strongly resisted; second, it prompted later Popes like Pope
Julius II (1503-13) to spend extravagantly on architecture, sculpture and
painting in Rome and in the Vatican (eg. see Vatican Museums, notably
theSistine Chapel frescoes) - in order to recapture their lost influence. Their
response to the Reformation (c.1520) - known as the Counter Reformation, a
particularly doctrinal type of Christian art - continued this process to the end
of the sixteenth century.
An Age of Exploration
The Renaissance era in art history parallels the onset of the great Western
age of discovery, during which appeared a general desire to explore all
aspects of nature and the world. European naval explorers discovered new
sea routes, new continents and established new colonies. In the same way,
European architects, sculptors and painters demonstrated their own desire for
new methods and knowledge. According to the Italian painter, architect, and
Renaissance commentator Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), it was not merely the
growing respect for the art of classical antiquity that drove the Renaissance,
but also a growing desire to study and imitate nature.
In addition to its status as the richest trading nation with both Europe and the
Orient, Italy was blessed with a huge repository of classical ruins and
artifacts. Examples of Roman architecture were found in almost every town
and city, and Roman sculpture, including copies of lost sculptures from
ancient Greece, had been familiar for centuries. In addition, the decline of
Constantinople - the capital of the Byzantine Empire - caused many Greek
scholars to emigrate to Italy, bringing with them important texts and
knowledge of classical Greek civilization. All these factors help explain why
the Renaissance started in Italy. For more, see Florentine Renaissance (1400-
90).
For details of how the movement developed in different Italian cities, see:
Renaissance Artists
If the framework for the Renaissance was laid by economic, social and
political factors, it was the talent of Italian artists that drove it forward. The
most important painters, sculptors, architects and designers of the Italian
Renaissance during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries include, in
chronological order:
Cimabue (c.1240-1302)
Noted for his frescos at Assisi.
Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337)
Scrovegni Arena Chapel frescos.
Gentile da Fabriano (1370-1427)
Influential Gothic style painter.
Jacopo della Quercia (c.1374-1438)
Influential sculptor from Siena.
Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455)
Sculptor of "Gates of Paradise"
Donatello (1386-1466)
Best early Renaissance sculptor
Paolo Uccello (1397-1475)
Famous for work on perspective.
Tommaso Masaccio (1401-1428)
Greatest early Florentine painter.
Piero della Francesca (1420-92)
Pioneer of linear perspective.
Andrea Mantegna (1430-1506)
Noted for illusionistic foreshortening techniques.
Donato Bramante (1444-1514)
Top High Renaissance architect.
Alessandro Botticelli (1445-1510)
Famous for mythological painting.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Creator of Mona Lisa, Last Supper.
Raphael (1483-1520)
Greatest High Renaissance painter.
Michelangelo (1475-1564)
Genius painter & sculptor.
Titian (1477-1576)
Greatest Venetian colourist.
Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530)
Leader of High Renaissance in Florence.
Correggio (1489-1534)
Famous for illusionistic quadratura frescoes.
Andrea Palladio (1508-80)
Dominated Venetian Renaissance architecture, later imitated in Palladianism.
Tintoretto (1518-1594)
Religious Mannerist painter.
Paolo Veronese (1528-1588)
Colourist follower of Titian.
NORTHERN EUROPE
c.1400-1600 - Northern Renaissance Artists.
SCULPTORS
c.1400-1600 - Renaissance Sculptors.
As referred to above, the Italian Renaissance was noted for four things. (1) A
reverent revival of Classical Greek/Roman art forms and styles; (2) A faith in
the nobility of Man (Humanism); (3) The mastery of illusionistic painting
techniques, maximizing 'depth' in a picture, including: linear
perspective,foreshortening and, later, quadratura; and (4) The naturalistic
realism of its faces and figures, enhanced by oil painting techniques
like sfumato.
• Linear Perspective
Example: Flagellation of Christ by Piero della Francesca.
• Foreshortening
Example: Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Mantegna.
• Quadratura
Example: Camera degli Sposi frescoes by Mantegna.
• Sfumato
Example: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.
Among other things, this meant that while Christianity remained the dominant
theme or subject for most visual art of the period, Evangelists, Apostles and
members of the Holy Family were depicted as real people, in real-life postures
and poses, expressing real emotions. At the same time, there was greater use
of stories from classical mythology - showing, for example, icons like Venus
the Goddess of Love - to illustrate the message of Humanism. For more about
this, see: Famous Paintings Analyzed.
Up until the Renaissance, painters and sculptors had been considered merely
as skilled workers, not unlike talented interior decorators. However, in
keeping with its aim of producing thoughtful, classical art, the Italian
Renaissance raised the professions of painting and sculpture to a new level.
In the process, prime importance was placed on 'disegno' - an Italian word
whose literal meaning is 'drawing' but whose sense incorporates the 'whole
design' of a work of art - rather than 'colorito', the technique of applying
coloured paints/pigments. Disegno constituted the intellectual component of
painting and sculpture, which now became the profession of thinking-artists
not decorators. See also: Best Renaissance Drawings.
Influence on Western Art
The ideas and achievements of both Early and High Renaissance artists had a
huge impact on the painters and sculptors who followed during
thecinquecento and later, beginning with the Fontainebleau School (c.1528-
1610) in France. Renaissance art theory was officially taken up and
promulgated (alas too rigidly) by all the official academies of art across
Europe, including, notably, the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, the
Accademia del Disegno in Florence, the French Académie des Beaux-Arts in
Paris, and the Royal Academy in London. This theoretical approach, known as
'academic art' regulared numerous aspects of fine art. For example, in 1669,
Andre Felibien, Secretary to the French Academy, annunciated a hierarchy of
painting genres, modelled on Renaissance philosophy, as follows: (1) History
Painting; (2) Portrait art; (3) Genre Painting; (4) Landscape; (5) Still Life.
In short, the main contribution of the Italian Renaissance to the history of art,
lay in its promotion of classical Greek values. As a result, Western painting
and sculpture developed largely along classical lines. And although modern
artists, from Picasso onwards, have explored new media and art-forms, the
main model for Western art remains Greek Antiquity as interpreted by the
Renaissance.
Renaissance Chronology
[The High Renaissance developed into Mannerism, about the time Rome was
sacked in 1527.]
This chronology largely follows the account given in the authoritative book
"Vite de' più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori Italiani" by the
Renaissance commentator Giorgio Vasari (1511-74).
This decisive advance in realism first appeared about the same time in Italy
and the Netherlands, more specifically in the work of Masaccio (1401-28) at
Florence, and of Jan van Eyck (c.1390-1441) at Bruges. Masaccio, who was
said by Delacroix to have brought about the greatest revolution that painting
had ever known, gave a new impulse to Early Renaissance painting in his
frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine.
Though Van Eyck also created a new sense of space and vista, there is an
obvious difference between his work and that of Masaccio which also
illuminates the distinction between the remarkable Flemish school of the
fifteenth century and the Italian Early Renaissance. Both were admired as
equally 'modern' but they were distinct in medium and idea. Italy had a long
tradition of mural painting in fresco, which in itself made for a certain
largeness of style, whereas the Netherlandish painter, working in an oil
medium on panel paintings of relatively small size, retained some of the
minuteness of the miniature painter. Masaccio, indeed, was not a lone
innovator but one who developed the fresco narrative tradition of his great
Proto-Renaissance forerunner in Florence, Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337).
See, for instance, the latter's Scrovegni Chapel Frescoes (c.1303-10, Padua).
In this way, what might have been simply a nostalgia for the past and a
retrograde step in art became a move forward and an exciting process of
discovery. The human body, so long excluded from fine art painting and
medieval sculpture by religious scruple - except in the most meagre and
unrealistic form - gained a new importance in the portrayal of the gods,
goddesses and heroes of classical myth. Painters had to become reacquainted
with anatomy, to understand the relation of bone and muscle, the dynamics
of movement. In the picture now treated as a stage instead of a flat plane, it
was necessary to explore and make use of the science oflinear perspective.
In addition, the example of classical sculpture was an incentive to combine
naturalism with an ideal of perfect proportion and physical beauty.
Painters and sculptors in their own fashion asserted the dignity of man as the
humanist philosophers did, and evinced the same thirst for knowledge.
Extraordinary indeed is the list of great Florentine artists of the fifteenth
century and, not least extraordinary, the number of them that practised more
than one art or form of expression.
In every way the remarkable Medici family fostered the intellectual climate
and the developments in the arts that made Florence the mainspring of the
Renaissance. The fortune derived from the banking house founded by
Giovanni de' Medici (c.1360-1429), with sixteen branches in the cities of
Europe, was expended on this promotion of culture, especially by the two
most distinguished members of the family, Cosimo, Giovanni's son (1389-
1464), and his grandson Lorenzo (1448-92), who in their own gifts as men of
finance, politics and diplomacy, their love of books, their generous patronage
of the living and their appreciation of antiques of many kinds, were typical of
the universality that was so much in the spirit of the Renaissance.
The equation of the philosophy of Plato and Christian doctrine in the academy
instituted by Cosimo de' Medici seems to have sanctioned the division of a
painter's activity, as so often happened, between the religious and the pagan
subject. The intellectual atmosphere the Medici created was an invigorating
element that caused Florence to outdistance neighbouring Siena. Though no
other Italian city of the fifteenth century could claim such a constellation of
genius in art, those that came nearest to Florence were the cities likewise
administered by enlightened patrons. Ludovico Gonzaga ( 1414-78)
Marquess of Mantua, was a typical Renaissance ruler in his aptitude for
politics and diplomacy, in his encouragement of humanist learning and in the
cultivated taste that led him to form a great art collection and to employ
Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) as court painter.
Nearer to Fra Angelico than Masaccio was Fra Filippo Lippi (c.1406-69), a
Carmelite monk in early life and a protege of Cosimo de' Medici, who looked
indulgently on the artist's various escapades, amorous and otherwise. Fra
Filippo, in the religious subjects he painted exclusively, both in fresco and
panel, shows the tendency to celebrate the charm of an idealized human type
that contrasts with the urge of the fifteenth century towards technical
innovation. He is less distinctive in purely aesthetic or intellectual quality than
in his portrayal of the Madonna as an essentially feminine being. His idealized
model, who was slender of contour, dark-eyed and with raised eyebrows,
slightly retrousse nose and small mouth, provided an iconographical pattern
for others. A certain wistfulness of expression was perhaps transmitted to his
pupil, Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510).
It was a direction of effort that seems to lead naturally and inevitably to the
achievement of Michelangelo (1475-1654). Though there are manifest
differences in mode of thought and style between his Last Lodgement in the
Sistine Chapel and Signorelli's version in the frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral,
they have in common a formidable energy. It was a quality which made them
appear remote from the balance and harmony of classical art. Raphael (1483-
1520) was much nearer to the classical spirit in the Apollo of his Parnassus in
the Vatican and the Galatea in the Farnesina, Rome. One of the most striking
of the regional contrasts of the Renaissance period is between the basically
austere and intellectual character of art in Tuscany in the rendering of the
figure as compared with the sensuous languor of the female nudes painted in
Venice by Giorgione (1477-1510) and Titian (c.1485-1576). (For more, please
see: Venetian Portrait Painting c.1400-1600.) Though even in this respect
Florentine science was not without its influence. The soft gradation of shadow
devised by Leonardo da Vinci to give subtleties of modelling was adopted by
Giorgione and at Parma by Antonio Allegri da Correggio (1489-1534) as a
means of heightening the voluptuous charm of a Venus, an Antiope or an Io.
The Renaissance masters not only made a special study of anatomy but also
of perspective, mathematical proportion and, in general, the science of space.
The desire of the period for knowledge may partly account for this abstract
pursuit, but it held more specific origins and reasons. Linear perspective was
firstly the study of architects in drawings and reconstructions of the classical
types of building they sought to revive. In this respect, the great architect
Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) was a leader in his researches in Rome. In
Florence he gave a demonstration of perspective in a drawing of the piazza of
San Giovanni that awakened the interest of other artists, his friend Masaccio
in particular. The architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) was another
propagator of the scientific theory. Painters concerned with a picture as a
three-dimensional illusion realized the importance of perspective as a
contribution to the effect of space - an issue which involved techniques of
illusionistic mural painting such as quadratura, first practised by Mantegna at
the Ducal Palace in Mantua in his Camera degli Sposi frescoes (1465-74).
Paolo Uccello (1397-1475) was one of the earl promoters of the science at
Florence. His painting of the Battle of San Romano in the National Gallery,
London, with its picturesqueness of heraldry, is a beautifully calculated series
of geometric forms and mathematical intervals. Even the broken lances on
the ground seem so arranged as to lead the eye to a vanishing point. His
foreshortening of a knight prone on the ground was an exercise of skill that
Andrea Mantegna was to emulate. It was Mantegna who brought the new
science of art to Venice.
Classical in ordered design and largeness of conception, but without the touch
of antiquarianism that is to be found in Mantegna, Piero was an influence on
many painters. His interior perspectives of Renaissance architecture which
added an element of geometrical abstraction to his figure compositions were
well taken note of by his Florentine contemporary, Andrea del
Castagno(c.1420-57). A rigidly geometrical setting is at variance with and yet
emphasizes the flexibility of human expression in the Apostles in Andrea's
masterpiece The Last Supper in the Convent of Sant' Apollonia,
Florence.Antonello da Messina (1430-1479) who introduced the Flemish
technique of oil painting to Venice brought also a sense of form derived from
Piero della Francesca that in turn was stimulating in its influence on Giovanni
Bellini(1430-1516), diverting him from a hard linear style like that of
Mantegna and contributing to his mature greatness as leader of Venetian
Painting, and the teacher of Giorgione and Titian.