Renaissance

Effects of the Renaissance on Painting and

Sculpture

the Italian Renaissance was noted for four things.

• A reverent revival of Classical Greek/Roman

art forms and styles;
• A faith in the nobility of Man (Humanism)
• The mastery of illusionistic painting
techniques, maximizing 'depth' in a picture,
including:
 linear perspective,
 foreshortening and
 quadratura; and
• The naturalistic realism of its faces and
figures, enhanced by oil painting techniques
like sfumato.
Renaissance Painting Techniques
• Linear Perspective
Example:
Flagellation of
Christ by Piero della
Francesca.
• Foreshortening
Example: Lamentation
over the Dead
Christ by Mantegna
(Pinacoteca di Brera)

A classic example of foreshortening, in Early

Renaissance painting
• Quadratura
Example: Camera degli Sposi frescoes by
Mantegna - painted onto walls or ceilings so
that they seem to extend the
real architecture of the room
• Sfumato
Example: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci -
blending of colours
Sculpture
Merchant families of the city-states of Venice,
Florence, and other Mediterranean ports.
Merchant families aggressively and
competitively funded
• art,
• education, and
• science in order to maintain power and
prestige.
More and more of these investments came to
have direct and lasting imprints on urban
design and urban planning.
Societal changes altered cities and urban life, and
also shaped the way subsequent generations
understood the relations between
urbanization,
society, and
culture.
Kingsley Davis –Kingsley Davis was an
internationally recognized American
sociologist and demographer.

He suggest that the ‘real’ urban revolution was

not in Mesopotamia in 3,500 BCE, but in
Western Europe five thousand years later,
during the Renaissance
It went on the basis of
• improvements in agriculture and
• transport, the opening of new lands and new
trade routes, and
• rise in productive activity -
first in highly organized handicraft and
revolutionary new form of production – the
factory run by machinery and fossil fuel.
The transformation thus achieved in the
fourteenth century was the true urban
revolution,
Means
not only the rise of a few scattered towns and
cities but the appearance of a genuine
urbanization, in the sense that a substantial
portion of the population lived in towns and
cities.
The growth of cities during the Renaissance,
however, was neither even nor unproblematic.

Four main factors conditioned the growth of

cities during this period.
• First, the modernization of warfare
introduced new requirements for urban
defence, while rendering medieval
fortifications ineffective.
Gunpowder (believed to have been invented by
the Chinese in the 9th century) was introduced
to Europe through Arabian trade networks in
the fourteenth century, and new artillery made
the medieval cities -- walled cities protected by
moats, or cities situated on inaccessible hills --
more vulnerable.
In the attempt to equalize military conditions, the
towns from this point on were compelled to
abandon their old system of simple walls,
defended for the most part by a citizen
soldiery.
They were forced to hire soldiers, so that they
might sally forth and engage the enemy in
open battle
Second,
the expanded networks of trade associated with
the rise of European colonialism shaped the
course of urbanization.
Third,
the rapid urbanization of European society
created densely-packed cities vulnerable to fire
and plagues, dangers that crossed all lines of
class and privilege and thus justified public
intervention in sanitation, construction, and
other aspects of city life
Fourth,
city growth and patterns varied with the
particular mix of trends in Christianity and
political control.
suggests that sixteenth-century Europe
developed two patterns of cities –
princely, hierarchical settlements modelled on
Rome and administrative control through the
Catholic Church, and new secular merchant
towns that grew from the replacement of
medieval economic relations with new trading
wealth.
Harmony and proportion
• The Renaissance architect and artist Leon Battista
Alberti created a system of architecture based on the
ratios 2:1 and 3:1 suggested by the Timaeus of Plato
in ancient Greece and which had its basis in the
musical scale.
• He reasoned that “what is pleasing to the ear should
be pleasing to the eye.”
• This pair of ratios can be used to create the ancient
musical scale going back to the time of ancient
Sumeria and brought to ancient Greece by
Pythagoras.
Architecture & proportion

Renaissance architects seem to have truly believed

that "Man is the measure of all things.“
Drawings by Francesco di Giorgio illustrate such
proportional concepts directly and vividly.
"Francesco di Giorgio demonstrates by means
of the inscribed human figure how to weld
together organically the centralized and the
longitudinal parts of such a church design.
The centralized eastern end is developed from
the basic geometrical figures of circle and
square“
The Vitruvian Man was very much a part of this
order and need for proper proportion,
"Order stands at the center of the received
character of the Italian Renaissance. The circle
is the image of divine perfection, the five
Platonic solids the building blocks of the
cosmos, and the human figure the microcosm
of that universe, a figure whose extensions
area encompassed by the
circumscribed shapes of the
circle and the square“
Vasari, for example, in his recommendations for
the design of an ideal palace, compares the
façade with the face, the central door with the
mouth, the symmetrically placed windows
with eyes, the courtyard with the body,
staircases with the legs and arms…the typical
proportional ratios to be detected in the
measurements of the human figure and limbs
are to be employed for sizing the elements of
the building, without any sense at all of the
plan or façade corresponding to the body in
general disposition"
Looking back and looking forward
• At the top of a hill in northern Italy, not far
from Venice – villa - Designed by Andrea
Palladio - the Villa Almerico-Capra - La
Rotonda - most recognizable buildings of the
Renaissance.
• Building - consciously recalls - ancient Roman
classical models - innovative design had a
lasting impact for future generations of
architects in Italy and abroad.
Palladio was
concerned with
harmony and
mathematical
consonance and
used the square and
the circle as
essential, yet
elegant forms.
The picturesque qualities of the villa - relation
environment.
unique design, a façade - always visible:
the viewer - never encounters a non-favourable angle.
Gardens
French
Classic Renaissance garden
Gorgeous Renaissance Garden of Love at Chateau
de Villandry (Grand country house, France) is
composed of four aspects of love: Tender Love,
Passionate Love, Fickle Love and Tragic Love