Cultural Values of the Renaissance:

• Secularism (donor paintings)

• Individualism (portraiture)

• Humanism (scholarship)

• Naturalism (perspective)
 Medieval vs. Renaissance art?
• Medieval paintings:
– copious use of gold
– flat, little sense of depth
– Limited to religious and devotional themes
• Renaissance paintings:
– realistic perspective
– Shading and lighting
– Realistic proportions
– Interest in the natural world
 Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)
• Italian humanist author, artist, architect, poet,
priest, linguist, philosopher and cryptographer
• Author of On Painting (1435), synthesis of the
most recent teaching on drawing and painting:
– Widely circulated as “published” manuscript
– Broadly influential in transforming artistic
practices: use of perspective and color theory
Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)
 De pictura (On Painting) 1435
• First western description of linear geometric perspective,
credited discovery to Brunelleschi
• Advised artists on principles of distance, dimension and
proportion
• Also advised artists to use color with restraint
• Preferred to paint in the effect of gold rather than using actual
gold in paintings
• Influenced the artists Donatello, Ghiberti, Botticelli, and
Ghirlandaio, also Leonardo da Vinci, and through them the
entire Italian renaissance
• Also author of De statua (On Sculpture) and De re aedificator
(On Architecture)
 Art Before the Renaissance
• Art in Europe featured heavenly figures devoted to
the worship of Christ
• In Medieval paintings, the figures depicted were
citizens of heaven
• Because the artists painting these pictures had
never actually seen heaven, the background was
therefore left to the imagination and the teachings
of the church
• Gold backgrounds were common, because the air in
heaven surely must be precious.
 Perspective
• Challenge: project the three-dimensional
world onto the two-dimensional surface of a
painting, called the picture plane
• Solution: linear perspective with idea that
converging lines meet at a single vanishing
point and all shapes get smaller in all
directions with increasing distance from the
eye
 Enormous Impact
• Most artists painting in Europe after 1435 were aware
of the principles Alberti outlined in his book
• An artist created a "floor" (a ground or stage on which
figures and objects would be placed) in a painting and
drew a receding grid to act as a guide to the relative
scale of all other elements within the picture
• Alberti suggested relating the size of the floor squares
to a viewer's height, which reveals an underlying
Renaissance principal: painting would no longer glorify
God, but cater instead to the perspective of those
people looking at the painting.
The Last Supper (ca. 1325)
Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper (1520)
Duccio, Madonna and Child (ca. 1300)
Raphael, Madonna and Child (1505)
The Annunciation (1333)
The Annunciation (1497)
 Paolo Ucello (1397-1475)
• studied with Lorenzo Ghiberti
• active in Florence and Venice
• heavily influenced by Alberti and obsessed
with perspective
• also worked on foreshortening
• particularly interested in battle scenes, horses
 Paolo Uccello (1397-1475)
Battle of San Romano (1450s)
Battle of San Romano (1450s)
Saint George and the Dragon (1470)
Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)