Renaissance ArtRenaissance Art

Renaissance

❖ literally means ‘rebirth’

❖ French translation of the Italian ‘rinascita’

❖ 200 years from 1400 to 1600

What Happened during the Renaissance?

❖ age of growth in Europe

❖ New and powerful city states emerged

❖ A new middle class had more and more money to spend.

The Renaissance❖ The New Middle Class

❖ bankers, merchants and tradesmen had a new market for their services

❖ people are now wealthier with more than enough money to spend. They began to build larger houses, buy more expensive clothes and get interested in art and literature

❖ they had more free time for learning, foreign languages, reading, playing musical instruments and other things of interest

The Renaissance

❖ Italian cities = centers of trade, wealth and education

The Renaissance

❖ Exploration and Trade - exploring the seas and sailing to other continents

❖ Portuguese navigates explored west coast of Africa and brought gold and ivory

❖ Also discovered India, Asia that offered spices, silk and various cloth

❖ Columbus discovered America in 1492 and many Spanish, French and Italian explorers followed suit. The Spanish conquered Central and South America and brought home the gold and silver from the Inca and Aztec empires

The Renaissance

❖ Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1445

❖ Mass production of books at a very cheap cost

❖ Publishing Boom - buying and selling books began to prosper in many European countries. Travel books, romances, poetry and almanacs

The Renaissance

❖ Scholars read the writings of Greek and Roman philosophers - ‘classics’

❖ Study of old manuscripts on topics like science, art and life.

❖ Martin Luther - found a new religion and split away from the church

The Black Death

❖ Bubonic plague estimated to have killed 30% to 60% of Europe’s population, or as many as 75 million people

❖ 120,000 citizens in 1338 to 50,000 in 1351.

❖ Left Europe in political and economic chaos that took 100 years to recover

Florence Baptistery

❖ also Baptistery of St. John

❖ 1400 after the plague, Florence was ready for a new commission and went out for entries

❖ South end was completed by Andrea Pisano in 1329 before the plague

❖ Competition, artists had to submit a bronze panel of ‘Abraham sacrificing Isaac’ to win the cities’ biggest prize.

❖ Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, both in their early 20s.

❖ The feud that sparked the renaissance

❖ “Brunelleschi’s work is by far the more dramatic and disturbing, all angles and movement and raw emotion., like nothing that had ever been created before. His Abraham is a tall, powerful figure, grasping a frail Isaac along the jawline with his left hand, the father’s thumb under the boy’s chin to better expose the neck, or perhaps to cut off the flow of oxygen so that his son won’t feel the fatal blow. In his right hand, Abraham holds the knife, driving the blade forward with such forceful commitment that the angel sweeping down from the sky must grab his wrist to stop the sacrifice. The story literally bursts out from the panel, breaking the boundaries of the Gothic quatrefoil within which it is supposed to be contained, just as Brunelleschi burst through the boundaries of the Gothic art with his creation.”  -(Robert Paul Walker from his book “The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance”)

❖ “Ghiberti’s panel is more elegant and more beautiful. His Isaac is a perfectly modeled classical nude while his Abraham is a smaller, more graceful man, his left arm wrapped around the boy’s shoulders while his right hand holds the knife hovering in the air, as if he has not yet made the decision to strike. The angel floats above them, open palm over Abraham’s well-coifed, curly hair, no need to grab the father’s arm but able instead to stop him with a word. The whole scene plays out against an exquisitely cascading mountainside, all neatly contained within its quatrefoil boundary. Whereas Brunelleschi’s piece demonstrates an artist aching to forge a new and more powerful image of reality, Ghiberti’s demonstrates masterful perfection of the art,as remarkable in its own way for the time and place and age of the artist as is the work of his rival.” -Paul Robert Walker

❖ Committee could not decide which is best, so they called together to work in tandem on the doors

❖ Brunelleschi refused, saying he would gladly concede the project to Ghiberti rather than work with anything less than full creative control

❖ Ghiberti won the project, and became a huge victory for him and a humiliating defeat for Brunelleschi

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❖ The aftermath created the creative snowball rolling in Florence

❖ Brunelleschi took the bigger leap forward by inventing the system of linear perspective, and the biggest architectural project in the world: giant red dome on the top of the duomo

Principal Components or Renaissance Style

❖ Revival of classical forms originally developed by the Ancient Greeks and Romans

❖ Intensified concern with secular life--interest in humanism and importance of the individual

❖ beginning of the great Western age of discovery and exploration

❖ Artists were no longer regarded as mere artisans

❖ Renaissance artists are now seen as having independent personalities

❖ Sought new solutions to formal and visual problems

Linear Perspective

❖ converging lines meet at a single vanishing points and all shapes get smaller in all directions with increasing distance from the eye

❖ all elements to the painting are related proportionally and rationally

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❖ what Renaissance artists have achieved with careful observation of nature is recreating three-dimensional physical reality of human form on two-dimensional surfaces

❖ The Holy Trinity by Massacio

❖ Painters devote themselves to the rendition of landscape

❖ Careful depiction of trees, flowers, mountains, cloud filled skies

❖ Development of Aerial Perspective

Aerial Perspective

❖ Objects are increasingly less distinct and less sharply colored

❖ Northern painters from Flanders and the Netherlands - innovations by introducing oil painting as a new medium

Renaissance Art & Architecture

❖ Use of mathematics to plan their works

❖ The Golden Mean - objects in nature have a certain proportion

Renaissance in Italy

❖ Renaissance first started in Italy

❖ The Italian Renaissance is the earliest manifestation of the European Renaissance

Florence

❖ Florence - birthplace of Renaissance

Florence❖ Many great artists of that time started their studies

or worked in Florence

❖ 12 guilds controlled the trade in the city, the most powerful were the textile workers

❖ Florence - center of cloth making and cloth trading - wool

❖ Banking - many families were successful bankers

❖ ‘florin’ - gold coin that was used and popular all over Europe

❖ Santa Maria Novella by Leon Battista Alberti - colored marble facade and decorated cloisters

Early Renaissance Sculpture

❖ 14th-15th century - Icon-like paintings in gold ground, more natural study of man and nature in fresco technique

❖ Simplicity, piety (Franciscan influence)

❖ Three Florentine goldsmiths

❖ Filippo Brunelleschi

❖ Lorenzo Ghiberti

❖ Donatello

Filippo Brunelleschi

❖ greatest architect and engineer of the Renaissance

Lorenzo Ghiberti

❖ best known for the reliefs in the gilded bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery

❖ Highly praised by Michelangelo, termed them ‘worthy of the Gates of Paradise’

‘Gates of Paradise’

Adam and Eve

Cain and Abel

The Story of Noah

The Story of Abraham

Jacob and Esau

Discovery of the Golden Cup

Solomon & the Queen of Sheba

Donatello❖ Donato di Niccolo di Betto

Bardi or Donatello

❖ Powerful and influential artist who also traveled widely

❖ A Florentine, he worked in Venice, Padua, Naples and Rome

❖ Thereby instrumental in carrying the new Florentine innovations to much of Italy

David by Donatello

❖ first nude statue of the Renaissance (1430-1435)

❖ First statue since classical antiquity to be cast in the round

❖ departure from the rigid, columnar figures from Gothic sculpture

Early Renaissance Painting

❖ Masaccio

❖ Massacio was the first to employ the new techniques in painting

❖ short career (died at age 27)

❖ Linear and aerial perspective in frescoes

❖ ‘Tribute Money’

❖ Tribute Money by Masaccio

❖ Brancacchi Chapel (Florence)

❖ Expulsion from Paradise

❖ one of the 6 frescoes by Masaccio at the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, Italy

❖ realism, three dimensionality and dramatic depiction

Fra Filippo Lippi❖ monk

❖ Vasari’s ‘Lives of the Artists’: “instead of studying, he spent all his time scrawling pictures on his own books and those of others.”

❖ Always been patronized by the Medicci family

❖ His most distinguished pupils include Sandro Botticelli and his son Filippino Lippi

❖ ‘Madonna and Child’, tempera on wood (1455)

Fra Angelico

❖ The Annunciation❖ Fra Angelico is a devout Dominican monk

❖ Adoration of the Magi

Piero della Francesca

❖ Baptism of Christ (1445)

❖ early Renaissance art

❖ Piero’s interest in geometry and perspective

Jan Van Eyck

❖ Arnolfini Portrait / Arnolfini Wedding

❖ believed to be rich merchant Giovanni Arnolfini and wife

❖ Jan van Eyck is a Flemish painter of the Netherlands

Renaissance Painting: 2nd Generation

❖ With the innovations of aerial and linear perspective, rendition of landscape, powerful figural types and rigorous compositions, it was further consolidated and refined

❖ Study on the complexities of the human anatomy from life

❖ Scientific, perspective, anatomy, deeper landscape, chiaroscuro

❖ Horizon line slightly below or above center of painting, wispy trees, distant hilss, cities bathed in blue, foreground of warm yellows, ochres and browns

❖ Scene placed as if upon a stage

❖ Pollaiuolo’s ‘Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian’

❖ ‘Birth of Venus’ by Sandro Botticelli as commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici

❖ themes of astrology, classical mythology and Christianity

❖ Linear, flat space with an overall effect of grace and delicacy

High Renaissance

❖ taking art to a level of noble expression

❖ initiated by Leonardo da Vinci, upon his return to Florence from Milan in 1500

❖ there he found the young Michelangelo, who was about to begin the famous gigantic Statue ‘David’

High Renaissance

❖ centers in Rome, Florence, Venice

❖ Pictorial space deepened

❖ Sky more dramatic with dark clouds and flashes of light as if afternoon or evening

❖ More dramatic representations of events of lives of martyrs and church figures

❖ Unsettled mood pervades art

❖ Landscape competes with and replaces human figure

Leonardo da Vinci

❖ quintessential Renaissance man

❖ celebrated as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist

❖ profound love for knowledge and research was the keynote for both his artistic and scientific endeavors

❖ The Last Supper

❖ Instead of showing the 12 apostles as individual figures, it is grouped in dynamic compositional units of three, framing the figure of Christ in the center of the picture

❖ Mona Lisa

❖ technical innovations, like the mysteriousness of its legendary smiling subject

❖ two techniques ‘sfumato’ and ‘chiaroscuro’

❖ Sfumato - subtle, almost infinitesimal transitions between color areas, creating a delicately atmospheric haze or smoky effect; evident in the delicate gauzy robes worn by the sitter and in her enigmatic smile

❖ Chiaroscuro -modeling and defining forms through contrasts of light and shadow, the sensitive hands of the sitter are portrayed with a luminous modulation of light and shade, color contrast used only sparingly

Michelangelo

❖ Contributions to painting, sculpture and architecture

Pieta

❖ one of his memorable early works (St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican city)

David

❖ located at the Academia

❖ 5.17 m or 17 ft.

❖ the original location is replaced by a replica

❖ only 26 years old

David

❖ Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes

❖ Interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis, the story of creation of the world

❖ contains 343 figures and nine stories from the Book of Genesis

❖ finished at only 34 years old and took him 4 years to finish

Sistine Chapel Frescoes

Creation of Adam

Ignudi

Creation of Plants, Sun, Moon and Stars

Creation of Eve

Downfall of Adam & Eve

The Flood

Moses

Raphael Sanzio

❖ born in Urbino, based in Rome where he had an active shop with many assistants

❖ 25 year old Raphael was summoned to Rome by Pope Julius II and given a commission to decorate the papal apartments

❖ died of a fever, aged 37

School of Athens

Venetian Renaissance

❖ 16th century

❖ dramatic diagonal compositions

❖ sumptuous, warm, sensual colors

❖ Venetial school influences Spanish and Dutch art

❖ Giorgione

❖ invigorated the Venetian school of painting and whose art was unrivaled in the portrayal of mood

❖ innovations in the landscape and the female nude

❖ ‘Tempest’

❖ The Tempest by Giorgione

❖ follower of Giorgione, Tiziano Vercellio or ‘Titian’

❖ most gifted High Renaissance painter in Venice

❖ ‘Sacred and Profane Love’

❖ Venus of Urbino

❖ Titian’s Mary Magdalene

Renaissance Artist Signatures

❖ Raphael - extremely smooth and beautiful

❖ Leonardo - mixed colors scientifically

Conclusion❖ Art enters the experimental stage

❖ New colors discovered, free brush strokes

❖ Forms modeled in color and chiaroscuro

❖ Canvas introduced

❖ Discovery of the landscape

❖ Art rises to independent, personal expression of individual artists

❖ Early Renaissance - linear and calm

❖ High Renaissance - painterly and dramatic

❖ Scientific discovery of natural world results in many new techniques