Art in the Renaissance

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Art in the Renaissance
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Dates to Remember

• 1400 Several Seignories are established
• 1401 The Sforzas in Milan
• 1420 Brunelleschi studies Linear Perspective
• 1434 The Medici in Florence
• 1455 Gutenbergs printing press the Bible
• 1469 Lorenzo de Medici in Florence
• 1492 Discovery of America
• 1494 Charles VIII in Italy
• 1494 Michelangelos Pietà

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• Leonardo paints The Last Supper
• 1517 Martin Luthers 94 theses
• 1519 Leonardo dies
• 1519 Charles V of Spain crowned emperor
• 1525 Cortés destroys the Aztecs
• 1527 The sack of Rome (Charles V)
• 1532 Francisco Pissarro conquers the Inca empire
• 1534 The Anglican Schism(Henry VIII)
• 1537 Cosimo I Duke of Tuscany

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• 1541 Calvinism
• 1542 The Church
  institutes the
  Inquisition
• 1545-1564 The
  Council of Trent
  and the Catholic
  Counterreformation

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• The whole history of painting may be strung on
  this single thread - the effort to reconstitute
  impressions, first the dramatic impressions and
  then the sensuous. A summary and symbolic
  representation of things is all that at first is
  demanded the point is to describe something
  pictorially and recall peoples names and
  actions. It is a characteristic of archaic
  painting to be discursive and symbolic each
  figure is treated separately and stuck side by
  side with the others upon a golden background.
  The painter is here smothered in the recorder, in
  the annalist only those perceptions are allowed
  to stand which have individual names or chronicle
  facts mentioned in the story. But vision is more
  sensuous and rich than report, if art is only
  able to hold vision in suspense and make it
  explicit. When painting is still at this stage,
  and is employed on hieroglyphics, it may reach
  the maximum of decorative splendor. Whatever
  sensuous glow finer representations may later
  acquire will be not sensuous merely, but poetical.

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• Illustrations are nevertheless an intellectual
  function that diverges altogether from decoration
  and even, in the narrowest sense of the word,
  from art for the essence of illustration lies
  neither in use nor in beauty. The illustrators
  impulse is to reproduce and describe given
  objects. He wishes in the first place to force
  observers - overlooking all logical scruples - to
  call his work by name of its subject matter and
  then he wishes to inform them further, through
  his representation, and to teach them to
  apprehend the real object as, in its natural
  existence, it might never have been apprehended.
  His first task is to translate the object
  faithfully into his special medium his second
  task, somewhat more ambitious, is to penetrate
  into the object during that process of
  translation that this translation may become at
  the same time analytical and imaginative, in that
  it signals the objects structure and emphasizes
  its ideal suggestions. In such reproduction both
  hand and mind are called upon to construct and
  build a new apparition but here construction has
  ceased to be chiefly decorative or absolute in
  order to become representative. The aesthetic
  element in art has begun to recede before the
  intellectual and sensuous effects, while of
  course retained and still studied, seem to be
  impressed into the service of ideas.
• George
  Santayana, The Life of Reason (1905)

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• From religious to profane art
• Art changes content
• From craftsman to artist creative identity
• Geographic, technical, scientific discoveries
  new trust in science, reason and experience
• The discovery of perspective new ways of
  expressing space
• Human body as the image of divine symmetry and
  perfection

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Masaccio

• Http//www.christusrex.org/www2/art/gallery.htm
• Http//www.mynet.it/mantova/arte/index.html
• The first great innovator, Masaccio (San Giovanni
  Valdarno, 1401-Rome 1428)
• Greatest Work Fresco of the Cappella Brancacci
  (Church of the Carmine, Florence 1424-5)
• The commission to illustrate Adam and Eves Fall
  from Eden, the Life of Christ and San Peters
  miracles
• New way to treat religious episodes
• Giottos expressive power is visible
• Use of chiaroscuro to define forms
• San Peter appears 3 times in the upper and twice
  in the lower fresco. The environment is defined
  by perspective
• The figures are located in a realistic space

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• The forms are modeled by chiaroscuro
• He respects reality and does not embellish
• Figures are full of humanity, simplicity of the
  dress
• Value is given more to the dignity than to beauty
• The visual values are essentially plastic, the
  chiaroscuro emphasizes the volume of the figures.
  
• Perspective is used to cast the figures in a
  tridimensional space
• The solemnity of the gestures is emphasized
• The simplicity of painting without unnecessary
  ornamentation
• A sense of religious profundity exalts man both
  as responsible for his own Fall as for his
  salvation
• Masaccios realism is an affirmation of humanity

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Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446)

• Florentine architect and sculptor. Studies Greek
  and Roman architecture. Creates works based on
  mathematical and proportional symmetries
• In Brunelleschi the edifices speak an essential,
  harmonious and classical language. The
  overpowering decorative emphasis of the
  late-gothic masters is abandoned
• In the Spitale degli innocenti he revives the
  Roman arches
• In the Cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore (1420-36),
  he equals the diameter of the Roman Pantheon
• The Cupola provided formidable technical
  difficulties a)
  builds without scaffolding
  b)
  builds an internal and external shell and a
  staircase in between c) the external
  nervatures are purely ornamental
  d) uses over 4 million small
  terracotta tiles for easy maintenance
  e) leaves no drafts
  of the structure
• When completed, the Duomo becomes the symbolic
  center of Florence

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Filippo Brunelleschi
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• LINEAR PERSPECTIVE
• A conventional way to represent space
• The objective is to order the view and to select
  a focal point
• The space in which we live is not orderly, our
  motion changes our position and perspective
• Medieval artists had represented space in an
  intuitive way, or they had eliminated it (gold
  backgroundspiritual, heavenly dimension)
• Renaissance rationality represents divinity in a
  human setting
• The central perspective is the most common,
  allowed a symmetrical representation and a
  central vision (closer to the observer)