Transcript Art in the Renaissance - The College of New Jersey

Art in the Renaissance
Dates to Remember
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1400 Several Seignories are established
1401 The Sforzas in Milan
1420 Brunelleschi studies Linear Perspective
1434 The Medici in Florence
1455 Gutenberg’s printing press: the Bible
1469 Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence
1492 Discovery of America
1494 Charles VIII in Italy
1494 Michelangelo’s Pietà
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Leonardo paints The Last Supper
1517 Martin Luther’s 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
• 1541 Calvinism
• 1542 The Church
institutes the
Inquisition
• 1545-1564 The
Council of Trent
and the Catholic
Counterreformation
• 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 people’s 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.
• 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 illustrator’s 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 object’s 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.
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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
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 Eve’s Fall from
Eden, the Life of Christ and San Peter’s miracles
• New way to treat religious episodes
• Giotto’s 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
Masaccio’s realism is an affirmation of humanity
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
Filippo
Brunelleschi
• 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 background=spiritual, 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)