Download RENAISSANCE

The Dark Ages
•The Middle Ages in Europe were known as the Dark Ages, as there was a
great lack of art and learning. People lived in very poor conditions, where
there was constant turmoil, war, poverty, and hunger. The Dark Ages
lasted from 400 -1350 AD.
Poverty in the Dark Ages
A Time For Change
•The dark ages lasted for hundreds of years. Then in
the middle A.D. 1300s things slowly began to improve.
People began again to discover the arts, and
technologies of the Romans and Greeks, making life a
little easier. With call this period of time the
Renaissance. The Renaissance began around A.D. 1350
in Italy, and continued until about A.D. 1600
•People began to take a new interest in life
and questioned the world around them
What was the Renaissance?
•The Renaissance began in Italy and was a
new way of looking at the world. Italians
started to look again at the achievements of
the ancient Greeks and Romans. This
changed the way they thought and behaved.
It was almost as if the Greeks and Romans
had come back to life. For that reason
historians began to call this age the
Renaissance, which means “rebirth”.
Why Italy?
There are a number of reasons why the Renaissance began in Italy.
1. Italy was the centre of the old Roman Empire. Italians wanted
to repeat the achievements of the Romans.
2. Their language was based on Latin, which was also the language
of the Romans. They were well educated and could read the works
of Roman writers.
3. Italy traded with many countries; Eastern Europe, Arabia, India
and even China. This made them immensely rich. As a result they
had money to spend on fine buildings and magnificent pictures and
statues. Many bankers, traders, merchants and even the Pope
hired artists to paint portraits, decorate, sculpt and design
churches and other buildings
4. Italian merchants found new ideas on their travels and brought
them back to Italy.
5. Italy had many cities. It was divided into different cities and
each had its own ruler. Each city wanted to make their own the
best and outdo each other in terms of having the best
monuments, churches and artists.
Patrons
The city governments and rich
merchants were called
patrons. A patron is a person
who pays an artist to produce
a work of art.
Cosimo de Medici, the wealthy
merchant who ruled Florence
paid artists and scholars to
work for him
Cosimo de Medici
The richest bankers in Florence the Medicis.
Cosimo Medici was the head of the family. He
was a shrewd businessman who made a great
fortune. He used his money to send agents
around Europe in search of monastic libraries
for old, forgotten manuscripts. He built a
library and it became the largest in Europe. It
was also the first public library.
Cosimo helped artists and inventors. He invited
them to stay in his home and he paid them to
work for him. He also paid for many public
buildings himself.
When Cosimo dies, his grandson, Lorenzo, took
over his rule. He was a great sportsman and a
famous patron of the arts. He did so many
things that he became known as “Lorenzo the
Magnificent”.
Lorenzo the Magnificent
Renaissance Painting Developments
The way artists painted changed greatly during the Renaissance. The
best way to see the changes is to compare the two pictures.
This is a Medieval painting
showing the birth of Jesus in a
stable in Bethlehem. The gold
sky, the angles are seen. Human
are not very important here
This is a Renaissance painting
showing the same scene. Do you see
how much more realistic it is? Mary
and baby Jesus are the right size
and look like real people. The
message in this image is that Jesus is
a real person like us.
Making pictures more lifelike
•
The aim of Renaissance artists was to make pictures
more lifelike. They developed a number of tricks to do
that.
1. Showing perspective. Things that are further away from
us look smaller than thing that are close. It was also
used to create depth or distance in pictures.
2. Studying the body. Some artist studied anatomy. They
cut up dead bodies to find out where the bones were and
how the muscles worked. This made their paintings and
sculptures more accurate. Here is a famous sculpture by
Michelangelo called “David”.
3. Sfumato is an art technique using light
and shade. It was used to great effect
to show different expressions on
faces. It made painting of faces and
bodies much more lifelike Leonardo da
Vinchi used this technique when he
painted the Mona Lisa to make her
expressions unclear. Look at the
picture and see can you make out if
she is happy or sad.
4. Studying nature. Artists looked closely at trees and
flowers and tried to paint them as they were. Animals
and nature scenes are usually included in Renaissance
paintings
5. Painting in oils. Early in the Renaissance painters
mixed their colours with egg white. This dried quickly as
it was difficult to get the effect they wanted. Then a
French artist discovered how to use oil paints. These
dried more slowly and allowed artist to show things more
accurately
Frescos
Many Renaissance
paintings were
frescos. A fresco is a
picture painted
directly onto a wall or
a ceiling. They used
frescos to decorate
their churches and
houses
Leonardo da Vinchi
Leonardo da Vinchi was one of the greatest geniuses of the Renaissance.
He was a marvellous painter but he was also an inventor
•Leonardo da Vinchi was born in a town called Vinchi (the Italian word
“da” means “from”) in Italy in 1452. His father wanted him to become a
lawyer but Leonardo was interested in painting. At the age of fifteen he
became an apprentice to a leading artist in Florence and he began to learn
how to paint. It soon became clear that Leonardo was better than his
master. He soon set up his won workshop
•He was the first artist to use sfumato and he was good at portraying
peoples feelings. You can see both qualities in his most famous picture
the Mona Lisa. People still argue about what sort of expression is on her
face. Is it sadness or happiness?
•Leonardo painted a famous fresco “The last Supper”
on the wall of a convent church. Leonardo tried out a
new recipe for making the paint. It did not work. Soon
after the picture was done, the paint began to peel
away. You can see that in this picture
Leonardo's Notebooks
•Leonardo always carried a notebook with him so that he could jot down any
ideas he had. If he saw an interesting face on the street, he would draw it.
Sometimes he would even following the person home so that he could finish
the drawing.
•He dissected more than thirty bodies so that he could study the human
body closely and make his pieces more lifelike. He also had a great interest
in nature and animals. It is said that he would buy caged birds on street
markets just to set them free.
•When he wrote in his notebook he used mirror writing ( from right to left)
For that reason no one could read his notes until many years after his
death. We now have 5000 pages of his notebooks. The contain diagrams of
machines as well as notes on science, geology and engineering.
Leonardo the Inventor
Leonardo invented
several weapons of war,
including an armoured car
and a canon. His
notebooks show that he
thought about other
inventions such as the
submarine, and
aeroplanes
Sculpture and Architecture
Sculptors produced many human figure during the Renaissance. They
made them very lifelike and realistic. When they carved a statue they
tried to show bone and muscles.
St John by
Donatello
This is a close up of “David” by
Michelangelo. It shows how beautiful
he carved the marble so that Davis
looks like a living man
Michelangelo Buonarroti
The greatest sculptor of the
Renaissance was Michelangelo. He
worked for the famous Lorenzo de
Medici and lived in his palace designing
and making wonderful statues for him.
He soon moved to Rome and , here, he
made one of him most famous statues
called “The Pieta”, which means
“sorrow”. The statue can be seen in St
Peters Church. One day, Michelangelo
heard people praising the beauty of the
Pieta but they did not know who had
carved it. That night Michelangelo
sneaked into St Peters in Rome and
signed his name on the statue. It is the
only statue he ever signed.
In 1505 Pope Julius ll asked Michelangelo to paint frescos on the ceiling
of the Sistine Chapel. For four years he worked on the paintings. In
them, he told the story of creation from the bible. He began with God
creating Adam and ended with Noah and the flood
He worked lying on his back. He became so involved in his painting that
he often forgot to eat or sleep. He dismissed assistant after assistant.
Only an old servant and Pope Julius were allowed to watch him work in the
end.
When he finished, the whole ceiling was covered in over 300 figures
Architecture
Many new buildings were designed during the Renaissance. Wealthy
Italians wanted to make their city more beautiful. One way to do
this was to design a new church. But the Italian did not want to
build Gothic churches of the kind that were fashionable in North
Europe.
They wanted to build churches like the Roman buildings they had
admired. Three features of Renaissance style buildings were :domes
round arches and columns.
Notre Dame Cathedral in
France which features
gothic elements of
design.
The Pantheon was a Roman temple is a
Renaissance style building.
This is a cathedral
designed by a famous
architect Flippo
Brunelleschi in Florence
during the Renaissance
Writing
Before the Renaissance all books were written by hand. Johannes
Gutenberg invented the printing press in Germany in 1440. The first
book he printed was the Bible. It was 1300 pages land it took four
years to complete. Today there are only 47 copies of this bible
available and its one of the most valuable books in the world.
How printing changed the world.
•Books became cheaper, so more people could afford to own them.
•They were more common, so people learned to read and write
•New ideas spread around the world thanks to books.
•Is became harder for kings or popes to stop a new idea that they
disliked because people could make copies of a book about it.
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was born in
Stratford-on-Avon in England in 1564. At
the age of eighteen he married Anne
Hathaway and soon after that he moved
to London.
In London he became an actor. There
were several dramas there because the
queen , Elizabeth 1, loved drama.
Shakespeare soon began to write plays.
He wrote thirty five altogether. They
include comedies such as The Merchant
of Venice and As you Like It , and
tragedies as Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet.
Like many Renaissance writers , he based
some of his plots on stories from ancient
Greece or Rome. His plays are still very
popular today.
Science
In the Middle Ages, people believed that the earth was at
the centre of the universe and that the sun, moon and stars
moved around it. The bible and Church supported this theory.
it also seemed to fit with common sense. Everyday people saw
the sun rise from the east, move across the sky and set in
the west. The moon and planets also seemed to move across
the sky. So the obvious conclusion seemed to be that they
moved around the earth, which stood still.
But in the Renaissance some astronomers developed a new
theory about the place of the earth in the universe.
Nicholas Copernicus
Nicholas Copernicus was born in Poland in
1473. He was a priest but also studied
maths, medicine and astronomy. He
watched the way stars moved and he made
careful notes of his observations. Using
mathematical calculations, Copernicus
worked out a new theory. He suggested
that the sun, not the earth was the centre
of the solar system and that the earth
revolved around it.
Copernicicus set out his theory in a book
called Concerning the Revolutions of the
Heavenly Spheres. He decided not to
publish it because he was scared of getting
into trouble.
Galileo
Galileo was born in Pisa, Italy, in 1564. He
studied mathematics and physics in the local
university. He designed and built a telescope
so that he could study the stars.
He believed that theories must be proved by
experiment. He dropped two balls of
different weight from the leaning tower of
Pisa to show that objects fall at the same
speed, whatever their weight.
1. Florence was one of the richest cities in Italy. Where did it
wealth come from?
2. What was a patron?
3. How did Lorenzo de Medici get his nickname “Lorenzo the
Magnificent?
4. Describe how Leonardo da Vinchi trained as an artist.
5. Name two techniques he used in his paintings?
6. What would you see if you went to visit the Sistine Chapel?
7. How is “The Pieta” the only piece of work signed by
Michelangelo.
8. List three features of Renaissance architecture. Where did
these ideas come from?
9. In what way did the printing of books help the Renaissance?
10.Write a short account of Nicolas Copernicus.