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The Renaissance
The real world and fantasy
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Come prepared to your ART lesson
At school we provide you with a whole range of materials to work with
so that you can make all sorts of artworks. However, we expect that
you have your materials too.
For all art lessons you should have the following items with you:
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A pen to write with
A pencil to draw with
A rubber
A pencil sharpener
A straight edge (either a ruler or a set square)
This booklet
You should also have your drawing box at school (either with you
in the lesson or in your locker)
Module title:
‘The Renaissance’. The real world, fantasy and
science in art
Our guiding questions for this module are the following:
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How did fantasies and nightmares find their way into Renaissance art?
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How did the Renaissance artist make great improvements in
representing the real world in pictures?
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How did art and science connect in the Renaissance world?
By trying to answer these questions we will gain a much closer
understanding of what exactly the very important period known as
the Renaissance
Renaissance means literally ‘rebirth’ and a name given to a period in history that began from about 1420 in Italy. Artists in this period continued to have a great interest in making artworks about God and the art from the
Greek and Roman civilizations. However increasingly important was their interest in the world around them.
The wanted to make art about their great buildings, cities and the people that lived in and around them.
The centre point of the Renaissance was Italy. The cities of Rome, Florence, Siena and Venice all played an
important part in giving us the art and architecture that we still look at today. However we are going to begin our
own look at the Renaissance by travelling to Northern Europe to look at the artworks that were produced there.
THE RENAISSANCE IN NORTHERN EUROPE
The Renaissance was a period when people travelled more and this meant that many of the new artistic techniques would have been seen and learnt about by artists all over Europe. However, the art that was made in
the countries roughly to the north of the Alps developed in a quite different way and had a style of its own, one
that remained more like those of Medieval artists.
The artists in the north wanted to paint very realistically and they
looked very carefully at everything that they painted. This meant
that they painted what they saw, right down to the smallest detail.
One of the most famous examples of this sort of approach is The
Arnolfini Wedding Portrait by Jan van Eyck. Giovanni Arnolfini was
a rich Italian businessman who wanted his wedding, an important
day in his and his wife’s lives, recording forever. What better way
was there to do this than in a painting? Van Eyck played the role
of a sort of witness, a little like to a wedding photographer of today.
This part of the artist’s role on this occasion is made still clearer by
the way he has signed his signature on the wall behind the couple;
as if to say that, ‘Yes, I was here’.
The Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, Jan van Eyck,
1434
Jan van Eyck and his brother Hubert were also responsible for one of the great religious paintings of northern
Europe, The Ghent Altarpiece. This is a series of paintings with religious themes and packed with detail. It is
also one of the first paintings to be made using oil paint. Van Eyck, it is thought was the first artist to use this
material and make use of the new possibilities it allowed him.
Paint is a mixture of a coloured
pigment and a binder. Before van
Eyck, to paint onto wood artists
had used tempera, for this the
binding material used is egg. This
meant the paint dried very quickly.
But when artists used linseed oil
instead as the binder they discovered a whole new set of possibilities. The paint was more glossy,
thin transparent layers could be
used and it dried much more slowly, allowing the artist to rework
areas of the painting over and
over again.
How is egg tempera paint made?
Take a closer look at Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding
portrait
Take a closer look at Jan van Eyck’s Gent altar painting
Assignment – write the missing words in the boxes below
The Arnolfini Wedding Potrait is a very
paint-
ing.
It shows a very
The artist lived in
business man.
Europe.
He sometimes painted together with his
The most famous Renaissance art was made
.
Italy.
Pieter Bruegel often took religious subjects as his themes. In The Tower of Babel we see the tower
from the Bible story being built. The story and the painting are meant to be warnings against human
arrogance. The people in the story were trying to build a tower so high that it would reach heaven. In
the story, God punishes the people by making them all unable to speak the same language. Breugel,
it is thought, was also using it as a metaphor and a warning for the people of Antwerp (where he
lived) to try and live better lives.
The Tower of Babel,
Pieter Bruegel, 1563
To have a much closer look at
the painting use the link here
Detail from The Garden of Delights, Hieronymus Bosch, 1503
The paintings of Hieronymus Bosch show
more of an approach of careful attention to
detail, together with a religious theme. His
very religious paintings show quite fantastic
ideas and imagination. In his work The Garden of Earthly Delights we get a frightening
and bizarre vision of a sort of heaven and hell.
The work is clearly intended as a sort of warning to encourage us the viewers to behave
during our life-time or later face the horrible
hell that he painted. The whole surface of the
painting is covered in activity in a unique sort
of chaos that brought Bosch a great deal of
fame even during his own lifetime.
To see the whole painting in high resolution
click on the link:
Glossary:
attention – aandacht
constructed – opgebouwd
witness – getuige
comparable – vergelijkbaar
signature – handtekening
glossy – glans
transparent – doorzichtig
arrogance – arrogantie
punishes - bestraft
Assignments – The Renaissance in Northern Europe
How would artists in Northern Europe have heard about the art being made in Italy?
Italian artist used perspective to make their paintings more realistic, how did artist like Jan van Eyck
make his pictures more like the real world?
In what unusual way did van Eyck put his signature onto the painting The Anolfini Wedding Portrait?
The basic ingredients of paint are pigment (the colour) and a binder. Give two examples of things
that can be used as a binder?
1
2
Where did Breugel find the idea for the story behind his painting The Tower of Babel?
How were the people of Babel punished by God?
Why do you think that this punishment meant that the tower never got finished being built?
What was Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Delights about?
Was the painting meant to make people happy?
How are the paintings The Tower of Babel and The Garden of Delights similar?
Gargoyles – a PRACTICAL ASSIGNMENT
Sometimes there are strange creatures
on churches and other buildings.
What are they and why are they there?
They are called gargoyles.
For more examples of gargoyles click on the link
Gargoyles are water spouts at the end of a gutter
and they serve to drain away the rainwater.
Gargoyles were also used to scare off demonic and
evil spirits.
Gargoyles are also decorative statues.
Gargoyles are sometimes combinations of real animals and people.
Assignment 1
Homework
Look in magazines, newspapers or on the internet,
pictures of 6 mammals,
6 birds, 6 reptiles and 6 amphibians.
Glue these onto one or two sheets of A4 paper.
Make sure that the pictures are arranged in an interesting way.
Assignment 2 Design
On an A3 sheet of paper:
Make 2 sketches of a combination of a mammal and
a bird.
Make 2 sketches of a combination of a mammal and
a reptile.
Make 2 sketches of a combination of a mammal and
an amphibian.
Make 2 sketches of a combination of a bird and a
reptile.
Make 2 sketches of a combination of a bird and a
amphibian.
After these exercises you must make you own design for 3 different gargoyles. They have to be a
combination of at least 2 animals. (Not human!). It
is best is to let them sit so you get a closed form.
Make some detail drawings of textures, claws/paws,
eyes etc.
Assignment 3
Clay work
Choose one of your designs to make out of clay. Ask
your teacher if you have chosen the best one.
Your statue has to be three-dimensional so it has to be
interesting from all sides.
It has to be a solid form. Parts that stick out will break off
easily.
You have to use different textures. A beak is hard and
shiny, feathers are soft and fur can be soft or rough.
Make a clear difference between the different parts of
the gargoyle
Take care of the details, eyes are more than two holes
in a head, a snout is not only a cut in the clay.
Do not draw in the clay, lines are created by form.
The quality of the finishing is very important.
For more ideas click on the Pinterest link
PAINTING THE REAL WORLD
- the early Renaissance In italy
In the Italy of the 15th and 16th centuries, a period known
as the Renaissance, there was an even greater interest
in the real world, and not only the illustration of (mostly)
Biblical stories. It was a time of experimentation and discovery.
Renaissance – means literally ‘rebirth’ and a
name given to a period in history that began from
about 1420in Italy. Artists in this period had great
interest in the world around them, God and the art
from the Greek and Roman civilizations.
Perhaps the greatest discovery was that of perspective
and the possibilities it gave for painting the real, threedimensional world in a way that had never before been
achieved.
Perspective – Painting a person, object or space
that gives the impression of space and depth. In
the Renaissance it was discovered that this could
be done using certain lines within a painting that
come together at a ‘vanishing point’.
One of the first painters to master the use of perspective was Masaccio. In
1427, when he was just 27 years old, he painted The Holy Trinity in the
church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Italy. It is said that the painting
was so realistic that the people of the church thought that he had broken
down a wall into the building next door. This seems unbelievable to us now,
but Masaccio had painted the architecture and pillars around the figures
strictly to the rules of perspective and on a life-size scale. The result for his
15th century public was simply amazing.
So how does the perspective work here, click on the link:
The Holy Trinity, by Masaccio, 1427
Equally shocking, but very different in appearance
was Andrea Mantegna’s Mourning of Christ (1480).
Here the perspective is used to give us a dramatic and
unusual view of the dead Christ.
Such
‘foreshortening’ of a figure had not been painted before and would have amazed the people in the 15th
century. The wounds in Christ’s feet seem almost to
poke out of the picture at us.
Mourning of Christ, by Mantegna, 1480
The discovery of the rules of perspective meant that an new sort of painting had become possible for the Renaissance artist. Paintings no longer had just a height and a width, but now a tremendous sense of depth. It
was a depth that could disappear off into the far distance of the background of a painting. Rooms and buildings
could be painted so that they looked like real rooms and buildings, with realistic people in and around them. To
start with artists like Masaccio led the way in the use of perspective but it was not long before the new technique was being used by virtually all painters as they tried to create more and more surprising pictures and effects.
Many of the great paintings of the Renaissance, painted on
church walls or indeed on the walls and then spreading right
across the ceiling. Mantegna also made paintings that quite
literally surround you. An example of this area in his work can
be found in the Camera degli sposi in Mantua, Italy. Not surprisingly these paintings took a long time to paint, he worked
on them between 1468 and 1474.
If we look up at the middle of the ceiling we can just see what
appears to be a hole in the roof. This is of course, a painted
hole. A look at the detail of the ceiling painting soon shows
us that once again Mantegna is showing us his skill in painting views from the strangest angles. Two people look down
on a child who is balancing dangerously on a ledge. Above
them we see clouds floating over a blue sky.
Summary of perspective assignment
Put the words in each pair of brackets into the right order to create a summary of perspective.
The first line has been completed for you.
(was, perspective, during, Renaissance, the, discovered)
Perspective was discovered during the
Renaissance.
(used, artists, Renaissance, perspective)
(creates, depth, perspective, in, paintings)
(three-dimensional, gives, it, a, effect)
(is, vanishing-point, position, the, the, of, important)
Assignments – The early renaissance & perspective
What does the word Renaissance literally mean?
Apart from stories from the Bible what else were Renaissance artists interesting in making
paintings about?
What technique helped artists in the Renaissance make more realistic paintings?
Name two Renaissance artists who used this new technique?
i)
ii)
Where can you see many of the great paintings of the Renaissance period?
Perspective collage assignment
You are going to make a one-point perspective drawing of an interior space (inside a room) on a sheet of A4
paper.
The basic construction to start with is outlined below. If you follow the steps carefully it allows you to draw a
view of the inside of a room into which can be added (also in perspective) windows, doors, carpets, paintings
and furniture.
The final part of the collage is to add three collage figures of various sizes that have been cut out of a magazine. These must be placed in the drawing using the eye level line as your guide. The photographs below the
diagrams give you an idea of the sort of photographs that will be useful. For the best effect the size of the figures should vary between ± 5cm and ± 18cm.
For an online tutorial in drawing a room using one point perspective watch the film link below:
LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452-1519)
The Renaissance was a period of great change, especially in southern Europe and in particular in Italy.
The people in the big cities such as Rome, Florence and Sienna had become much more interested than
earlier in art, in science, in the world around them and their relationship with each other as well as with
God. These must have been exciting times to live in with so many new things to see and think about.
Great art was being made, huge new buildings were being built and the cities were growing very quickly.
One man who stood in the middle of these developments was Leonardo da Vinci. He was, in many
ways, the ‘ideal’ Renaissance man. He is perhaps best known for his paintings but was much more than
just a painter. He was also a scientist and had a great interest in architecture. He was a great
‘researcher’ in everything that he did.
Leonardo was born in 1452, very little is known about his childhood, but from 1469 until 1471 he was an
assistant of the successful Italian artist Verrochio. It was here that he would have started his education
and career as an artist.
Leonardo painted many pictures that are considered to be
great works of art, but without a doubt the best known is La
Gioconda (translation: the joking one), a painting that is much
better known as the Mona Lisa. It is, perhaps, the most famous painting in the whole of art history and can be seen in the
Louvre in Paris – hidden behind several centimetres of bulletproof glass.
It is a small picture (77 x 53 cm) and was painted around 1503.
A there are still many questions about the painting that still
have not been answered, even who exactly the woman is –
nobody is certain. Why is this? What is it about that has fascinated so many people for so long?
She is a friendly looking woman with mysterious eyes and an
unusual smile. She sits there in front of a rocky landscape
showing little emotion watching us almost as much as we are
watching her. What is it that she is thinking about? There
seem to be questions than there are answers – perhaps this is
why it is a picture that has interested people for so long.
Like many other artists around this time Leonardo was also interested in trying to make pictures that
showed the space and depth of the real world as realistically as possible. To do this he also used the
new perspective techniques but also tried to perfect other techniques to show the natural world as it really was. In his painting The Last Supper it is possible to see how he has tried to do this.
Leonardo’s interest in painting was only a part of his work. He was not
only one of the world’s great artists, but also one of the great thinkers.
He made plans for architecture, wrote poetry, studied anatomy and
engineering. He made designs for helicopters, tanks, pumps and
many other things. If he did have a weakness it was that his speed of
thought often meant that ideas didn’t always get finished. Many of his
ideas though, were simply ahead of their time, and it was often the
case that the seeds of ideas that Leonardo had were not completed
until many (sometimes hundreds) of years later – as in the case of his
flying machine.
Sketch for the design of a flying machine
Click on this link to see a short film about the building of Leonardo’s tank design
The inventions of Leonardo DA VINCI
Assignment based on the film about Leonardo’s inventions that we
will be watching in class.
You are going to watch a film about the inventions of Leonardo. After the film you are
going to be divided up into groups to write and give a very short presentation about the
film. All people in the group have to have something to say during the presentation.
The presentation must last no less than two minutes and no longer than three minutes in
total.
To make the whole assignment a little more challenging each group will be given a set of
words that have to be included somewhere during the presentation. The words are as
follows……
Group 1:
imagination, intelligent, anatomy, underwater
Group 2:
birds, dangerous, pope, materials
Group 3:
fly, anatomy, breathing, painting
Group 4:
joints, air, inventor, drawings
Group 5:
writing, bodies, leather, test
If you are not sure what a word means……look it up in a dictionary!!
Words you need to
know……….
ENGLISH
realistic
Life-like
narrative
religious
pigment
perspective
depth
illusion
Vanishing
point
invention
Eye-level
DUTCH
WHAT DOES IT
MEAN?
MICHELANGELO (1475-1564)
perhaps an even greater Renaissance artist than
Leonardo!
Michelangelo arrived in Florence, the centre of Renaissance Italy,
in 1488. He began as a student, learning from various other artists. It was not long though before he had been introduced to the
Medici family, and after meeting these important people, the young
Michelangelo’s career as an artist started to progress very well.
Michelangelo thought that sculpture was the most important form of
art. By making great sculpture he wanted to show how good as an
artist he could be.
The Medici: The Medici family was
an extremely rich and important
group of people in Italy during the
Renaissance. They were very important patrons of art, paying artists
to make new artworks and architects
to build new impressive buildings.
Working for the Medici was a good
way to improve your career!!
During his time in Florence he carved his famous statue called David. David was the young boy from the Bible that with a sling threw
a stone at Goliath the giant and killed him instantly. It is the story
of an ordinary boy who became a hero. Michelangelo’s sculpture
shows us David as a naked young man. It is a massive sculpture
(5.5 metres tall!), made of marble and stands in a museum in Italy.
The original is too valuable to leave out in the rain where it was
meant to stand. Instead, a copy has been made and can be seen
in the street in the centre of Florence.
The Creation of
Adam, Detail of Sistine
Chapel, 1508-12
Michelangelo went to Rome to work for the Pope and in 1508 was commissioned to make his most famous artwork. The pope asked him to
paint the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a large church in the
centre of the Vatican in Rome. After a year of planning the project Michelangelo began work in 1509 and finished in 1512. Michelangelo carried out almost all of the painting himself.
He divided the huge ceiling up into a number of panels that each told a
different part of the story from the beginning of the Bible when God was
creating the world. He divided the stories from Genesis (the first book
of the Bible) into nine parts, beginning with God creating the light and
ending with the story of Noah.
David,, 1501-4
The Pope was not always an easy person to work for, and there are stories about how he used to hit Michelangelo with his stick when he wasn’t happy with how the painting was going! There were regularly
problems between the great artist and the head of the Catholic Church (the pope). Both men had their own
ideas of how they wanted things to be done - and these ideas were often quite different.
22 years later, a different pope, Paul III, made Michelangelo his head architect, painter and sculptor. This
was probably the most important job in the whole of Italy at the time. It was then that he was asked to paint
a fresco painting for the end wall of the Sistine Chapel. The subject of the painting was The Last Judgement.
The resulting painting is a huge picture filled with movement and figures.
Jesus stands at the centre of it all with
people all around him and angels in
the sky above him.
This was, once again, a very ambitious and long project. It was eventually finished in 1541. However, that
was not the end of the story. Many of
the people that Michelangelo had
painted were painted naked (without
any clothes on!). This was how Michelangelo chose to paint them, and
pope Paul III did not mind. But only a
few years later yet another new Pope
said that he wanted the painting
changed. So in 1559-1560, one of
Michelangelo's students Danielle da
Volterra was asked to paint clothes on
many of the figures.
The last few years of his life Michelangelo spent most of his time working on
architectural projects. He designed
many churches and worked on the
designed for the biggest church in
Rome, St Peter's.
Michelangelo died in Rome in February 1564 at the age of 89 years.
The Last Judgement, 1534-41, Sistine Chapel, Rome
The Last Judgment: Paintings with the title, the Last Judgment are often found in the history of art. The
subject of the paintings is when Jesus returns to earth (some time in future). He will be returning to earth
to judge the people - both the living and the dead. Those people who have lived their life in God's way
will go to heaven - and those who have not will go to hell.
Take a little look around the Sistaine Chapel and Michelangelo’s painting using the link below.
Assignment – Michelangelo
Did Michelangelo think that painting or sculpture was the most important form of art?
Did Michelangelo carve the statue that we can now see, standing outside in a street
in Florence?
How long did it take Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel?
How many parts is the story of Genesis (the first book in the Bible) divided into in
Michelangelo’s painting?
Did Michelangelo have a good relationship with his patron?
One part of the decoration of the Sistine Chapel was completed much later than the
rest, what was the title of this part of the painting, and when was it finished?
What person from the Bible stands at the middle of the painting?
What sort of painting technique was used to paint the Sistine Chapel?
Why did Michelangelo’s pupil Daniele da Volterra have to paint some extra detail on
the paintings about 20 years later?
Towards the end of his life did Michelangelo spend most of his time working on
paintings, sculpture or architecture?
The renaissance
Having reached the end of the ‘Renaissance’ module we should return to the Guiding Questions that we had
at the start. Think about the artworks that we’ve looked at and the subjects that we have discussed and try to
answer the questions as fully as possible for yourself.
How did fantasies and nightmares find their way into
Renaissance art?
How did the Renaissance
artist make great improvements in representing the
real World in their pictures?
How did art and science connect in the
Renaissance World?