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Art History 361
Summary of the
Renaissance
The word "Renaissance" comes from the French and means
rebirth, the rebirth of ancient learning. In Italian, the word is
Rinascenza.
The Italian Renaissance period is usually divided into Early
Renaissance (1420-1500) and High Renaissance (1500-20).
Major Time Periods in Renaissance Art:
13th Century
14th Century
15th Century
16th Century
Ideas and Concepts: Humanism, Neoplatonism, and Aristotelianism
The Classical in the Renaissance
The Renaissance's Five Great Achievements
Renaissance Characteristics:
Painting
Sculpture
Architecture
13th Century
Christian painting and sculpture were just beginning
to break away from the restraints of the dogma and
conventions of the earlier medieval period.
Breaking away in order to give greater human
emotional content to religious subject matter.
The life and teachings of St. Francis of Assisi had
been largely responsible for this.
Also responsible were the contacts with French
Gothic art.
14th Century
Once attention had been drawn to human emotion, it was only natural
that interest in the human being himself and in his physical surroundings
should follow.
The resulting secularization of religious subject matter is apparent in
the paintings of the 14th century.
15th Century
More detailed observation of man himself and of nature
followed in the 15th century with the growth of interest in
anatomy, perspective, details of nature, landscape
backgrounds, and form and color in light.
Paintings of the 15th century also reflect the growing curiosity about
man's achievement in Italy's past--that is, the Classic past.
It is this preoccupation with and study of Classic culture and art
that gave the Renaissance in Italy its particular character.
Classic culture also brought with it mythology and the ideal of
beauty.
16th Century
Christianity was added to Platonic ideal: Neo-platonism.
Michelangelo in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and Raphael in the
Vatican Stanze are representative of this movement at the beginning of
the 16th century; they brought the Renaissance to the highest
achievement in painting in Rome.
But the attempt to reconcile paganism and Christianity foundered.
The Reformation intervened and the works of the Mannerists show
what resulted in painting.
The Counter-Reformation ushered in the new period, the Baroque.
Ideas and Concepts:
Humanism, Neoplatonism, and
Aristotelianism
The art of a period is a reflection of the psychological, religious, and
political forces at work during that period.
Humanism
Humanism was the basic concept of the Italian Renaissance. It is
the term used to define that philosophical movement in Italy at the end
of the 14th century and during the 15th and 16th centuries which
asserted the right of the individual to the use of his own reason and
belief, and stressed the importance and potential of man as an
individual.
This concept can be identified with a belief in the power of
learning and science to produce "the complete man". This rational and
scientific conception of the world is the basis of our modern
civilization. Modern Humanism originated in the Renaissance when
scholars, writers, poets, artists, philosophers and scientists sought
regeneration in the freer intellectual spirit of Classical times.
The Humanists saw no conflict between the New Learning--the
newly rediscovered wisdom of the ancient world--and the authority of
the Church. They felt that the study of the ancient great writers of
Greece and Rome was a tool for the understanding of true Christian
doctrine, and that Platonic philosophy (the belief in the ideal of physical
beauty as the mani-festation of God, the One Supreme Being) could
only illumi-nate, never undermine, theology.
Neo-Platonism
Neo-Platonism in the Renaissance was the philosophy based on the teachings
and doctrines of a group of thinkers of the early Christian era who endeavored
to reconcile the teachings of Plato with
Christian concepts.
The Neo-Platonists, being at the same time both lovers of the
pagan past with its Platonic ideals of physical beauty, and being
Christians, wanted to fuse this pagan idealism with Christian doctrine.
The art and taste during the Renaissance for complicated mythological
fantasies intermingled with allegories and symbolisms tried to achieve
this fusion of the Platonic idealism with Christian doctrine. The
allegorical value of the art lies in this union of the Classical antique and
the Christian.
The Neo-Platonists conceived of the Christian religion as an
eternal doctrine existing even before the advent of historical
Christianity. The main object of the Neo-Platonic Academy in Florence
in the 15th century was the reconciliation of the spirit of antiquity with
that of Christianity.
The meaning of God to the Neo-Platonists was thus:
God was Beauty and the source of Beauty.
God's image is Man.
Therefore, the ideally beautiful Man is the closest approximation of
God on this earth.
Michelangelo was the greatest Neo-Platonic artist who believed that the
spirit of Classical art inspired and guided the formation of the concetto
(concept) of beauty in the mind.
Aristotelianism
In the Renaissance, another school of classical learning was coterminous and
was finally reconciled with Neo-Platonism, called
Aristotelianism. Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) first formulated this
concept of art based on the writings of Aristotle via Vitruvius (early
1st century A.D. classical author). It is the Aristotelian conception of
the visible world as ultimate reality.
Alberti's concept of beauty in a work of art is the harmony between
all the parts so that nothing can be added to it or taken from it
without impairing the whole. The work of art is synthesized by
adding together the most beautiful observable examples of the
component parts. Leonardo da Vinci, always the scientist, even
when a painter, was the chief exponent of the Aristotelian concept.
The Classical in the Renaissance
In the broadest artistic sense, Classical art is that art
which is based on the study of classical models, and art
which emphasizes qualities considered to be
characteristically Greek and Roman in style and spirit:
Reason
Objectivity
Discipline
Restraint
Order
Balance
Discipline
Restraint
These characteristics can be summed up in one
term: Harmony.
The essential conditions that encourage Classical
art are:
Pride in the past
Peace in the present
Confidence in the future
The Renaissance's Five Great Achievements
There are five fundamental elements in the great achievements of the
Italian Renaissance in the world of Art:
Naturalism
Organization of space
Invention of parallel
perspective by Filippo
Brunelleschi: the
The
use ofuse
classical
scientific
of a motifs
The
new dignity
the individual
perspective
basedofon
lines that come together
at a single vanishing
point on the horizon
Characteristics of Renaissance Painting
Harmonious proportions among all elements of a
painting
Reintroduction of chiaroscuro: the gradations of
light and dark within a picture, especially one in
which the forms are largely determined, not by
sharp outlines but by the meeting of lighter and
darker areas
The perfection of geometric or parallel perspective
Characteristics of Renaissance Sculpture
The reintroduction of contrapposto: the pose of
the human form in which the head and shoulders face
in a different direction from the hips and legs -- a
spiral twist
The systematic study of anatomy and of the
organic functions of the body
Free-standing monumental statues
Characteristics of Renaissance
Architecture
A harmony of all parts with symmetry and order of
geometric proportions and designs using Classical
architectural elements.
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