Download The renaissance mind mirrored in art

The Renaissance Mind Mirrored in Art
Susan Fegley Osmond. The World & I. Washington: Dec 1998. Vol. 13, Iss. 12; pg. 18
This article aims to outline some basic changes in
worldview that took place during the Renaissancea movement and an era of awakening that turned
from the medieval order and laid the basis for
Western civilization up to the present. Today, when
the Renaissance is mentioned, what springs to
most people's mind is art. Therefore, we will take
painting and sculpture as our springboard for
discussing some fundamental changes in attitudeusing Renaissance art as a window, as it were,
onto the Renaissance mind. In particular we will
look at how art evidences new attitudes toward
man, his place in the world, and his relationship to
God.
marked increase in individual freedom and
autonomy, and the acceptance of physical
existence and of the desire to pursue a happy,
practical life. Renaissance thinkers stressed man's
intrinsic value and dignity as a being created in the
image and likeness of God. Related to this was a
pervasive desire to pursue a direct relationship with
the Divinity founded on personal mystical
experience and/or the study of Scripture, early
church writings, and even pagan texts reinterpreted
in Christian terms. Also fundamental to the era was
the desire to understand and master nature
through direct observation and the discovery of its
laws and structure.
Renaissance (from the French for "rebirth") is a
term coined in the nineteenth century originally to
denote the revival of art and letters under the
influence of ancient Roman and Greek models.
This revival began in Italy in the fourteenth century,
flourished in the fifteenth, and in the sixteenth
reached apogee and then crisis in Italy while it
spread through most of Europe. But humanism's
classical learning alone cannot account for the
immense changes that took place during these
centuries; moreover, movements originating in the
North also contributed to these changes. Therefore
the term Renaissance has also come to denote the
era in general and its overriding spirit, in which
desires intrinsic to human nature, generally
repressed under medieval feudalism, burst forth
with new fervor and resulted in a new culture.
As in any period, remnants of the old worldview
coexisted with and to some extent helped shape
the new. In northern Europe, Gothic art and culture
(as it was derisively named by Italian humanists)
held sway into the sixteenth century, and, as a
result, the Renaissance there had a strongly
religious cast.
Understood as an era and also as an inspiritus of
awakening, the Renaissance includes both the
movement of humanism that emanated from Italy
and the northern-based Reformation (and its
precursors in England and Bohemia in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). These two
developments should by no means be equated
with each other, but they had in some respects a
common root and exerted a powerful influence on
each other. The era is also characterized by
increasing secularization, burgeoning trade (run by
a powerful merchant class), the expanding power
of northern European monarchies and of vying
Italian city-states, and the beginnings of the age of
exploration and the scientific revolution.
It seems that the Renaissance sprang forth in
response to the need for outlets through which
some basic human desires, generally denied in the
medieval order of things, could be expressed and
find fulfillment. One sees during the Renaissance a
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
protoreformers such as John Wycliff and the
Lollards in England and Jan Huss and the various
branches of the Hussites in Bohemia called for lay
study of the Bible and preaching in the vernacular,
as well as the moral reform of the clergy. Less
extreme but more pervasive was the Devotio
Moderna-which stressed individual piety and
education, found a focal point in Thomas a Kempis'
Imitation of Christ, and in time fused the finest
elements of Scholasticism and humanism. All of
these prepared the ground for the Reformation,
which began in 1517. (See the February 1999
issue for a Millennial Moments article on the
Reformation.) In the North the Renaissance spirit
of revival found expression in these religious
movements and also in the humanism that drifted
northward from Italy. Both affected all areas of
society and culture.
Gothic art and culture had never had much impact
on Italy, however; traces are mostly confined to the
northernmost regions. Likewise, feudalism was
never so pervasive there as in northern Europe. In
an environment of commerce-fueled rival citystates, the founders of the Italian Renaissance
looked to Italy's glorious ancient past as an
impetus for revival. Here, in rediscovered ancient
texts and in the ruins of ancient buildings and
sculpture, they anchored their efforts to break free
of medieval frames of reference and to discover a
true understanding of man, finding in classical
civilization a worldview in some respects
sympathetic to their own. Soon they found
confidence to follow the dictates of their own
observations, powers of reason, and conscience
andwhile continuing to learn from the revered
wisdom of the ancients-to trust their own ability to
surpass all previous achievements.
THUMBNAIL HISTORY
In this article we will present certain traits in the art
of the fifteenth and first third of the sixteenth
centuries and discuss how these indicate
underlying Renaissance attitudes. Because we will
go trait by trait, it will necessitate jumping around
chronologically and geographically in a way that
might be confusing. Therefore it would be useful to
first get our bearings in a thumbnail outline of the
history of art during the Renaissance, as it is
usually delineated.
Renaissance art in "the South" (Italy) and that in
"the North" (northern Europe) are usually treated
separately. First, the early shoots of the
Renaissance in fourteenth-century Italy are
examined, with the beginnings of the studia
humanitatis ("studies of mankind")-later called
humanism-by Petrarch and others who sought out
and translated into the vernacular ancient
philosophical and literary texts. This coincided with
a tendency in art to move away from Byzantine,
Romanesque, and Gothic models in the direction of
naturalism, informed to some degree by classical
ruins and also by Franciscan humanitarianism. The
most celebrated artist of this period is Giotto.
Then ensues an exploration of the Early
Renaissance (spanning the fifteenth century), in
which, centered mostly in republican yet Medicidominated Florence and a few other cities, a
newfound confidence in the innate dignity of man
and the value of individuality (rooted in humanistic
study), coupled with a passion to comprehend and
utilize the divine mathematics undergirding the
order of the world, fueled the creation of seminal
works by Donatello, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo
Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Sandro
Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna,
the Bellinis, and Leonardo da Vinci among others.
Some of these artists overlap into the next period,
called the High Renaissance, the geographical
center of which was (mostly) Rome. There despotic
popes commissioned some of the world's immortal
artworks by towering figures such as Michelangelo
Buonarotti and Raphael and lesser giants such as
Donato Bramante and Perugino. The art of this
period is distinguished by its harmony, balance,
and profundity of ideas.
Following the devastating Sack of Rome in 1527 by
forces of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the
spotlight shifts to Venice and central Italy with
artists such as Giorgione, Titian, and Antonio
Correggio, as well as architect Andrea Palladio.
During the mid to late sixteenth century-in the wake
of the breakup of Christendom into opposing
camps, the occupation of Italy by foreign powers,
and the waning of Venice's trading dominancean
era of uncertainty and disillusionment set in.
Reflecting this was an art style dubbed Mannerism
for its extremes of emotionalism, purposeful
imbalance and distortion, and expressionism.
Parmigianino, Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto,
and (working in Spain but Venicetrained) El Greco
characterize this restless period that segued into
the Baroque.
Histories of Renaissance art in the North trace at
first the Gothic International Style and the
innovations of the Flemish Primitives and other
early Netherlandish painters in the fifteenth
century. They then look mostly to developments in
Germany, where Albrecht Durer fused visionary
and empirical aspects of the northern Gothic spirit
with what he learned of linear perspective and
rules of proportion through journeys to Italy.
Meanwhile, the artist whom history has come to
know as Matthias Grinewald brought Gothic
mystical pietism to a haunting apogee in his manypaneled Isenheim altarpiece. Woodcuts and
engravings, originating in the North, became
influential both as a means to disseminate the
imagery of important paintings through
reproduction and as a medium for original works.
In the land where the printing press was born, the
word in time surpassed the image as the motor of
culture. And throughout the North, Protestants
cleansed churches of images and religious articles
and shut down monasteries, so the scope allowed
to art narrowed drastically. Hans Holbein the
Younger moved to Henry VIII's England, where his
work was confined almost exclusively to
portraiture. Later, seventeenth-century Dutch
artists would broaden the field to also include
landscapes, still lifes, genre painting, and private
meditations on biblical themes.
RISE OF NATURALISM
We will now look at a selection of developments in
painting and sculpture that evidence specific
aspects of the Renaissance worldview. First we will
discuss naturalism, which refers to the idea that art
should be a mirror of nature.
Romanesque and Byzantine art did not adhere to
this idea. In a mostly illiterate and predominantly
Christian society, images became the medium to
educate the masses about Christian doctrine.
Subject matter was prescribed, as was the manner
of depiction. An elaborate system of didactic
symbols was developed to identify characters,
events, and important ideas. In this highly stylized
art, human figures were generally devoid both of a
sense of fleshed form and of individual identity.
Settings were connoted by the barest of means,
and human figures seemed to exist in a space
beyond dimension, frequently set against a
background of burnished gold leaf denoting a
realm of divine illumination.
In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
however, sculpture in the North began the thaw
into naturalism with the emergence of Gothic art.
Church sculpture became somewhat more
rounded, lifelike, and expressive. In Italy, as we
have noted, the Gothic style took only tenuous
hold. Nonetheless, in the mid to late thirteenth
century strains of naturalism worked their way into
art there.
An impetus for this came from English Franciscan
Roger Bacon, who helped develop fledgling
experimental science. He complained that the
images preachers had to rely on to help educate
their flock were not vivid or evocative enough. In a
section of his encyclopedic Opus ma,jus (1266-68),
written expressly at the request of the pope, he
called for the development of a painting method to
depict palpable forms in convincingly threedimensional space, based on the study and
application of geometry and the science of optics.
Response to this call can be seen in Italian
frescoes of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries.
For artist Giorgio Vasari-the great biographer of
Italian Renaissance artists-the new art had its birth
with Giotto. The cycle of frescoes the Tuscan artist
painted in the Arena Chapel in Padua became a
sort of pilgrimage site for artists of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries.
Giotto's 1305-1306 Lamentationone of his frescos
in the Arena Chapelreveals new emotional
eloquence. It is a scene of grief, yet there are
different reactions to the death of Christ, all derived
from the unique personalities of the characters
involved. Mary, clinging to the body of her son with
one arm draped across his chest, searches his
countenance as if to penetrate the barrier between
life and death; Saint John flings his arms out in
protesting disbelief, as if all the world has been lost
to him; Mary Magdalene gazes in private, tender
sorrow at the beloved feet she once had washed
with tears; each of the others react in similarly
individual ways, while above, the angels give full
vent to their sorrow.
Political developments in Italy played a significant
part in the emergence of artists such as Giotto,
who were confident to assert individual styles
based on the observation of nature rather than the
perpetuation of medieval traditions. During the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, a number of
independent city-states, fortified by their powerful
European-wide trade and banking, formalized their
governments as republics (Venice had even been
a republic since the eighth century). These
qualified democracies were governed ad hoc by
guilds-associations of merchants, bankers,
artisans, and other professionals. The unformalized
nature of the city constitutions enabled men greedy
for power to manipulate the quasi-democratic
governments; relics of the nobility or great
merchant oligarchs tended to lead the communes
into despotism at the hands of a family or a clique
(the fifteenth century saw the most virulent forms of
this). Nonetheless, these republics-particularly
Florence-offered guild-member citizens
unprecedented freedom. Fourteenth-century
frescoes reveal that individuality was not only
evident but already prized in the Italian
cityrepublics.
But burgeoning individuality and naturalism were
not unique to Italians. In the region today known as
the Netherlands and Belgium there had also
sprung up prosperous cities that were semiindependent and run on republican lines by guilds.
Haarlem-born Claus Sluter, an outstanding
sculptor, shows the elevation of individuality in his
powerfully characterized, strikingly realistic figures
for the Well of Moses (1395-1403) in Dijon.
It is in the early to mid fifteenth century that we see
the real flowering of the Renaissance, evident in
both Italy and Flanders. In Italy a new breed of
artists arose with strong, independent
personalities. They knew they were forging a new
art and indeed a new culture, and strove to rival
and even surpass the brilliance of classical
antiquity.
A NEW PERSPECTIVE
During this time we see in the service of naturalism
a development that was to revolutionize art.
Indeed, it defined most painting up to the twentieth
century (and still holds sway in realistic painting).
This was the discovery of linear or vanishing-point
perspective in Florence. The principles of it were
first demonstrated around 1413 by architect Filippo
Brunelleschi (who later gained fame for the
technical feat of designing and erecting the
immense dome of Florence Cathedral). But it was
architect and man of letters Leon Battista Alberti
who first described the underlying geometry and a
simple method in his treatise On Painting in 1435.
This system was further refined by Piero della
Francesca, Leonardo, and Durer.
Early pioneers devised a system of looking at the
world as if through a framed window, in which the
painting's panel (or picture plane) is the
"glasspane." They even devised frames with grids
through which the artist looked at (and could even
trace) the subject to be depicted. This was not a
very scientific approach, but it allowed the artist to
observe and gauge the phenomenon of
foreshortening. Artists had previously noticed that
if, say, you gaze at the interior of a long room, the
sides of the room appear to move inward, while the
floor appears to move up and the ceiling down, so
the wall at the far end of the room appears to be
smaller than a theoretical wall on the spot where
you are standing.
What Brunelleschi and Alberti discovered was
thatto take our example-while your side walls are in
reality pallel, if in your drawing you extend the lines
of their receding top and bottom edges to a
horizontal line denoting the far horizon opposite
your eye level, the lines of the walls all appear to
meet in a single vanishing point. With the further
help of geometry they developed a system to
measure "depth" in the picture. Thus it became
possible to depict objects with exact dimensions
placed in a measurable three-dimensional space
and to draw all objects to proper scale. The result
is a rendition of visual reality quite like what you
see with one eye closed, or like that produced in a
photograph. It's not exactly the way humans see,
for we have stereoscopic vision, among other
things. But it presents a convincing, readable, and
systematic two-dimensional representation of
three-dimensionality.
Early systems of linear perspective used a single
vanishing point in the center of the picture. The
system for working out the depth easily resulted in
the checkerboard floors and street-grounds often
found in Early Italian Renaissance paintings. But
the single vanishing point system works only for
simple scenes in which all planes depicted in depth
are parallel to each other and all planes depicted in
width are parallel to the picture plane. Any plane at
a different angle would result in another vanishing
point. To obtain greater naturalism, a system
evolved years later that used two vanishing points
(or even more) to achieve roundthe-corner or up
hill and down dale effects.
When linear perspective was first introduced,
Florentine artists seized upon it with fervor, for here
they not only had a method to render a scene in
correct perspective, re-creating almost exactly
what the eye sees, but they felt they had found the
key to unlock the divine order of the cosmos. Since
at least the time of Pythagoras in ancient Greece,
people had believed that the universe was
orderedwas held together, in a sense-by sacred
numerical relationships and proportions, by sacred
geometry. Here the artist-architects of the
Renaissance seemed to have found basic
principles underlying the structure of reality. No
wonder they had such confidence that man as a
creative being was capable of achieving divinity.
Here they could experience and vicariously
participate in the very process of the mathematical
creation of the universe through the re-creation of
"worlds" of harmony in their own works.
Geometric relations, mathematical proportion, and
the mysticism of numbers played an important part
in how painters designed their pictures and
architects their buildings. They made the
underlying structure itself embody central ideas or
themes (Piero della Francesca's paintings
demonstrate this most markedly).
Brunelleschi reportedly made two paintings to
demonstrate the principles of perspective he
discovered, but these are now lost. His good friend
the sculptor Donatello was apparently the first to
use Brunelleschi's findings, though rather
erratically; this was in his bronze relief Feast of
Herod (1423-27).
It was another friend of Brunelleschi's, the shortlived Masaccio, who made the earliest extant
painting utilizing the new perspective technique
consistently. The Holy Trinity With the Virgin, St.
John, and Donors (c. 1425-28), a fresco on a wall
of the Santa Maria Novella Church in Florence,
creates the illusion of a two-tiered chapel. The
bottom of this, with the tomb and skeleton of Adam,
appears to jut into the space of the church in which
the viewer stands. The upper part creates the
optical illusion of an additional barrel-vaulted wing
to the church, a "chapel of Golgatha" that houses
the crucified Christ, God the Father looming behind
him, and the dove of the Holy Spirit between them,
with Saint John and Mary flanking the scene. The
overall arrangement makes literal the Trinity
through the use of the triangle-or, more exactly, the
intersection of two triangles at the apex, one in the
spiritual chapel and the other linking the spiritual
dimension with the earthly one. Masaccio's
perspectival tour de force thus served as a most
effective vehicle through which a viewer could
contemplate the mysteries of the Trinity, the
Incarnation, and the process of redemption.
PERSPECTIVE AS SYMBOL
The development of linear perspective indicates
important things about the territory that the
Renaissance mind opened to inquiry and the new
worldview this brought into being. Most obvious is
a sense of being completely at home in the world
and an integral part of it-quite different from the
medieval feeling of being stranded in a realm of
mortality while one's true habitat is some great
dimensionless beyond. Earlier attempts at
perspective revealed man coming down to earth,
as it were, but with linear perspective he had truly
landed-and not only in the realm of pictures.
Medieval painting had had no extension in depth
and no horizon. Renaissance man discovered
extension, then discovered the horizonand then
wanted to extend his horizons!
Thus city-states and nation-states vied to expand
their territories, and merchants their spheres of
trade. And with the help of the geometry through
which artist-architects had first made a graph of
space, explorers eventually found a way to graph
their way across the trackless seas. The shores no
longer needed to be clung to-neither the physical
shores of Europe and Africa nor the shores of
knowledge itself.
Now seeming to be set on a course to fulfill the
biblical dictum to become lord of creation,
Renaissance man set out to master the world's
territory, and likewise to master the workings of the
universe through science. (Other articles in this
Millennial Moments series explore these
developments; see "Columbus and the Age of
Exploration" in the November 1998 issue and an
essay on Galileo and the scientific revolution
scheduled for the April 1999 issue.)
But the graphed space that linear perspective
outlines is in some sense a picture of the Western
mind's approach to knowledge from here on in. It
no longer primarily takes either a linear approach
or a poetic-intuitive one, as one can see
predominant in other cultures. Through its
investigations-whether they be scientific,
philosophical, or artistic-the postmedieval Western
mind seeks to find underlying laws and principles
and to form an understanding of how they
interrelate so as to make a grid or framework upon
which all knowledge can be plotted and connected
and formed into a solid edifice.
Linear perspective implies the rise of rationalism as
an approach to knowledge. It also shows the stage
being set for the quest for objectivity in knowledgeand also the inescapable fact of subjectivity. In
viewing the world as though through a window,
Early Renaissance artists mentally set themselves
apart from their subjects-they made themselves
observers from outside a literal frame of reference.
They then attempted to record everything within
that frame as exactly as possible, without
preconception. Early Renaissance Florentine
paintings and reliefs-usually depicting frontal,
straight-on scenes with a central vanishing pointparticularly conveyed this sense of being objective
before the truth as revealed through the world's
window.
Yet, perspective also manifests the subjectivity of
knowledge. What you see in your frame of
reference changes depending on your position.
This yields a certain angle that obstructs certain
elements while it reveals others. Your perception of
reality is inevitably slanted and your knowledge
limited. It is also uniquely your own. Linear
perspective gives unprecedented power to the
individual observer. The individual becomes the
main arbiter of his perceptions and of his
relationship to the world.
But this can be used to control others. The
subjectivity inevitable in presenting things in linear
perspective led artists such as Mantegna and
especially those in the later Mannerist and Baroque
periods to employ extreme or unexpected angles
for dramatic effect. Art became in a sense
exploitative-especially during the CounterReformation, which sought to enforce a certain
"view," to overwhelm the spectator, and to
manipulate him emotionally. So here we have
another paradox of Western life pictorially
symbolized in perspective. On the one hand, linear
perspective makes the individual of primary
importance-if you are the "artist" creating the scene
(that is, if you have the freedom to choose your
own point of view). In this it is a herald of the
democratic spirit. On the other hand, it is also a
forecast of authoritarian control through what is
presented to people as absolute truth-what people
are allowed to see.
One more interesting point about linear perspective
has to do with the changing understanding of the
relationship between man and God during the
Renaissance. In medieval depictions there was no
point of infinity such as that implied in linear
perspective's vanishing point. God, the infinitely
supurnal, was some divine omnipotence beyond
the heavens. Perspective's vanishing point brought
the infinite, as it were, into the phenomenal world.
But it did more than this. It made integral a
personal, unique relationship between the eye-I
and that infinite. In linear perspective the whole
picture of reality hinges on the vanishing point, but
where the vanishing point falls within the frame
depends on the angle of vision. Thus we have a
pictorial paradigm for the idea that every person
will experience God uniquely, based on his
viewpoint.
The linear perspective generally employed by
Italians and that usually used by northerners are
different in a way that seems to point toward
South-North differences in relating to God during
the Reformation. The Italians tended to use a
central vanishing point, presenting a frontal view of
deep space that psychologically did not seem to
extend into the viewer's own space but halted at
the picture plane (the "frame"). This can be seen
most dramatically in Antonello da Messina's St.
Jerome in His Study (c. 1475), in which the artist
has actually depicted a barrierlike marble archway
on the picture plane beyond which we view the
scholar at work in his cabinet, with surrounding
rooms receding inordinately back into the distance.
By contrast, employing a practice prevalent in the
North, Durer presents in his 1514 engraving St.
Jerome in His Cabin.et an oblique view that not
only creates an interior of normal dimensions but
gives the impression that the floor extends out
under our own feet. We feel we have just entered
the room and are part of the scene. Thus, in
northern depictions, the infinite became not only
imminent but intimate.
Linear perspective circumscribes the world so that
we are cut off from the realm of the magical, so to
speak-that spaceless space in medieval art from
which objects seem to appear and disappear. But
linear perspective opens a magnificent window
where it closed a door. In religious art, it is a
window-as art historian Erwin Panofsky puts it-onto
"the realm of the visionary, where the miraculous
becomes a direct experience of the beholder, in
that the supernatural events in a sense erupt into
his own, apparently natural, visual space and so
permit him really to `internalize' their
supernaturalness."
Panofsky continues, "Perspective, in transforming
the ousia (reality) into the phainomenon
(appearance), seems to reduce the divine to a
mere subject matter for human consciousness; but
for that very reason, conversely, it expands human
consciousness into a vessel for the divine."
EMPIRICAL APPROACH
While linear perspective, with its rationalistic
approach, was being formulated and refined in
Italy, in the North there arose an exacting form of
naturalism that was based in meticulous empirical
observation. This originated in Flanders, and it
grew out of the tradition of intricate manuscript
illumination. The innovators were later dubbed the
Flemish Primitives (so called because they were
the first artists to work in a sophisticated form of oilbased paint). They included such artists as Robert
Campin, his apprentice Rogier van der Weyden,
and Jan van Eyck, as well as their later followers.
Among the Flemish Primitives, van Eyck was the
most assiduous exponent of art as a mirror of
nature. His Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride (also
known as Arnolfini Wedding, 1434) shows every
detail of the couple's garb and refined chamber,
down to individual hairs in the dog's fur and
detailed reflections in the convex mirror. In the
fourteenth century, Englishman William of Ockham
had elaborated the theory of Nominalism, which
rejected the prevailing Scholastic view that
"universals," or categories, really exist and claimed
instead that only individual, "particular" things do;
he also claimed that knowledge (as opposed to
that which can only be taken on faith) comes from
direct, sense-based experience of individual things.
Surely with van Eyck we have Nominalism in paint.
It shows that a fundamental change has occurred
in how man perceives the world.
Van Eyck has taken great care to create a sense
that Arnolfini and his bride inhabit threedimensional space, though the artist took an
empirical, pragmatic approach to perspective that
yields results different from the vanishing-point
perspective developed around the same time in
Italy Yet by planting his figures firmly on a receding
floor upon which objects at the back of the room
appear smaller than those in front, and through
delicately and consistently delineating light and
shadow, the artist convincingly conveys depth and
tangibility. He furthermore offers an honest
portrayal of personality even when it is unflattering,
not shrinking from capturing the sly, bloodlessly
cold features of his patron (who, history records,
was quite a sinister fellow). In all this-minute
recording of the optical perception of the surface of
things, capturing a sense of depth through scale
and one-point lighting, and personality-revealing
portraiture-van Eyck was an innovator in the North.
modeling with a consistent source of light, it is an
important aspect of convincingly conveying a
sense of depth.
Here we see that, simultaneous with developments
in Italy, the Flemish Renaissance mind has
decisively broken free of medieval insubstantiality
and found a home on earth-literally a defined
space. Van Eyck's microscopic-telescopic vision,
as it has been called, reveals a mind that not only
accepts the world but eagerly investigates every
particle of it, as if expecting to bring to light eternal
verities clothed in the tangible. A century and a half
before Francis Bacon, we see operative in the art
of van Eyck and his Flemish peers an informal yet
exacting empiricism at work as a method of
knowledge-the use of an inductive approach
whereby through the accumulation of detail upon
detail a comprehensive grasp of reality can be
achieved.
In Italy the originator of atmospheric perspective
and chiaroscuro (light and shadow) modeling was
Massacio. This and his pionering work in linear
perspective make him a watershed figure in the
history of art-a fact well appreciated by painters of
the Italian Renaissance. His cycle of frescoes in
the Branacci Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria
del Carmine in Florence was the manifesto of the
new pictorial style and became the model for all
Florentine artists, including Michelangelo, who
personally studied the frescoes to learn the new art
of chiaroscuro.
It must be noted, however, that the early
Netherlandish painters, and van Eyck in particular,
further developed the medieval passion for
symbolism. Van Eyck often constructs an intricate
subtext of symbols and references drawn not only
from long iconographic tradition but also from his
wide reading, weaving a manylayered web of
meaning and inference almost as detailed and
nuanced (though not always as comprehensible)
as his portrayal of the visible world. This penchant
for creating in a subtext of symbolism a sort of
shorthand interactive exegesis or commentary-a
penchant in some ways related to Scholasticism's
delight in the subtleties of argument and the
accumulation of authoritative opinion-remained a
hallmark of northern art for centuries.
It shows that a kind of microscopically investigative
rationalism was simultaneously at work with
empirical observation.
ATTENTION TO ATMOSPHERE
Netherlandish artists innovated the depiction of
detailed landscapes in the background of their
paintings. In these works we see the development
of atmospheric perspective-the depiction of
changes in tone and color values that can be
observed in objects receding from the spectator.
Because of moisture and dust particles in the air,
the farther something is from the viewer the more
muted is its color, tending toward blue in the far
distance. The difference in atmosphere between
northern Europe and the Mediterranean accounts
in part for the greater interest afforded atmospheric
perspective by northern painters. But, together with
The greatest Renaissance master of modeling and
atmospheric perspective, however, was Leonardo.
He developed sfumato ("smoke") modeling, the
transition of tone from light to dark so gradual as to
be imperceptible. (A version of this is previously
apparent in van Eyck, but Leonardo expanded the
tonal spectrum to include more dramatic darks,
while van Eyck accurately observed the effects of
not only the shadows cast by a primary light but
reflected light playing in these shadows.) In works
such as his first version of Virgin of the Rocks
(1483-85), we can see Leonardo using sfumato
modeling and atmospheric perspective to soften
the overall image into a unity and also to impart a
mood of gentle yet profound gravity. The
harmonizing of all elements-with figures arranged
in geometric forms (in Leonardo's case usually the
pyramid) and all proportions in careful balance-is
integral to the Renaissance ideal of beauty. But in
his sfumato and delicate atmospherics Leonardo
goes beyond geometrics to produce harmony
through something that connotes intuitive
perception. His approach-not only combining the
outward expression of well-proportioned forms but
harmonizing three inward ways of knowing: the
intellectual, the empirical, and the emotionalintuitive-epitomizes the ideal balance achieved
during the all too brief High Renaissance.
The Mannerist painters would continue to utilize
chiaroscuro modeling and atmospheric perspective
to convey an impression of profundity as well as
spacial depth, but in their unbalanced paintingssuch as those of Tintoretto-the techniques are
manipulated to heighten the rather hysteric
emotional effect. Nonetheless, when one looks
back to see how far painting had come from
medieval times, you can see a radical increase in
the sensitivity to and honesty about emotion, and
atmospheric effects are an important part of this. A
sense of mood does not exist in medieval painting,
but it becomes primary in later sixteenth-century
Italian and especially seventeenthcentury Dutch,
Spanish, and Italian painting.
RENAISSANCE INDIVIDUALISM
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of
the Renaissance is the emergence of
individualism. We have already discussed how the
unique value of the individual is implied in linear
perspective. Individualism is also revealed,
perhaps more blatantly, in the care with which each
of the outstanding artists of the era cultivated a
unique style. It is also demonstrated in the
increasing depiction of human figures as unique,
complex individuals.
Although there was discernible originality in artists
of the 1300s, with the fifteenth century, in both Italy
and the Low Countries, we see a quantum leap in
the intensification of personal style among the
luminaries of the day. The manifesto for this was
Donatello's marble St. Mark (1411-15) in Florence.
Art historian Frederick Hartt has said, "It has been
rightly claimed that this statue represents so abrupt
a break with tradition that it should be considered a
mutation-a fundamental declaration of the new
Renaissance position with respect to the visible
world."
What makes the St. Mark revolutionary is its
decidedly classical gravitas and moral grandeur.
The full-bodied figure stands in natural
contrapposto that has nothing to do with the
artificial grace of the Gothic International Style
exemplified, for example, in the nearly
contemporary St. John the Baptist and St. Matthew
by Lorenzo Ghiberti. (These, like the St. Mark,
occupied niches on the outside of Florence's grain
exchange, the Orsanmichele, which was also a
shrine.) St. Mark's clothing, too, is not the usual
study in late Gothic decorative lyricism but is
completely realistic, revealing the contours of a
solid body beneath its weighty folds. (Vasari tells
us of a technique, apparently originated by
Donatello, in which the sculptor, making his
preparatory model, would make a clay nude and
then dip sheets of cloth in clay slip and drape them
on the figure.)
But even more revolutionary than this is the
psychological realism that Donatello brought to his
depiction of the saint. Michelangelo said of the
statue, "No one could fail to believe the word of
such a sincere man." The most compelling thing
about the figure is the concentrated power of the
face, with its alert tension, assessing dangers from
without while summoning inner resources to deal
with them. Hartt comments, "This noble face with
its expression of severe determination-the Italian
term terrible is how the Renaissance would
describe it-can be thought of as a symbolic portrait
of the ideal Florentine under stress.. . . It is a
summation of the virtues demanded in an age of
crisis."
More than any of his contemporaries, Donatello
showed fascination with the inner life of his
subjects. He remained an innovator throughout his
career. His bronze David (c. 1440) was the first
nude rendition of this biblical character. (In the
Middle Ages and Renaissance nudity symbolized
the nakedness of the soul before God; in Donatello
this was combined with the humanists' admiration
of the body as the encapsulation of ideal beauty.)
The sinuous figure was also possibly the first
freestanding statue since antiquity-quite literally the
embodiment of republican individualism. In later
years, the longlived artist developed a highly
expressionistic style, and it appears he forsook the
humanistic ideals of his youth during a time of
religious reaction in Florence dominated by its
archbishop. His harrowing Mary Magdalene (c.
1453-55) is unforgettable evidence of this.
During the fifteenth century, the portrayal of
convincingly individual character is sporadic, both
in the South and the North. It became more
pervasive during the sixteenth century.
Perhaps the best vehicle for communicating the
individuality of human beings in art was the revival
of the ancient art of portraiture. Portraits were
almost always commissioned by patrons, and the
fact that they wanted to leave some lasting
memorial to themselves itself is evidence of a new
attitude. In Italy, early pictorial portraits tended to
be profiles, and often they recorded little more than
the outward visage of the sitter. It was in Flanders
that portraiture became the revelation of
personality, in the art of van Eyck and van der
Weyden. Van Eyck's Man in a Red Turban (1433),
possibly a self-portrait, was the first in which the
sitter turned his gaze directly to meet that of the
viewer. Here we see a man of the world, a person
of unmistakable intelligence who has his own
opinions and is not about to change them. He
takes things as they come and suffers no illusions.
His middle-aged face, with wrinkles surrounding
the skeptical eyes and thin lips, is recorded in
every particular, down to the graying stubble on his
chin.
In Italy, portraiture as a window onto character later
reached great heights in such works as Raphael's
Baldasarre Castiglione (1514-15), Leonardo's
enigmatic Mona Lisa (c. 1503-1506 ), and many
works by Titian, including The Young Englishman
(c. 1540-45).
Self-portraiture also became a common practice for
the first time. Gothic artists had sometimes worked
apparent self-portraits into their great decorative
schemes. This practice was carried on in
Renaissance Italy, where artists often discreetly
placed portraits of themselves in scenes. In the
North, however, artists developed selfportraiture as
a separate genre, devoting specific paintings to the
depictionindeed, the examination-of themselves.
Chief among these was Durer.
Artists of the Renaissance further demonstrated
individualism in the strength of their egos.
Particularly in Italy the period is distinguished by
intense rivalries and enmities between artists who
sought after renown as unique creative geniuses
(itself a new idea). This was all part of artists'
stringent efforts to elevate their social status. For
centuries before (and after) the Renaissance,
those engaged in manual labor were low on the
totem pole. Artists were considered mere
crafstmen who had only utilitarian skills and thus
required no particular education besides the
routine artisan's apprenticeship. Brunelleschi and
Donatello, however, acquainted themselves with
humanist studies and meticulously researched
ruins of antiquity firsthand. Alberti, an early
exemplar of the "universal man" much extolled in
the Renaissance (but rarely achieved), wrote
influential treatises and, joined by many
colleagues, sought to have art accepted as one of
the liberal arts in education. This was ultimately
achieved.
Artists with their own workshops felt more free to
show they could not easily be pushed around by
patrons. We have the example of Donatello: When
a Genoese merchant claimed to have been
overcharged because the price for a bust worked
out to more than half a florin for a day's work,
Donatello replied that he himself could ruin the
fruits of a year's toil in an instant and shattered the
bust onto the ground, adding that the merchant
showed he was more used to bargaining for beans
than for bronzes. (On the other hand, artists who
were put in the permanent employ of princes
endured virtual servitude and ran the risk of turning
into glorified odd-job men.)
Artists had a new respect for their calling and for
their own creative powers. Leonardo proclaimed
that whatever a painter wants to do, he is "Lord
and God" to do it, and that the painter's mind "is a
copy of the divine mind, since it operates freely" in
the creation of objects and beings out of nothing.
"The divine Michelangelo"-who did not fear to defy
popes when their desires threatened the integrity of
his inspired vision-saw himself and his tools and
stone as instruments of the divine will, and the
creative process as an aspect of salvation.
Durer, the first northern artist to be profoundly
influenced by Italian art and ideas as a result of
several trips there, brought back from Italy the idea
that the artist is not merely a craftsman but a
creative genius, and he worked-with notable
success-to achieve international fame. In him there
was a typically northern blend of personal ambition
with a mixed confidence and humility before God.
A self-portrait done in 1500 creates a startling
emblem in that it portrays the Artist as Christ. Lest
this seem blasphemous, it must be remembered
that this was still the age of the imitatio Christi in
northern Europe, in which the believer strove to
identify himself mystically with the model of Christ
as an ideal. In his notes on the arts, Durer wrote
that "the more we know, the more we resemble the
likeness of Christ who truly knows all things." For
Durer-a later convert to Protestantism-his creative
powers were derived from Christ, and in this selfportrait he confirms to himself and to his viewers
that the artist must strive for ever greater
perfection, far beyond the mastery of technique or
craft: In this lies true genius.
THE DIGNITY OF MAN
All of this shows that there was a new concept of
man at work in the Renaissance. This view extolled
the intrinsic value and dignity of man as the
supreme creation of God and the microcosm of the
world. In 1451-52, Florentine humanist Giannozzo
Manetti wrote a treatise titled On the Dignity and
Excellence of Man, in which he refuted the claims
of medieval theologians that man was worthless in
the sight of God. Instead, Manetti declared man
"lord and king and emperor in the whole orb of the
world, and not unworthy to dominate and to reign
and to rule." He argued that there is nothing the
human intelligence cannot encompass, no mystery
of the cosmos it cannot fathom.
A later humanist, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,
stressed both the freedom and the responsibility of
the individual. In his influential Oration on the
Dignity of Man (1486), Pico has God speaking to
Adam: "The nature of all other beings is limited and
constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed
by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in
accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand
We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the
limits of thy nature." Pico exclaims: ao highest and
most marvelous felicity of man! To him it is granted
to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he
wills." He warns that, depending on which aspects
of his nature one chooses to cultivate, one moves
either downward into the bestial or upward toward
perfection. "Let a certain holy ambition invade our
souls," he exhorts, "so that, not content with the
mediocre, we shall pant after the highest and
(since we may if we wish it) toil with all our strength
to obtain it." Through the proper cultivation of love
and reason, one may ultimately reach that state
where he "is in God and God in him, nay, rather,
God and himself are one."
We have already seen the latter view at work in
Durer's 1500 self-portrait. In general, however, the
belief in the godlike dignity of man was exemplified
through the depiction of the nude human form, and
this was most prevalent in humanist Italy. Some
artists, such as Michelangelo and Botticelli, did not
even concern themselves much with placing
figures in clearly delineated three-dimensional
space.
Throughout Michelangelo's long career, his main
interest was the life of the human soul as
expressed through the body. He often called the
human body the mortal veil of divine intention. His
colossal David (1501-1504) is the epitome of the
heroic style for which he is best known, celebrating
the nobility of the human form and the power of
human will.
But the Creation of Adam (1511-12), from his
grand cycle of frescoes covering the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, is the epigrammatic
statement of the divine potential of man. Here the
massive, beautiful, receptive figure of Adam lifts his
hand-that modus of creation-to receive from the
hand of a most virile yet venerable God the life of
life: a divine soul. The tiny space that separates the
fingers human and divine has given rise to
centuries of rumination. But what is undeniably
clear is that this is Father and Son. Adam is no
mere vessel but an Incarnation, and God Himself
shows tense concentration and excitement as He
brings to life this culmination of His creation, His
second self. Here we have what is perhaps
posterity's greatest inheritance from the
Renaissance-the confident assertion of man's
everlasting destiny, though impeded by the Fall, to
become the child, companion, and embodiment of
God.
Here we must end our investigation of the
Renaissance. Following the Sack of Rome in 1527,
a darker, more complex view of man set in, and
this too was reflected by Michelangelo, in his Last
Judgment (153S1541) on the altar wall of the
Sistine Chapel. Even here, however, we see
implied Pico's idea that man has been endowed by
God with the power to choose what he becomes.
Among the many figures is a condemned man who
crouches as he covers the left half of his face and
looks out in horrified self-realization. His visage
brings to mind lines from a poem by Michelangelo:
"My good by Heaven, my evil by myself was given
me/ By my free will, of which I am deprived."
Yet Jesus, the Master of Judgment, conducts the
cycling movement of the scene with an ambiguous
gesture. Though his right arm is raised with terrible
power as if to slay the wicked, his left, more gentle,
almost seeks to mitigate that wrath, and his face is
that of an unbiased and patient judge. Some have
seen in Jesus' face and in the water separating the
shore of the damned from the mouth of hell
evidence that Michelangelo believed man's
punishment is not irrevocable. This mighty, most
godlike and human Jesus, the Last Adam to whom
the Almighty has entrusted His creation, has the
power and authority to reengender the cosmos. He
is renaissance, or rebirth, personified.1