Renaissance Art
Renaissance Period
Very few terms ignite our imaginations the way the Renaissance does. Is that because the spirit of the Renaissance resonates so closely with our own modern approach to life? The Renaissance genius was, in part, the belief, that as Henry David Thoreau puts it in Walden, of ‘…the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.’ This, in essence, was the humanist spirit that animated the Renaissance. It was a celebration of man and his humanity, of his place in the world, and of his destiny as partner to the gods. And it is no very different to how we feel about ourselves today.
The term Renaissance or rebirth was coined in the late 18th century to describe the revival of ancient Greek and Roman architectural forms in 16th century Italy. In the 19th century, it started to be used in a wider sense, encompassing the changes, to art as a whole, which the humanist approach was galvanizing. The nucleus of the Renaissance was the Italian city state of Florence. From there, it diffused through all of Europe. In discussing this great cultural upheaval, it is sometimes useful to speak of three periods: the early Renaissance from 1400 to 1495, the High Renaissance from 1495 to 1520, and the late Renaissance from 1520 to 1600. The late Renaissance period saw the emergence of a focus on style and other technical elements to illustrate emotion that came to be known as Mannerism (from Italian maniera – style), a good example of which is Jacopo da Pontormo’s Deposition of Christ
Michelangelo, da Vinci, Humanism, Alberti, and Dürer
‘For the essence of humanism is that… nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly lose its vitality — no language they have spoken, nor oracle by which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever been passionate or expended time and zeal.’ (Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Walter H Pater, Macmillan & Co., 1873, London, at 38)
The spirit that animated the Renaissance was humanism which, in very broad terms, is an approach to life that places man’s concerns and importantly, not religion dogma, at the centre of living. It is a spirit that glorifies man to an extent that borders on atheism. It expresses confidence in our ability to comprehend the natural world around us and to regulate our social affairs. It is feeling. It expresses compassion for our earthly lot. And, not surprisingly, it engendered a strong individualism and republicanism, the latter a distinguishing characteristic of the Italian peninsula after the death of Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1250.
Fra Angelico
The art before the Renaissance had, as its subject, religious themes. But the figures therein were idealized almost to the point of abstraction. The notables were partly individuals and partly symbols. They were icons. But by the time of Fra Angelico (c. 1400 - 1455) the figures were so obviously human, they were thought to be portraits. Fra Angelico who was born as Guido di Pietro became a Dominican friar around 1420 – 22. An extraordinary churchman who refused the post of Archbishop of Florence, his exemplary moral life earned him the Fra Angelico (Angelic Brother) title.
Naturalism
The most singular aspect of renaissance art painting is its fascination with the human condition, the human figure and human emotion. Just as in antiquity, Renaissance man stood in awe of man. He might have said as a later poet did: ‘What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!’
The sketches of human figures were driven by sheer appreciation of a beautiful thing but just as much as by a curiosity about the mechanics of our movement and internal biological structure.
Individualism
Man, and woman, is portrayed as realistically as possible. Take Albrecht Dürer’s portraiture of a young Venetian woman. She may have lived almost 500 years ago but we can still recognise the sensibility in her features. This is a feeling creature – human – not a symbol of some idea… not an abstract. Figures in medieval paintings were more symbolic. How could they not be… in depicting individuals, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, the disciples, whose lives were so iconic? So, in the art painting of the Middle Ages, there is nothing comparable to the fine portraits of Botticelli, Bellini, or Andrea del Verrocchio. The concept of portraiture was not possible in a milieu that left man prostrate at the feet of the heavenly host. It could only evolve in a society that had elevated man… saw him standing Promethean-like as an individual. As that great art historian Jacob Burkhardt (1818 – 1897) remarked: fifteenth-century Italy was ‘the place where the notion of the individual was born’. (The Renaissance Portrait: from Donatello to Bellini, Yale University Press http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300175912)
The subject matter of art painting evolved from the purely religious to the purely secular as the Renaissance progressed. Medieval art painting depicted heavenly figures in a heavenly setting. In such a panorama, the artist could paint the backdrop in brilliant colours of gold or blue both of which came to symbolize the light of heaven. And one artist’s vision of heaven was just as acceptable as another’s. But with an earthly rather than a heavenly background, the craftsman now had concrete objects to represent. The actors in such a drama were still religious figures but now they were on earth and, increasingly, were shown interacting with a few fortunate personages. Give example. Thus the change in setting required a shift from allegory to realism. Later still, the tableaux were of earthly figures in an earthly setting. An interesting example of the secular and the religious combined is The Adoration of the Magi by Sandro Botticelli. This tempera on panel work pays homage to the Medici family by portraying several members. The Magus kneeling before Mary is Cosimo. His two sons, Piero (red cloak) and Giovanni (white trimmed with gold), kneel in the centre. The figure at the far right in brown is thought to be a likeness of Botticelli himself. Giuliano, or perhaps, Lorenzo is on the far left next to the horse.
Realism
An aspect of the new naturalism that Renaissance art painters strove for involved a greater awareness of a startling paradox: that the world as we saw it was really quite different from the way it was in reality. That meant painting in a rather counter-intuitive way by, for example, portraying figures that were close larger than figures that were further away. An example of this is illustrated by a fresco on the north wall of the Sistine chapel that shows Jesus delivering to St. Peter the gold and silver keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. This is The Charge to St. Peter painted sometime between 1481 and 1482 by Pietro Perugino (1446/1450 - 1523) who was at one time the teacher of Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (Raphael). The mathematics is even more obvious in Perugino’s The Marriage of the Virgin (c.1504 Oil on wood. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Caen). The figures in the background are much smaller just as they would appear in a modern photograph.
Perspective
This aspect of naturalism, we know now, as perspective. In summary, it is that lines of vision tend to converge to vanishing points. The concept was not unknown in antiquity. In an illuminating piece Romans paint better perspective than Renaissance artists, Carla Schodde examines the use of perspective in the frescoes at the villa of Publius Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale. But the single vanishing point concept appears to be a Renaissance device. And the artist credited with its genesis, Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 – 1446), most likely saw it as an improvement on the methods of antiquity. Although an engineer and architect (he designed the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore), he had two panels painted of the city of Florence that showed his understanding of perspective. His ideas were published, in 1435 – 36, in a tome by Leon Battista Alberti dedicated to him entitled Della Pittura (On Painting). Della Pittura trans. by John R Spencer at http://www.noteaccess.com/Texts/Alberti/ Example
Jan van Eyck (40,500), Rogier van der Weyden (8,100) and Robert Campin (2,900)
Oils became the preferred binder after Northern European artists like Robert Campin (1378 – 1444), Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400 – 1464) and, particularly, Jan van Eyck (1395 – 1441) made use of them. The vibrancy that van Eyck’s colours conveyed inspired the Italians to abandon their traditional egg tempera. The essential difference between the two paints can be seen from their names: oil paints are a suspension of pigments in oil; tempera paints are a suspension of pigments in egg yolk. Oil paints take rather much longer to dry, both on canvas and off, than tempera. An artist may be able to mix paint for days of work. Not so with tempera. Left overnight, it will degenerate into a gluey mess. But tempera work is hardly ever complete in the short time that its fast-drying action suggests since many coats of paint are usually applied and it will take around six months before the paint is cured. But, once matured, unlike oils, tempera will not darken with age. Generally, oil will produce a glossy finish while tempera gives a matte surface. Yet, many, the New Mexican artist Peter Hurd who did a portrait of LBJ for instance, preferred tempera because of ‘its inherent luminosity’.