Renaissance Art and Architecture

I

Introduction

Renaissance Art and Architecture, painting, sculpture, architecture, and allied arts produced in Europe in the historical period called the Renaissance. Broadly considered, the period covers the 200 years between 1400 and 1600, although specialists disagree on exact dates. The word renaissance literally means “rebirth” and is the French translation of the Italian rinascita. The two principal components of Renaissance style are the following: a revival of the classical forms originally developed by the ancient Greeks and Romans, and an intensified concern with secular life—interest in humanism and assertion of the importance of the individual. The Renaissance period in art history corresponds with the beginning of the great Western age of discovery and exploration, when a general desire developed to examine all aspects of nature and the world.

During the Renaissance, artists were no longer regarded as mere artisans, as they had been in the medieval past, but for the first time were seen as independent personalities, comparable to poets and writers. They sought new solutions to formal and visual problems, and many of them were also devoted to scientific experimentation. In this context, mathematical or linear perspective was developed, a system in which all objects in a painting or in low-relief sculpture are related both proportionally and rationally. As a result, the painted surface was regarded as a window on the natural world, and it became the task of painters to portray this world in their art. Consequently, painters began to devote themselves more rigorously to the rendition of landscape—the careful depiction of trees, flowers, plants, distant mountains, and cloud-filled skies. Artists studied the effect of light out-of-doors and how the eye perceives the diverse elements in nature. They developed aerial perspective, in which objects become increasingly less distinct and less sharply coloured as they recede from the eye of the viewer. Northern painters, especially those from Flanders and the Netherlands, were as advanced as Italian artists in landscape painting and contributed to the innovations of their southern contemporaries by introducing oil paint as a new medium.

Although portraiture also developed as a specific genre in the mid-15th century, Renaissance painters achieved the greatest latitude with the history, or narrative, picture, in which figures located within a landscape or an architectural environment act out a specific story, taken either from Classical mythology or Judaeo-Christian tradition. Within such a context, the painter was able to show men, women, and children in a full range of postures and poses, as well as the subjects' diverse emotional reactions and states.

The Renaissance of the arts coincided with the development of humanism, in which scholars studied and translated philosophical texts. The use of classical Latin was revived and often favoured at this time. The Renaissance was also a period of avid exploration; ships set sail in search of new routes to Asia, which resulted in the discovery and eventual colonization of North and South America. Painters, sculptors, and architects were driven by a similar sense of adventure and the desire for greater knowledge and new solutions; Leonardo da Vinci, like Christopher Columbus, discovered whole new worlds.

II

The Renaissance in Italy

That the Renaissance first developed in Italy is readily explained. The example of the ancient Greeks and Romans was constantly available to the Italians—their language, which was only codified in about 1300, had evolved from the Latin of the Romans, and Italy also had on its soil a wealth of Classical ruins and artefacts. Roman architectural forms were found in almost every town and city. Roman sculpture, particularly in the form of the marble sarcophagus covered with reliefs, had been familiar for centuries.

A

Early Renaissance Sculpture

The development of Renaissance art in the early 15th century began in sculpture. Three Florentines, who were originally trained as goldsmiths, made certain crucial innovations that broke away from the conventions of Gothic style.

The eldest was Filippo Brunelleschi, who developed linear perspective. He eventually became an architect, and as such was the first truly Renaissance builder. He designed the enormous octagonal dome of Florence Cathedral, also called the Duomo, completed in 1436. The dome was considered one of the most impressive engineering and artistic feats since Roman times. Brunelleschi was also responsible for the revival of the Classical orders of architecture, which he studied in Rome. He introduced into all his public and private structures a new rationalized spatial formula that was unique to the Renaissance.

Lorenzo Ghiberti is best known for the reliefs he made for two sets of gilt bronze doors, produced for the Florence Baptistery. His second pair of doors, illustrating Old Testament themes, was highly praised by Michelangelo, who termed them worthy of the Gates of Paradise, which they have been called since then.

Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, known as Donatello, was one of the most influential artists of the Renaissance, not only because of the expressive power of his figures but also because he travelled widely throughout Italy. A Florentine, Donatello also worked in Venice, Padua, Naples, and Rome and was thereby instrumental in carrying Florentine artistic innovations to much of Italy. His principal works include the bronze David (c. 1430-1435, Bargello, Florence), an image of the biblical hero with the head of Goliath at his feet. The near-life-sized nude figure, conceived in the round, was the first such statue made since ancient times. Another major work is the marble Cantoria, or Singing Gallery (c. 1443-1448, Museo dell' Opera del Duomo, Florence), made for Florence Cathedral, with scores of frolicking putti, which were recurring subjects in Renaissance art. Donatello, who also worked in terracotta and wood, made use of Brunelleschi's perspective devices in his reliefs. His dignified and expressive free-standing statues, often representing saints, became a measure of excellence for the next hundred years.

B

Early Renaissance Painting

In painting, the new naturalism and expressiveness, and the beginnings of linear and aerial perspective, are seen in the work of Masaccio. Despite a regrettably short career (he died at the age of 27), Masaccio had a dramatic effect on the course of art. The frescoes (c. 1427) depicting episodes in the life of St Peter for the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence show the revolutionary character of his work. In the most famous of these scenes, the Tribute Money, Masaccio invested the figures of Christ and the apostles with a new sense of dignity, monumentality, and refinement. The Brancacci Chapel frescoes were inspirational for later painters, including Michelangelo, who copied Masaccio's figures. In the Trinity fresco (c. 1425, Santa Maria Novella, Florence), Masaccio, by employing some of Brunelleschi's discoveries concerning linear perspective, created for the first time the convincing illusion of space to suggest a chapel.

The direction taken by Masaccio was shared by his contemporaries, including Paolo Uccello, who was much taken with the pictorial potential of linear perspective. Among his finest works are three battle scenes (Uffizi, Florence; National Gallery, London; Louvre, Paris) made in the late 1440s for the Medici Palace in Florence, in which the participants are shown sharply foreshortened. He also painted the large fresco Sir John Hawkwood (1436, Florence Cathedral), which simulates a bronze equestrian monument, a type known from Roman examples and soon to be revived in free-standing sculpture by Donatello. Another master of the same period was Fra Angelico, a monk, whose refined style combined the rugged new Renaissance forms with delicacy of colour and treatment. Fra Angelico was particularly innovative in painting tree-filled landscapes. His works include a series of fresco decorations painted in the 1430s and 1440s for his fellow Dominicans at the Convent of San Marco in Florence.

Florence continued to maintain a commanding position in the flowering of Renaissance art in Italy, although other regions provided important masters throughout the entire period. Pisanello, who worked for various small ducal courts including that of the Gonzaga of Mantua and the Este of Ferrara, was from Verona; he had a highly refined style, more lyric and flowing than Masaccio's. Among his contributions are scores of bronze portrait medals that were greatly prized by his aristocratic patrons. Jacopo Bellini is usually regarded as the founder of Renaissance painting in Venice, which later became a powerful artistic rival of Florence. Although few of his works survive, many drawings are extant, unique in both number and complexity for the period. Jacopo was the father of two Renaissance masters, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, and the father-in-law of another, Andrea Mantegna.

Another painter of the early Renaissance was Piero della Francesca, who also wrote extensively on perspective and mathematics. Although he probably lived in Florence as a young man, he made his career in other Italian cities. Piero's style is best seen in the Legend of the True Cross (c. 1453-1454), a cycle of frescoes in the choir of San Francesco in Arezzo. His measured, geometric style echoes the monumentality of Masaccio's art, but it is more abstract and distant. Late in his career, Piero began to combine tempera, the usual medium for panel pictures, with oil paint, which was adapted from the painters of the Low Countries.

The art of the early Renaissance is summed up in many ways by the work of Leon Battista Alberti, a humanist, a Latin scholar, and a prolific writer, who was trained in north Italy, his family having been expelled from Florence. He had some direct experience with painting and sculpture and was an inventive architect. Among his influential designs was the façade (completed 1458) of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, in which Alberti developed a flattened temple-front system, which was later widely adopted. He also designed several churches in Mantua, including Sant' Andrea (completed 1494). Of equal importance to his buildings were his theoretical works on painting, sculpture, and architecture. In these books Alberti synthesized all the innovations of his contemporaries and also included ancient practices. As a result of his writings, the new ideas were propagated throughout Italy and beyond. He dedicated Della Pittura (1436), his book on painting, to Brunelleschi, as well as to Ghiberti, Donatello, Luca della Robbia, and Masaccio.