Floretine School :
ANDREA del VERROCCHIO, 1435-1488 and LEONARDO da VINCI, 1452-1519
In the second half of the fifteenth century, Andrea del Verrocchio was the most famous artist in Florence. He was one of those many-sided geniuses produced by the prodigal forces of the Italian Renaissance, renowned as a goldsmith, a master of geometry, music, and wood-inlaying, a painter and above all a sculptor. Unmarried and disinclined to be bothered by women, he dedicated his life to intellectual pursuits; and in his workshop the luminaries of the city foregathered to discuss Art. They did not look upon Art as a little thing- the whimsical aberration of minor talent; they regarded it as the ultimate attainment of mind and spirit, above science and philosophy but partaking of both. Verrocchio was not the foremost painter of his day, but in sculpture he won the distinction of having designed and modeled the noblest equestrian statue in the world, the Bartholommeo Colleoni, in Venice.
BARTHOLOMMEO COLLEONI, Venice.Bronze, unveiled 1496.
You can see picture of the statue at the this site:
http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=12850
Acclaimed more often than any other work as the greatest equestrian statue in the world. The feral glance and iron resolution of the captain, and the incomparable construction of both horse and rider, make eyesores of most public monuments.
The only extant painting which can be attributed with absolute certainty to Vrocchio is "THE BAPTISM of CHRIST", a sinewy, labored work with a hardness of modeling that betrays the sculptor; and its grimness and power, a characteristic product of the Florentine school of anatomists. The picture is memorable for the vaporous landscape in the distance, and kneeling angel at the left, whose carefully drawn hair and delicate features touched with radiance were not of Verrocchio's fiber. These additions were painted by an apprentice, a boy of seventeen named Leonardo da Vinci, who had already displayed his prowess in mathematics, music, and every branch of design.
"THE BAPTISM OF CHRIST",Ufficy gallery, Florence.Painted about 1470.
You can see the painting at this site:
http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/v/verocchi/painting/baptism.html
Leonardo's loyalty to his master was the only personal tie formed in his youth. He remained in Verrocchio's workshop from his thirteenth to his twenty-fifth year - a period of learning rather than accomplishment. Here he found support for his scientific researches; her he met Botticelli, Perugino and Lorenzo di Credi, and close by were the Pollaiuolo brothers* whose nudes were the latest marvels of Art. He lived soberly in his master's house; his fame was rising, and by common consent, he was the most richly gifted and enviable young man in Italy. Reluctantly, five or six years after he had become a licensed painter, he opened his own shop; for he had little interest in Art as a phisical excercise or as a livelihood, and he disliked to finish a work within a stipulated time.
*Sandro Botticelli, Florentine school, 1444- 1510,"The birth of Venus", Uffici gallery,Florence, 1482 ?
*Antonio Pollaiuolo, Florentine School,1429-1498, Sculpture "Hercules and Antaeus" sculpture museum "Bargello", Florence,"Portrait of a Lady' "Poldi-Pezzoli Museum" Milano
You can find picture of Verrocchio's "David" (from "Museo Nazionale del Bargello") at:
http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=12858
You can see a picture of the sculpture "Daivd" by Donatello in "Museo Nacionale del Bargello", Florence, so that you can compare it with the other variants of "David created by Michelangelo, Verrocchio and Bernini.
http://www.artrenewal.org/asp/database/image.asp?id=9053
MICHELANGELO BUONAROTI- 1475- 1564
In the flower of his physical and mental development, and ready to acknowledge no limit to his capacities, Michelangelo agreed to decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for Pope Julius. The magnitude of the undertaking can hardly be conveyed by words: there were ten thousand square feet of plaster to be painted - not merely covered but organized into an architectural design calling for 343 figures, 225 of which ranged from ten to eighteen feet in height. For nearly four years he was the Pope's prisoner. Day after day, month after month, he lay back, his head swathed in a towel, and with astounding delicacy of finish painted the creation and fall of man, the collective effects to be seen from below at a distance of sixty feet.
This architectural design combines single figures and groups of figures in compartments opening into the vault of heaven, with God the Father a majestic being, who, in spite of his tremendous bulk, sails lightly through space as if impelled by some celestial means of locomotion. The gigantic representations include the temptation of man and the expulsion from Paradise, rows of prophets and Sybils, athletic nudes bursting with vitality, the genealogy of Christ, and episodes symbolical of the redemption. In this world, heaven's- and art's- first law is wonderfully observed, and the danger of overpowering monotony avoided by the diversity of postures and by changes in the scale and number of the figures grouped together.
The decorations in the Sistine Chapel constitute the greatest single-handed work of art that man has ever produced. So transcending is this achievement that it reduces most of the paintings of the world to miniatures and granulated fragments. As art rises to the pinnacle of human capacities, it must stand or fall, in size, power, and importance, by comparison with the Sistine Chapel decorations.
Consider the Jeremiah!
(http://www.wga.hu/framese.html?/html/m/michelan/3sistina/3prophet/09_1pr6.html) Jeremiah, Sistine Chapel, Rome,Vatican, about 1510
If this patriarch should spread his arms, the momentum generated would atomize a whole breed of Darwinian mortals. He is needles to say, a member of the Florentine artist's race of supermen, a figure created with such omnipotent mastery as to defy the attempts of the most skillful draftsmen to reproduce its simple volumes and condensed powers; in attitude and expression, the Lord's prophet and Michelangelo's spokesman meditating his lamentations on the doomed human race.
The theme of creation of man had possessed the minds of artists since the Middle Ages. Michelangelo respected the story but treated it in his own way, visualizing the Mosaic account in terms of his own experiences. He created his own world and placed within it a race of men constructed with all his science and animated by the noblest outpourings of his soul. His world is wholly anthropomorphic and inhabited by superior beings. Landscape is abolished; the vegetable kingdom symbolized by a bunch of herbs; Paradise a waste land with a few rocks and a single tree. It is the story of heroic man in all phases of his development.
"The highest object of art for thinking men,' Michelangelo declared, "is man," a statement meaning not only man in the generic but in the individual and masculine sense. Women he sometimes painted, but formed after the pattern of his men into large, heroic creatures with no references to physical loveliness or the charms of sex. In women created on the scale of his giants, the appeal of sex would have been nothing less than a cosmic error. He used the human figure, male and female, as a vehicle to express his moods, his mental habits, and every shade and depth of his emotions.
The inclusion of pagan priestesses in a Christian Church was not a blasphemous innovation to an artist reared in the Italian Renaissance. Michelangelo accepted the sibyls as great human types - one of them had foretold that "a child shall be born who will bring peace to the world" - an utterance construed by the ecclesiastics to signify the coming of Christ.
(http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/m/michelan/3sistina/4sibyls/01_7si1a.html) The Delphic Sibyl, detail, Sistine Chapel, Rome, Vatican)
(http://www.wga.hu/framese.html?/html/m/michelan/3sistina/4sibyls/01_7si1.html)
The Delphic Sibyl, cast in the heroic mold of his Biblical characters, in the most beautifully proportioned and spiritually alert of his prophetic types. With the exception of the scroll, there is nothing in the painting to connect the figure with the ancient oracle of Delphi. The young woman must be taken as one of those god-like creatures, eternally strong and young, removed from the mundane world, but filled with the awareness of events that were to shake heaven and earth- the creation of an artist who perpetually brooded on the mystery of life.
Michelangelo is the lord almighty of the naked figure. His great nudes have no duplicates in nature: he painted them, technically, from his fund of knowledge-from a study of the figure beginning in boyhood and carried forward by incessant industry, by anatomical dissections and struggles with the highest and hardest problems of sculpture-inventing new proportions and attitudes. If they seem completely satisfactory as human organisms, it is because they are so perfectly put together. Nothing in art is so difficult to produce or so hard to find as a completely convincing nude. In the work of almost every master, there is some perceptible weakness of structure: but there are no weaknesses in Michelangelo's nudes. They are, in truth, of superhuman construction, and to dwell with them for any length of time is to make one turn to the relaxing earthiness of less prodigious artists.
Some conception of his powers may be formed by giving thought to his Adam, painted while flat on his back on a scaffold, and painted in three days on wet plaster, without corrections or later embellishments! This superb giant is more beautifully articulated and immeasurably more vital than anything the Greeks ever did - and should the dormant figure rise to its feet and extend its compressed energies, it would be more than a match for the agents of earth. The art of painting, unable to present continuous narrative, is limited to certain instants of action or contemplation; and the reclining Adam is portrayed at the instant of receiving the life force communicated to him by the Creator. It is not likely that the world will ever again produce the equal of Michelangelo in the painting of the nude; and it is not rash to say that the figure of Adam is superior to all other nudes not only in size, power, and physical perfection but also in those qualities which are the opposite of the material.
With the Sistine Chapel, the main fabric of Michelangelo's world was completed. One might think, on beholding the vault of the chapel, that he had exhausted every imaginable human attitude; but he returned to the room thirty years later, a tired old man, and painted on the back wall two hundred more figures in "THE LAST JUDGEMENT" without a repetition of posture!