[CHP. 13- The Early Renaissance] / Page|1

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Adams- Art Across Time- Chapter 13- The Early Renaissance-

Summary and Study Guide

Chronology

1468Rossellino: Matteo Palmieri

1470Alberti: Church of San Andrea, Mantua

c. 1475Pollaiuolo: Herakles and Antaios

1478Botticelli: Primavera

c. 1480Botticelli: The Birth of Venus

c.1483-1488Verrocchio: Equestrian Monument of Colleoni, Venice

The Early Renaissance

When you hear the word “RENAISSANCE” what comes to mind?

  • Italy as a nation-state does NOT exist Instead the area was divided into a number of AUTONOMOUS (self-governing) regions. By 1350, northern Italy was a highly urban region. Three cities (Genoa, Venice, Florence) had populations of about 100,000 people, a huge cities for the time. These were COSMOPOLITAN (worldly, sophisticated, urbane) centers of trade and commerce. Fertile places for new ideas.
  • Rise of Wealthy Merchant Families: As trade grew, a new class of merchants and bankers rapidly arose and had a powerful impact upon the Renaissance providing, For the first time in centuries, new patrons of the arts. The Church is still very important
  • The Renaissance was noticed in Italy first. However, major artistic developments began to occur simultaneously in Northern Europe. We will study the Northern Renaissance after our investigation of the Italian Renaissance.
  • The Early Renaissance was a time of experimentation; it was during this time that artists discovered the mathematical formulas necessary for representing perspective and space accurately on a two-dimensional surface. There was innovation not only in architecture and painting, but also in sculpture, where the movement toward an art of realism based upon observation was at the same time interpreted in a Classical mode.

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.
  • Humanism means the rediscovery of the art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome
  • Humanists were scholars, writers, and artists who rediscovered and then studied the cultural heritage of Greece and Rome.
  • 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 manifestation of God, the One Supreme Being) could only illuminate, never undermine, theology.

“Man is the Measure of all Thingss”

  • This rediscovery of the Greco-Roman heritage sparked a renewed interest in HUMANS including

•Human form

•Human emotions and personalities

•Human potential

•Human achievements – especially heroic deeds.While religion had been the focus of much of medieval thought, the Italians of the fifteenth century were very much interested in humanity. For the Italians, the person literally became the "measure of all things." Interest in nature was combined with a passion for mathematics, for structure, and with a great belief in man's capacity to reason.

•Art was much more closely linked to science and mathematics in Florence than it was in the North. The interest in man and mathematics in fifteenth century Italy can be symbolized by the image known as "Vitruvian Man," which combines the figure of man with a combination of the circle and the square. These two basic geometric figures were thought to reflect the perfect harmony in the universe.

Natural world

•Curiosity about the natural world

•Detailed observation of nature

•Accurate representation of nature – will lead to important breakthroughs in art

Individualism

1.What is the reward for heroic achievement?

•Fame

•Wealth

2.Artists have names from now on

3.Portraits

•Of patrons

•Of themselves – self-portraits

•Autobiographies

A Historically Self-Conscious Age

  1. Classical Civilization
  2. Middle Ages sometimes called the “Dark Ages”
  3. The Renaissance or “rebirth”

The Fifteenth Century in Florence(1400s) The Quattrocento

•Masaccio

•Donatello

•Botticelli

•Ghiberti

•Brunelleschi

•Alberti

Many historians consider Florence to have been the source of the Renaissance, which commenced at the beginning of the fifteenth cen¬tury. Florence was then governed by wealthy families from the merchant class, including the Albizzi, Capponi, Medici, Pazzi, and Strozzi. By the 1430s, however, it was the Medici family that ruled the city, though not by title. The Medici were also great patrons of the arts and literature.

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.
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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. /
3.Classical Humanism and the Renaissance
Many Renaissance artists and thinkers believed that their own period represented a rebirth of the great classical age. The term "Renaissance" literally means Rebirth." In the medieval view of history the period of the classical Greek and Roman civilizations had been an age of darkness. With the birth of Christ light had entered the world and progress had continued since that time. The great fourteenth century writer, Dante, considered classical antiquity to be equal to Christian times. He couldn't condemn the great Greek philosophers to damnation but, instead, in his Divine Comedy, placed them in limbo with the unbaptized babies.
His compatriot, Petrarch, took the definitive step when he presented the position that it was the Christian period, not the classical one, that represented the Dark Ages. He longed for a return to the shining age of classical antiquity. This spirit grew among fifteenth century Italian artists and scholars, and these men came to believe that they were truly living in a new age, in a revival of the glorified past. The painter Mantegna made a pilgrimage on the birthday of the Roman writer Virgil.
Lorenzo de' Medici, the ruler of Florence in the second half of the fifteenth century, established an academy of scholars who devoted themselves to the revival of classical philosophy, literature, and art. These scholars felt their major task was to harmonize the tenets of classical humanism as represented in the works of the great pagan philosophers with the beliefs of the Christian church.
Classical forms slowly found their way into Christian art. At first Greek and Roman forms were adapted to Christian representations, as we saw in the great pulpit that Nicola Pisano created for the baptistry of Pisa Cathedral about 1260 (Figure 15 1). The interest in the forms of classical antiquity became almost a passion with many fifteenth century Florentine artists. The architect Brunelleschi and the sculptor Donatello made a trip to Rome, where they carefully observed and measured all the ancient Roman buildings and statues they could find there. Donatello's mounted equestrian portrait (Figure 16 13) is a clear reflection of the Roman statue of Marcus Aurelius he saw in Rome (Figure 6 77). Apparently Donatello was fascinated also by the classical nude figures he saw, their idealized forms representing man at his most glorious. Donatello's bronze David (Figure 16 12) clearly reflects this interest, even though it represents a Biblical subject. It is the first freestanding nude figure since classical times. The figure illustrates Donatello's rediscovery of the classical device of "contrapposto,~ or Weight shifts in which the weight is thrown on one foot, with the consequence that one side of the body is shown relaxed while the other has a contrasting tension. This pose had been discovered by the ancient Greeks in the fifth century and had been used by them and by the Romans (Figure 5 68).
The greatest reconciliation of classical and late medieval form in painting is seen in the work of Sandro Botticelli (Figure 16 60). Many of Botticelli's paintings are firmly anchored in the philosophic speculations of the members of Lorenzo de' Medici's Platonic Academy. Humanists like Poliziano and MarsilioFicino attempted to reconcile the concepts of pagan philosophy with the principles of Christianity, just as Botticelli synthesized the visual styles. The careful detailing, the flattened space, and the decorative linear forms all refer to the International Gothic style, and the painting seems to be closely related to the amine fleur" tapestries. Although the nude Venus is based on a classical prototype (Figure 5 63), she does not stand solidly on her feet. Classical figures always had a firm sense of body solidity, but Botticelli's Venus seems to float. She is a very beautiful figure, and for the Neo Platonic philosopher, Beauty was synonymous with Truth. The composition illustrates the progression of Beauty and guides the soul upward from the material world to the realm of pure truth, to union with God.
Earthly, natural beauty can lead us to contemplation of celestial beauty. This hierarchy of beauty is clearer if you understand Plato's definition of reality. Plato believed that truth resides in the pure ideas in the mind of the Boned In the Republic, Plato used the illustration of a group of people chained in a cave in such a way that they could only look in one direction. Behind them a great fire blazed and it threw shadows on the wall that could be seen by the chained beings. The shadows they saw were cast by figures moving and dancing behind them, but since the shadows were the only thing they could see, they mistook them for reality. A philosopher escaped from the chains and saw the real objects that were casting the shadows. Plato explained that the things we saw around us were like the shadow, mere reflections of the true and perfect forms that exist on a higher plane.
For the Neo Platonic philosophers everything in the world emanates from the God head, but each thing is more or less perfect according to the degree of nearness or remoteness from the source. Next to the original none," reason is most perfect. It contains in itself the Ideal World and the whole of true and changeless being. From reason emanates the World soul that actualized the ideal forms in sensible matter. Matter is undetermined and has no being in itself. The visible world is a transcription of the World soul. In a sense the World soul is like a computer program, containing the true essence of the reality that will be realized when the program has been implemented. As the World soul links reason and matter, so the individual souls partake of both reason and sense. Souls come down from the rational or light world, which is their real home and they retain a recollection of it and a longing to return. The strongest incentive for the return of the soul to its original home is the love of Beauty. The contemplation of earthly Beauty can lead us to an understanding of pure Beauty, and since Beauty and Truth are synonymous for the Neo Platonist we are carried through Beauty and Truth into the realm of pure being and so merge with God, the source of all being.

Ideas and Concepts:

  • Humanism
  • Neoplatonism
  • Aristotelianism

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.

Relief Sculpture: The Baptistery Doors Competition

Representative of the new artistic era of Florence was a competition held in 1401 for the design of the north doors of the Baptistery of Florence, which was built in the eleventh century. The south doors of the Baptistery, cast in bronze, had been designed by Andrea Pisano and were Gothic in style. Six artists were selected from those who entered the competition, and they were given one year to design and produce a panel cast in bronze depicting the Old Testament story of the sacrifice of Isaac. At the end of the year, the works of the artists were judged, and the field was narrowed down to the work of two young artists: Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) and Lorenzo Ghiberti (c. 1381-1455). As it happened, their entries to the competition also were the least conservative and traditional of the works submitted.

Brunelleschi's Entry

Brunelleschi's entry depicted the exact instant Abraham's thrust of the knife toward his son Isaac's throat was stopped by an angel of the Lord. Brunelleschi's placement of the figures within the panel seemed to be in response to the four-lobed (quatrefoil) form of the panel itself, with the angel on the left, Abraham on the right, and Isaac in the middle-a fairly symmetrical composition. The stances of the figures as well as the sweeping drapery that enveloped them appeared to reflect the shape of the panel.

Ghiberti's Entry

The panel that Ghiberti submitted-and for which he won the prize-portrayed Abraham and Isaac at a moment in time when Abraham was about to thrust the knife into his son's throat. His placement of the figures within the panel was asymmetrical, with the focus of attention upon Abraham in the middle and Isaac on the right. Ghiberti's treatment of the figure of Isaac reveals, in part, the direction the Renaissance was to flow. His Isaac was obviously based upon earlier Classical works, as reflected in the figure's musculature and well¬proportioned form; the panel reflects both a sense of realism and the quality of idealized beauty. Ghiberti's design for the doors followed the format established by Pisano on the south doors, with the space divided up into twenty-eight quatrefoils, each representing a figure or a biblical scene. As in his prize-winning panel, Ghiberti's style as seen in his treatment of the figures and his use of space represented a shift from Gothic idealism to naturalism.