Renaissance Critics

Vasari, on Raphael’s work

“his paintings are living things" […] the spirit is made visible”

positions him as a flawless embodiment of the artistic virtuosity and moral integrity of the High Renaissance

Vasari, on Raphael’s qualities

“agreeable and pleasant to every sort of person”

“excellence of character” combined with his technical mastery makes him equivalent to Michelangelo

Vasari, on Michelangelo’s skill

“a spirit universally capable” of disegno, sculpture, and “every art and profession […] exhibiting perfection”

the greatest in the trinity of him, Da Vinci, and Raphael

“it is not merely his figures that live, but their very souls”

Vasari, on Michelangelo’s flaws

Hostility towards patrons framed as “independent spirit and pride” and a refusal to compromise on his “artistic integrity”

His unattractiveness is dramatised as captivatingly paradoxical to Renaissance monism (unity of body and soul)

On Titian

Titian exhibited absolute mastery of the inherent characteristics of Venetian painting

His inferiority to Raphael and Michelangelo is ultimately due to his mastery of colore rather than disegno

If he had studied the masterpieces of Florence and Rome, he could have achieved “truly stupendous things”

Vasari, on Brunelleschi’s role

Revived architecture from it’s pre-Renaissance “shameful lack of grace”

“sent to us by heaven to give a new form to architecture which had been going astray for hundreds of years”

Vasari, on Brunelleschi’s skill

his imagination was strong enough to envision “how Rome once appeared even before the city fell to ruins”

Vasari, on Florence

Portrays Florence as the birthplace of the core ideals and philosophies of the Renaissance, and where these concepts were mastered

Associated with absolute technical mastery of disegno, perspective, and human form

“the manner of painting that was born in Florence […] make Italy the object of admiration in all the world”

Vasari, On Rome

Architectural advantage as artists would travel to Rome to view the abundance of classical ruins

Works were grand and monumental, with deep roots in the imagery of antiquity

Significant proximity to and patronage from the Papacy and Church led to large-scale, dramatic expressions of religious devotion with Biblical subjects

Shaped by a “heroic style” that fused classical ideals of form and proportion with the dynamism of disegno, and applied this to religious scenes

Vasari, on Venice

Artists drew from antiquity and the Renaissance, but also numerous other cultural influences (Gothic, Byzantine)

Venetian artists mastered colore rather than disegno - they focused on the evocation of opulence and sensuality through rich colour palattes and luxurious pigments rather than the anatomical dynamism expressed through disegno

Chapman, on Sistine Madonna

figures appear to be “weightless” but still maintain a “strong sense of corporeality”

Gayford, on the San Zaccaria Altarpiece

“as mad a way of hanging a masterpiece as can be imagined”, but “few if any people ever look at the other paintings”

Vasari, on Uccello

Dedicated countless hours to finding the perfect, exact vanishing point of every composition he painted

Gombrich, on Galatea

presents the “perfect and harmonious composition of freely moving figures”

Raphael, on Galatea

Raphael had an “absence of good judges and beautiful forms” supposedly required to render Galatea as a combination of every beautiful figure he had seen, so used an imagined “idea” of an ideal

Vasari, on Sacred and Profane Love

“If Titian had not written his name in the dark background, it would have been taken for a painting by Giorgione”

Gombrich, Portrait of a Young Man

the features of the young man “look less solid. They are not so correctly drawn”

Linda Murray, on Portrait of Pope Julius II

a “sensitive reflection of an old man, wearied by his ceaseless struggles”

Vasari, on David

the work “puts to shade” every other statue of the Renaissance

“he seems to be ready to leap into action”

Gayford, on Madonna della Pieta

“As so often with Michelangelo, the strangeness is inseparable from the power of the work”

“too famous for its own good” - its power is diminished by its new, brightly-lit location

Freud, on Moses

“As our eyes travel down it, the figure exhibits three distinct emotional strata” - Michelangelo expresses a psychologically dynamic interiority

Syson and Cafa, on Adam

“One of the most profound contemplations of divine and artistic creation”

Peter Murray, on the Dome of the Florence Cathedral

he “must have worked the whole thing out by wandering among the ruins and asking himself questions which no one else at the time had even thought of formulating”

from 1420, the “construction” and “invention of new machinery was Brunelleschi’s work alone”

Witold Rybczynski, on Tempietto

the “perfect expression of High Renaissance ideals”

Peter Murray, on San Michele in Isola

it “must have been the source of the classic impulse in Venice at that date”

Peter Murray, on Foundling Hospital

the “first truly Renaissance work” and the “first true expression of Brunelleschi’s own architectural principles”

Witold Rybczynski, on Bramante and Palazzo Caprini

He was “too knowledgeable to make mistakes” - the introduction of grand, reverential classical architectural features into a secular structure is Bramante “intentionally breaking the rules”

Witold Rybczynski, on Ca d’Oro

complexity of composition is an “architectural tour de force”