Key Notes

• Time Period: 1400–1500

  • Takes place in the courts of Italian city-states: Ferrara, Florence, Mantua, Naples, Rome, Venice, and so on.

• Culture, beliefs, and physical settings

  • Renaissance art is generally the art of Western Europe.

  • Renaissance art is influenced by the art of the classical world, Christianity, a greater respect for naturalism, and formal artistic training.

• Cultural interactions

  • There are the beginnings of global commercial and artistic networks.

• Materials and Processes

  • The period is dominated by an experimentation of visual elements, i.e., atmospheric perspective, a bold use of color, creative compositions, and an illusion of naturalism

• Audience, functions, and patron

  • There is a more pronounced identity of the artist in society; the artist has more structured training opportunities.

• Theories and Interpretations

  • Renaissance art is studied in chronological order.

  • There is a large body of primary source material housed in libraries and public institutions.

Historical Background

• Italian city-states were controlled by ruling families who dominated politics

• These princes were lavish spenders on the arts, and great connoisseurs of cutting-edge movements in painting and sculpture.

• They embellished their palaces with the latest innovative paintings by artists such as Lippi and Botticelli.

• They commissioned architectural works from the most pioneering architects of the day.

• Princely courts eventually shifted from religious to secular concerns in a humanistic spirit.

• Humanism: an intellectual movement in the Renaissance that emphasized the  secular alongside the religious.

  • Humanists were greatly attracted to the  achievements of the classical past, and stressed the study of classical literature,  history, philosophy, and art

Patronage and Artistic Life

• The patrons of this time dictated the quantity of gold used on altarpieces and which family members were to be shown in paintings.

• Great families often had their own chapel in the local church.

• These churches' mysticism was enhanced by muralists.

• Quattrocento: the 1400s, or fifteenth century, in Italian art

Early Renaissance Architecture

• Renaissance architecture requires order, clarity, and light.

  • Gothic churches' gloom, mystery, and sacredness were barbarous.

  • Wide windows, minimal stained glass, and vibrant wall murals replaced it.

• Renaissance architecture emphasizes geometric designs, yet all buildings require mathematics to support their technical principles.

  • Vitruvius' ideal proportions created harmony.

  • Humanistic values were reflected in Florentine Renaissance church interior ratios and proportions.

  • Unvaulted naves with coffered ceilings reminded Early Christianity.

• Thus, the crossing is twice the nave bays, the nave twice the side aisles, and the side aisles twice the side chapels.

  • The nave is two-thirds arches and columns.

  • As in Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel, the nave's white and gray marble floor patterns emphasize this logic.

• Alberti's Palazzo Rucellai and other Florentine buildings feature austere, three-story façades.

  • The first level is usually for public use and business.

  • A sturdy string course marks the ceiling and floor of the second storey, which rises light.

  • Roman temple-style cornices top the third story.

• Mullion: a central post or column that is a support element in a window or a door

• Orthogonal: lines that appear to recede toward a vanishing point in a painting with linear perspective

  
  

➼ Pazzi Chapel

• Details

  • Designed by Filippo Brunelleschi

  • Basilica di Santa Croce

  • Designed 1423; Built 1429–1461,

  • A masonry,

  • Found in Florence, Italy

• Form

  • Two barrel vaults on the interior; small dome over crossing; pendentives support dome; oculus in the center.

  • Interior has a quiet sense of color with muted tones that is punctuated by glazed terra cotta tiles.

  • Use of pietra serena (a grayish stone) in contrast to whitewashed walls accentuates basic design structure.

    • Pietra serena: a dark-gray stone used for columns, arches, and trim details in Renaissance buildings

  • Inspired by Roman triumphal arches.

  • Ideal geometry in the plan of the building.

• Function

  • Chapter house: a meeting place for Franciscan monks; bench that wraps around the interior provides seating for meetings.

  • Rectangular chapel with an apse and an altar attached to the church of Santa Croce, Florence.

• Attribution

  • Attribution of portico by Brunelleschi has been recently questioned;

  • The building may have been designed by Bernardo Rossellino or his workshop.

• Patronage

  • Patrons were the wealthy Pazzi family, who were rivals of the Medici.

  • The family coat-of-arms, two outward facing dolphins, is placed at the base of each pendentive on the interior.

• Image

  

➼ Palazzo Rucellai

• Details

  • Designed by Leon Battista Alberti

  • c. 1450, stone,

  • A masonry

  • Found in Florence, Italy

• Form

  • Three horizontal floors separated by a strongly articulated stringcourse; each floor is shorter than the one below.

  • Pilasters rise vertically and divide the spaces into squarish shapes.

  • An emphasized cornice caps the building.

  • Square windows on the first floor; windows with mullions on the second and third floors.

  • Rejects rustication of earlier Renaissance palaces; used beveled masonry joints instead.

  • Benches on lower level connect the palazzo with the city.

• Function

  • City residence of the Rucellai family.

  • The building format expresses classical humanist ideals for a residence:

    • the bottom floor was used for business;

    • the family received guests on the second floor;

    • the family’s private quarters were on the third floor;

    • the hidden fourth floor was for servants.

• Context

  • The articulation of the three stories links the building to the Colosseum levels, which have arches framed by columns:

    • the first floor pilasters are Tuscan (derived from Doric);

    • the second are Alberti’s own invention (derived from Ionic);

    • the third are Corinthian.

  • Original building:

    • Five bays on the left, with a central door.

    • Second doorway bay and right bay added later.

    • Eighth bay fragmentary: owners of house next door refused to sell, and the Palazzo Rucellai never expanded.

• Patronage

  • Patron was Giovanni Rucellai, a wealthy merchant.

  • Rucellai coat-of-arms, a rampant lion, is placed over two second-floor windows.

  • Friezes contain Rucellai family symbols: billowing sails.

• Image

  

  
  

Fifteenth Century Italian Painting and Sculpture

• Linear perspective, which some experts believe the Romans used, is the most distinctive feature of Italian Renaissance art.

  • In the early fifteenth century, Filippo Brunelleschi created perspective while sketching the Florence Cathedral Baptistery.

  • Some painters were obsessed with perspective, presenting things and people in proportion, unlike medieval painting, which emphasized humans.

  • Linear perspective was quickly adopted by pre-Traditional artists.

  • The artists used trompe l'oeil to purposely deceive the viewer.

  • Trompe l’oeil: (French, meaning “fools the eye”) a form of painting that attempts to represent an object as existing in three dimensions, and therefore resembles the real thing.

• By the end of the fifteenth century, portraits and mythical subjects had replaced religious paintings, expressing humanist ideas.

• Humanism and Greco-Roman classics revive interest in genuine Greek and Roman sculptures.

  • Medieval painters saw old naked glory as heathen.

  • Donatello's David begins the century-long renaissance of nudity in life-size sculpture in Florence.

• Increased anatomy study leads to nudity.

  • Nude sketches of heroes are cast in stone and metal.

  • Some painters display tremendous physical interplay of shapes in their twisting motions and straining muscles.

• Bottega: the studio of an Italian artist

• Perspective: depth and recession in a painting or a relief sculpture.

  • Objects shown in linear perspective achieve a three-dimensionality in the two-dimensional world of the picture plane.

  • Lines, called orthogonals, draw the viewer back in space to a common point, called the vanishing point.

  • Paintings, however, may have more than one vanishing point, with the orthogonals leading the eye to several parts of the work.

  • Landscapes that give the illusion of distance are in an atmospheric or aerial perspective.

➼ Madonna and Child with Two Angels

• Details

  • Painted by Fra Filippo Lippi

  • c. 1465

  • Tempera on wood

  • Found in Uffizi, Florence

  • Madonna: the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus Christ

• Content and Symbolism

  • Symbolic landscape

    • Rock formations symbolize the Christian Church.

    • City near Madonna's head is the Heavenly Jerusalem.

  • Pearl motif: seen in headdress and pillow as products of the sea.

  • Pearls used as symbols in scenes of the Incarnation of Christ.

• Context

  • Mary is seen as a young mother.

  • Model may have been the artist’s lover.

  • Landscape inspired by Flemish painting.

  • Scene depicted as if in a window in a Florentine home.

  • Humanization of a sacred theme; there is a sense of domestic intimacy.

  • Lippi was a monk, as indicated by the word “Fra” that precedes his name; he was working in a Carmelite monastery under the patronage of the Medici.

• Image

  

➼ Birth of Venus

• Details

  • Painted by Sandro Botticelli

  • c. 1484–1486

  • Tempera on canvas

  • Found in Uffizi, Florence

• Form

  • Crisply drawn figures.

  • Landscape flat and unrealistic; simple V-shaped waves.

  • Figures float, not anchored to the ground.

• Content

  • Venus emerges fully grown from the foam of the sea with a faraway look in her eyes.

  • Roses scattered before her; roses created at the same time as Venus, symbolizing that love can be painful.

  • On the left: Zephyr (west wind) and Chloris (nymph).

  • On the right: handmaiden rushes to clothe Venus.

• Context

  • Medici commission; may have been commissioned for a wedding celebration.

  • Painting based on a popular court poem by the writer Poliziano, which itself is based on Homeric hymns and Hesiod’s Theogony.

  • A revival of interest in Greek and Roman themes can be seen in this work.

  • Earliest full-scale nude of Venus in the Renaissance.

  • Reflects emerging Neoplatonic thought.

  • Neoplatonism: a school of ancient Greek philosophy that was revived by Italian humanists of the Renaissance

• Image

  

➼ David

• Details

  • Sculpted by Donatello

  • c. 1440–1460

  • Made of bronze

  • Found in National Museum, Bargello, Florence

• Form

  • First large bronze nude since antiquity.

  • Exaggerated contrapposto of the body.

  • Sleekness of the black bronze adds to the femininity of the work.

  • Androgynous figure; homoerotic overtones.

• Function

  • Life-size work, probably meant to be housed in the Medici palace courtyard; not for public viewing.

• Content

  • The work depicts the moment after David slays the Philistine Goliath with a rock from a slingshot; David then decapitates Goliath with his own sword.

  • David contemplates his victory over Goliath, whose head is at his feet; David’s head is lowered to suggest humility.

  • Laurel on David’s hat indicates he was a poet; the hat is a foppish Renaissance design.

• Context

  • David symbolizes Florence taking on larger forces with ease; perhaps Goliath would have been equated with the Duke of Milan.

  • Nothing is known of its commission or patron, but it was placed in the courtyard of the Medici palace in Florence.

  • Modern theory alleges that this is a figure of Mercury, and that the decapitated head is of Argo;

  • Mercury is the patron of the arts and merchants, and therefore an appropriate symbol for the Medici.

• Image

  

Chapter 16: High Renaissance and Mannerism