|
|
Civilizations Past And Present Book: Ancient Times Author: Robert A. Guisepi Date: 2004 Italian Renaissance Art
North of the Alps during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there was a continuation of "Gothic" art - in painting and sculpture, the same emphasis on realistic detail; in architecture, an elaboration of the Gothic style.
Fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, however, saw innovations that culminated in the classic High Renaissance art of the early sixteenth century. All this was the product of a new society centered in rich cities, the humanist spirit in thought and religion, and a revived interest in Classical art.
Transitional Period In Painting
The greatest figure in the transitional painting of the fourteenth century was the Florentine painter Giotto (1266-1336), who, it was said, "achieved little less than the resurrection of painting from the dead." While earlier Italian painters had copied the unreal, flat, and rigidly formalized images of Byzantine paintings and mosaics, Giotto observed from life and painted a three-dimensional world peopled with believable human beings dramatically moved by deep emotion. He humanized painting much as Petrarch humanized thought and St. Francis, whose life was one of his favorite subjects, humanized religion. Giotto initiated a new epoch in the history of painting, one that expressed the religious piety of his lay patrons and their delight in images of everyday life.
Quattrocento Painting, Sculpture, And Architecture
The lull in painting that followed Giotto's death in 1338, during which his technical innovations were retained but the spirit and compassion that make him one of the world's great painters were lost, lasted until the beginning of the quattrocento (Italian for "four hundred," an abbreviation for the 1400s). In his brief lifetime the Florentine Massaccio (1401-1428) completed the revolution in technique begun by Giotto. As can be seen in his few surviving paintings, Masaccio largely mastered the problems of perspective, anatomical naturalism of flesh and bone, and the modeling of figures in light and shade (chiaroscuro) rather than by sharp line. Masaccio was also the first to paint nude figures (Eve, in his Expulsion from Eden), thus reversing the trend of Christian art, which, since its inception in late Roman times, had turned its back on the beauty of the human form. Masaccio died in debt and poor in Rome, having received few commissions in Florence. Apparently his work was too austere and lacking in elegance to attract many patrons.
Inspired by Masaccio's achievement, most quattrocento painters constantly sought to improve technique. This search for greater realism culminated in such painters as Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) and Piero della Francesca (c. 1420-1492). Mantegna's painting of the dead body of Christ lying feet first on a marble slab well shows the results of his lifelong study of perspective. His group portrait of the family of his chief patron, the Gonzaga duke of Mantua, is "done in the grand manner" and reflects the self-assurance of the Renaissance elite.
Piero della Francesca's approach to painting was scientific and intellectual. His zeal to reduce perspective to a mathematical science - he wrote a book on the subject - led him to neglect motion. The figures in his Discovery and Proving of the True Cross, showing Constantine's mother Helena discovering the cross used for Christ's crucifixion, are as still as if hewn out of marble. Piero's restrained, undramatic, unemotional, and mathematically precise paintings prefigure the abstract painting of our own time. For such reasons, fashionable taste today has transferred its allegiance from Botticelli's lyrical exquisiteness to Piero's hushed serenity.
While Masaccio's successors in the last half of the fifteenth century were intent upon giving their figures a new solidity and resolving the problem of three-dimensional presentation, the Florentine Sandro Botticelli (1447-1510) proceeded in a different direction, abandoning the techniques of straightforward representation of people and objects. Botticelli used a highly sensitive, even quivering, line to stir the viewer's imagination and emotion and to create a mood in keeping with his more subtle and sophisticated poetic vision. This unconventional artist was associated with the Platonic Academy at Florence, where the Christian faith was fused with pagan mythology. Thus, although his Birth of Venus depicts the goddess of love rising from the sea, there is little that is human or material about her ethereal figure. Like the Virgin Mary, she has become the symbol of a higher kind of love - divine love. The allegory is reinforced by making the winds that blow Venus onto the shore look like Christian angels.
In the meantime progress was being made also in sculpture, and it, like painting, reached stylistic maturity at the beginning of the quattrocento. Like the humanists, the sculptors found in ancient Rome the models they were eager to imitate; they, too, saw what seemed related to their own experience and aspirations.
In his second pair of bronze doors for the baptistery in Florence, Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) achieved the goal he had set for himself: "I strove to imitate nature as closely as I could, and with all the perspective I could produce." These marvels of relief sculpture, which resurrect the form and spirit of Roman sculpture and architecture and drew from Michelangelo the declaration that they were worthy to be the gates of paradise, depict skillfully modeled human figures - including some classically inspired nudes - which stand out spatially against architectural and landscape backgrounds.
Although Ghiberti was a superb craftsman, he was less of an innovator than his younger contemporary in Florence, Donatello (1386-1466), who visited Rome to study the remains of antique sculpture. Divorcing sculpture from the architectural background it had in the Middle Ages, Donatello produced truly freestanding statues based on the realization of the human body as a functional, coordinated mechanism of bones, muscles, and sinews, maintaining itself against the pull of gravity. His David is the first bronze nude made since antiquity, and his equestrian statue of the army commander Gattamelata, clad in Roman armor, is the first of its type done in the Renaissance. The latter clearly reveals the influence of classical models and was probably inspired by the equestrian statue of the emperor Marcus Aurelius in Rome.
More dramatic than either of these equestrian statues is that of the Venetian general Bartolomeo Colleoni, the creation of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488). A versatile Florentine artist noteworthy as a sculptor, painter, and the teacher of Leonardo da Vinci, Verrocchio designed the statue of Colleoni to permit one of the horse's forelegs to be unsupported - a considerable achievement. The posture and features of the famous general convey dramatically the supreme self-confidence and even arrogance of Renaissance public figures.
Renaissance architecture, which even more than sculpture reflects the influence of ancient Roman models, glorifies the worldly success of its patrons. It began with the work of Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446). As a youth Brunelleschi accompanied Donatello to Rome where he employed measuring stick and sketchbook to master the principles of classical architecture. Returning to Florence, Brunelleschi constructed there the uncompleted dome of the cathedral, the first dome to be built since Roman times. Although strongly influenced by classical architecture, Brunelleschi's buildings in Florence, which include churches and palaces, were not just copies of Roman models. Employing arcades of Roman arches, Roman pediments above the windows, and Roman columns and other decorative motifs, Brunelleschi recreated the Roman style in a fresh and original manner. So began the Renaissance style of architecture that, with many modifications, has lasted to the present time.
The High Renaissance, 1500-1530
By the time of the High Renaissance in Italy, when painting, sculpture, and architecture reached a peak of perfection, the center of artistic activity had shifted from Florence to Rome. The popes were lavish patrons, and the greatest artists of the period worked in the Vatican at one time or another. It did not seem inconsistent to popes and artists to include representations of pagan mythological figures in the decorations of the papal palace, and thus the Vatican was filled with secular as well as religious art.
The great architect of the High Renaissance was Donato Bramante (1444-1514) from Milan. Bramante's most important commission came in 1506 when Pope Julius II requested him to replace the old basilica of St. Peter, built by the emperor Constantine, with a monumental Renaissance structure. Bramante's plan called for a centralized church in the form of a Greek cross surmounted by an immense dome. His design for St. Peter's exemplifies the spirit of High Renaissance architecture - to approach nearer to the monumentality and grandeur of Roman architecture. In Bramante's own words, he would place "the Pantheon on top of the Basilica of Maxentius." Bramante died when the cathedral was barely begun, and it was left to Michelangelo and others to complete the work. Michelangelo's dome has influenced the design of most major domes down to the beginning of the present century.
The painters of the High Renaissance inherited the solutions to such technical problems as perspective space from the quattrocento artists. But whereas the artists of the earlier period had been concerned with movement, color, and narrative detail, painters in the High Renaissance strove to eliminate nonessentials and concentrated on the central theme of a picture and its basic human implications. By this process of elimination, many High Renaissance painters achieved a "classic" effect of seriousness and serenity and endowed their work with idealistic values.
Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael, And Michelangelo
The great triad of High Renaissance painters consists of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. An extraordinary man, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was proficient in a variety of fields: engineering, mathematics, architecture, geology, botany, physiology, anatomy, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. He was always experimenting, with the result that few of the projects he started were ever finished.
A superb draftsman, Leonardo was a master of soft modeling in light and shade and of creating groups of figures perfectly balanced in a given space. But in addition to an advanced knowledge of technique, what makes Leonardo one of the great masters is his deep psychological insight into human nature. As he himself expressed it, "A good painter has two chief objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul."
One of Leonardo's most famous paintings is the Mona Lisa, a portrait of a woman whose enigmatic smile captures an air of tenderness and humility, which, Freud suggests, the memory of his mother called to his mind. Another is The Last Supper, a study of the dramatic impact of Christ's announcement to his disciples, "One of you will betray me." When he painted this picture on the walls of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Leonardo was experimenting with the use of an oil medium combined with plaster, and, unfortunately, the experiment was unsuccessful. The painting quickly began to disintegrate and has had to be repainted several times.
The second of the great triad of High Renaissance painters was Raphael (1483-1520). By the time he was summoned to Rome in 1508 by Pope Julius II to aid in the decoration of the Vatican, Raphael had absorbed the styles of Leonardo and Michelangelo. His Stanze frescoes in the Vatican display a magnificent blending of classical and Christian subject matter and are the fruit of careful planning and immense artistic knowledge. Raphael possessed neither Leonardo's intellectuality nor Michelangelo's power, but an appealing serenity, particularly evident in his lovely Madonnas, characterizes his work. Most critics consider him the master of perfect design and balanced composition.
The individualism and idealism of the High Renaissance have no greater representative than Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). Stories of this stormy and temperamental personality have helped shape our ideas of what a genius is like. Indeed, there is something almost superhuman about both Michelangelo and his art. His great energy enabled him to complete in four years the entire work of painting the ceiling of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel for Julius II, an area of several thousand square yards, and his art embodies a superhuman ideal. With his unrivaled genius for rendering the human form, he devised a wealth of expressive positions and attitudes for his figures in scenes from Genesis. Their physical splendor is pagan, but their spirit is Christian. The Creation of Adam depicts God, with the unborn Eve under his left arm, instilling the divine spark of the soul into the body of Adam.
Michelangelo considered himself first and foremost a sculptor, and this uomo universale ("complete man"), who also excelled as poet, engineer, and architect, was undoubtedly the greatest sculptor of the Renaissance. The glorification of the human body, particularly the male nude, was Michelangelo's great achievement. Fired by the grandeur of such newly discovered pieces of Hellenistic sculpture as the Laocoon group and strongly influenced by Platonism with its dualism of body and soul, he expressed in such works as his David, commissioned in 1501 when he was twenty-six, his idealized view of human dignity and majesty. Succeeding Bramante as chief architect of St. Peter's in 1546, Michelangelo designed the great dome and was still actively creative as a sculptor when he died, almost in his ninetieth year, in 1564. He had long outlived the High Renaissance.
The Venetian School
Following the sack of Rome in 1527 during the Italian Wars, the rich trading city of Venice became the center of art. This wealthy, sophisticated milieu produced a secular rather than a devotional school of painting. Most Venetian artists were satisfied with the here and now; while they sometimes painted Madonnas, they more often painted wealthy merchants and proud doges, attired in rich brocades, jewels, and precious metals. There is a sensuousness in the Venetian painting of this period, which is evident in the artists' love of decoration, rich costumes, striking nude figures, and radiant light and color. It has been said that while earlier painting consisted of drawing plus coloring, at Venice color and light became paramount ingredients of painting.
The first master of the Venetian High Renaissance was Giorgione (1477-1510), who, like Botticelli, rejected the quattrocento concern to be scientific and realistic and substituted a delicate and dreamily poetic lyricism. Common to all of his paintings is a mood of languor and relaxation that is called Giorgionesque. The lyrical grace of his Sleeping Venus, for example, has no erotic overtones. His paintings are fanciful idylls that have no narrative content - they tell no story. Viewers are left free to extract their own meaning from them.
The paintings of Titian (1477?-1576), who was probably born in the same year as his friend Giorgione but outlived him by sixty-five years, are less subtle and poetic. His Venuses, for example, are buxom Venetian models - mature, opulent, and sex-conscious. During his long working life he proved himself the master of every kind of subject ranging from religion to pagan mythology and including portraits of the self-satisfied upper class, for which he was most famed among his contemporaries. With his robust sensuousness and view of all things in terms of light and color, Titian is the type-figure of the Venetian painter, and his work has influenced many generations of modern painters.
Mannerism: The "Anti-Renaissance" Style
In 1494, the French king Charles VIII crossed into Italy with an army of 40,000 men and inaugurated the Italian Wars that lasted until 1559 and turned Italy into a battleground for the powerful new monarchies of France and Spain. While Italians were losing control of their destiny, Machiavelli in The Prince (1513) lamented his native land as being
more a slave than the Hebrews, more a servant than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians; without head, without government; defeated, plundered, torn asunder, overrun; subject to every sort of disaster. ^9
[Footnote 9: Trans. A. H. Gilbert, Machiavelli: The Prince and Other Works (Chicago: Packard & Co., 1941), p. 177 (Ch. 26).]
In 1527 the unruly army of Charles V, Spanish king and German emperor, sacked Rome, the major center of High Renaissance patronage and culture, and its many artists, writers, and scholars fled the city.
Such unsettling developments, including the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, produced a radical change of outlook on life. The earlier optimistic emphasis on "the dignity of man" was replaced by a pessimistic belief in man's evil nature - one of the basic assumptions in Machiavelli's Prince. Michelangelo, who as we noted had long outlived the High Renaissance, expressed a similar pessimism in the tortured figures of his late sculptures and in his painting of the Last Judgment, filled with huddled figures pleading for mercy before a wrathful God, painted on a wall of the Sistine Chapel in the 1530s after the sack of Rome and more than forty years after his glorious Creation of Adam on the ceiling. "Led by long years to my last hours," Michelangelo wrote, "too late, O world, I know your joys for what they are. You promise a peace which is not yours to give."
From about 1530 to the end of the sixteenth century, Italian artists responded to the stresses of the age in a new style called Mannerism. Consciously revolting against the classical serenity and poise of High Renaissance art, Mannerist artists sought to express their own inner vision - often, like Michelangelo in his later years, their doubts and indecisions - in a manner that evoked shock in the viewer.
Typical are the paintings of Parmigianino, who returned to his native Parma from Rome after it was sacked, and the Venetian Tintoretto. Parmigianino's Madonna with the Long Neck (1535) shows no logic of structure. One cannot tell whether the distorted figure of the Madonna is seated or standing. Her cloak billows out in defiance of gravity, and her Child seems to be slipping off her lap. The prophet in the background, standing beside a gigantic and purposeless column, is absurdly tiny.
The contemporaries of Tintoretto (1518-1594) had good reason to call him "the thunderbolt of painting." His Abduction of the Body of St. Mark, depicting the legend that three Venetians stole the body of their patron saint from Alexandria during a storm, replaces the harmony, proportion, balance, and idealized reality of the High Renaissance with dramatic force and movement, violent contrast in light and color, imbalanced composition, and crowded figures in uneasy and agitated poses. The upholders of the pure classical tradition who opposed the innovations of the Mannerists considered Tintoretto's work to be marred by careless execution and eccentric taste. One of them wrote that "had he not abandoned the beaten track but rather followed the beautiful style of his predecessors, he would have become one of the greatest painters seen in Venice."
The outstanding Mannerist sculptor was the unconscionable braggart, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571). Both his sculpture and his famous Autobiography reflect his violent and corrupt age's rejection of artistic and moral standards. (He boasts of the number of personal enemies he has killed and quotes a pope as excusing him on the ground that "men like Benvenuto, unique in their profession, stand above the law.") His work like the gold cup decorated with enamel and precious stones now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, consists largely of similar elegant, showy trifles, which Michelangelo described as "snuff-box ornaments."
Mannerist architects developed the Jesuit style, named for the new Jesuit Order that first sponsored it in its Gesu (Jesus) church in Rome (c. 1575). The classical components of Renaissance architecture were manipulated to achieve anticlassical effects. Columns and pilasters were paired for greater richness, curved lines ending in volutes replaced straight lines, and statues were often fixed to upper stories and roofs. The parts were arranged to form a climax in the center and fused into one complex pattern.
Tintoretto's Abduction of the Body of St. Mark pictures both the old architecture and the new. In the left background is a typical Renaissance building with its repetition of the same pattern; the whole is no greater than the sum of its parts. To the rear is a Jesuit-style structure whose effect is much more than the sum of its parts - to leave out any part would destroy its essential unity.
The Mannerist Jesuit style prefigures the fully developed Baroque architecture of the seventeenth century, just as the Mannerist style of Tintoretto - and El Greco (d. 1614) in Spain a generation later - prefigures Baroque painting (see ch. 17). There is no clear dividing line between the Mannerism of the sixteenth century and the Baroque of the seventeenth.
Renaissance Music
In contrast to the simple single-voiced or monophonic music - called plain song or Gregorian chant - of the early Middle Ages, the late medieval composers of church music wrote many-voiced or polyphonic music. Polyphony often involved a shuttling back and forth from one melody to another - musical counterpoint. By the fifteenth century as many as twenty-four voice parts were combined into one intricately woven musical pattern. The composers of the High Renaissance continued to produce complicated polyphonic music, but in a calmer and grander manner. Compared with the style of his predecessors, that of the Flemish composer Josquin des Pres (c. 1440-1521), the founder of High Renaissance music, "is both grander and more simple ... and the rhythms and forms used are based on strict symmetry and mathematically regular proportions. Josquin handled all technical problems of complicated constructions with the same ease and sureness one finds in the drawings of Leonardo and Raphael." ^10 During the sixteenth century, also, instruments such as the violin, spinet, and harpsichord developed from more rudimentary types.
[Footnote 10: F. B. Artz, From the Renaissance to Romanticism: Trends in Style in Art, Literature, and Music, 1300-1830 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 102.]
The Renaissance in Italy stimulated many new forms of secular music, especially the madrigal, a love lyric set to music. Castiglione in The Courtier insists that the ability to sing, read music, and play an instrument was essential for gentlemen and ladies. In addition to the Italian madrigal, French chansons and German Lieder added to the growing volume of secular music.
|