Renaissance Art

RENAISSANCE ART

A rise in wealth appeared in late medieval Europe after centuries of economic struggle. The rise came at about the same time that the Christian Church rediscovered the writings and works of art of the ancient Romans and Greeks. This bounty of ancient thought provided an interesting alternative to the Christian centered thinking that had dominated Europe for over a millennium. The thinking of the Romans and Greeks was a counterpoint that logically explained the frustrating realities of medieval life and pointed to a different set of principles that could better deal with the blossoming economics of the time than did the ubiquitous thinking of the Church.

While the Church dealt sought to understand this ancient way of thinking, Italian politicians as well as their wealthy patrons financed fratricidal wars that pitted neighbor against neighbor as they attempted to steer their city towards a better set of circumstances than their neighboring towns had in a constant but deadly game of civic one-up man ship. Ironically, these warring men also financed the growth of the Renaissance, as did the religious power elite of the Roman Church, using moneys either collected by the Church or from the immense wealth collected from trading between Europe and the Middle East. With both financial and intellectual wealth at its disposal, Italy moved from medieval fresco painting to a new form of painting that highlighted the modeling of the human face and body and the mathematical craftsmanship of perspective.

The Renaissance first rose up in Florence. Florence was one of several powerful city-states in Italy, in a political situation that reflected ancient Greece. These cities allowed both the spreading and the competing of ideas, whether it was in the arts, literature or politics. Italy’s great writer Dante Alighieri lived in Florence may have been at the forefront of this artistic flowering. He not only wrote the poetic masterpieces of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradisio, he was caught on the wrong side of a political war that raged in Tuscany.

It was in Florence that Botticelli, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Brunelleschi and Ghiberti all worked in less than a century after Dante’s writings. The competition to create the doors for the Bapistry of the Florence church sparked a creative streak that would sweep through Florence and them through Italy.

Sandro Botticelli painted several early Renaissance works in Florence, including The Birth of Venus, modeled by the wife of Americo Vespucci’s cousin. Leonardo Da Vinci was the artistic voice of Aristotelian theory, painting in a detailed scientific style that reflected the Greek’s ideas about nature. Michelangelo, despite repeated commissions from various popes to produce work in Rome, sculpted many of his masterpieces in Florence, including his statue of David. Raphael, who came from the town of Urbino, visited the city and seems to have been influenced by the spatial thinking of these other men.

The Roman and Greek ideas spread out from Italy as new artistic ideas and inventions quickly followed in the same path. Along the North Sea, Germany and Holland were blossoming financially and a Northern Renaissance appeared there. Artists like Hieronymus Bosch, Albrecht Durer, Pieter Bruegel and Hans Holbein defined a highly detailed but beautiful form of artwork that would influence later styles of art.

By the early 1500’s as the Spanish settled into America and the Portuguese sailed back from Indonesia loaded with spices, the Renaissance transformed European art.

Slowly, the Northern and Southern Renaissances merged together into a movement of art that can still be felt today.

Other works of Fine Art you may enjoy:

The Connections Of Mary Cassatt

Bend In the River, an oil painting

Silence In the City, a cityscape painting