High Renaissance Art

Thesis Statement

“Sculptures, along with paintings, formed the ideals for High Renaissance Art”

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni who was born in Caprese on March 6 1475, decided on a career in art and was apprenticed to the Florentine workshop of Domenico Ghirlandaio in 1488. Among his initial drawings are sketches after paintings by earlier masters of Italian art, including Giotto and Masaccio. Michelangelo also made, as an exercise in fantasia, a copy of Martin Schongauer's engraving, The Temptation of St. Anthony (Cole, pp. 24).

Discussion

Like its sister arts, painting and architecture, sculpture was a medium that gave tangible form to Renaissance ideals, reflecting the progress of cultural and intellectual currents. Accordingly, the origins of Renaissance sculpture are to be found in those of the period itself. The newly matured humanist movement stimulated a historical self-consciousness which prompted comparisons of contemporary culture with that of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Ancient texts about art became a source of inspiration and a touchstone against which to measure artistic achievements. Verisimilitude, the imitation of nature, gained signal importance in the artists' vocabulary. Contemporaneously, the lay spirituality of the Franciscan movement gave force to the renewed interest in nature and man (Cole, pp. 22).

A number of conditions continued to affect the course of the development of sculpture in Italy, which was virtually dominated by the Florentines in the 15th and 16th centuries. The technological advances of the Quattrocento and the increasing significance of archaeological finds (such as the discovery of the first-century-BCE Laocoön statue in Rome in 1506) inspired a concept of perfection which characterizes the art of the 16th century. The study of collections of antiquities, like that of Lorenzo de' Medici, inspired young sculptors in the 1490s to formulate a new ideal of beauty, grace, and harmony. The challenge not only to match but also to outdo antique sculpture prompted a shift to colossal scale in sculpture for public places and funerary projects. The relationship of sculpture and its architectural setting was tuned to a perfect harmony throughout the Renaissance. The creative power of the artist, filtered through an aesthetic vision of perfection, provided the potential to surpass nature; expression of the artifice of art replaced verisimilitude as the primary objective. The evolution of art theory in the 16th century Renaissance and the corollary notion of the artist-philosopher were critical to the formulation of the concept of the artist as genius and led ...