RENAISSANCE ART

Renaissance Art



Renaissance Art

Renaissance art includes a variety of media and genres, falling into the major categories of painting, sculpture, works on paper, objects, and architecture. The first four categories can be further subdivided into panel painting, frescoes, oil painting, portraits, genre scenes, sculptureintheround (ranging from monumental to miniature), reliefs, altarpieces, coins, drawings, prints, illuminated manuscripts, printed books, tapestries, jewelry, works in bronze, stone, ivory, and wood, and domestic objects such as dinnerware, clocks, and marriage chests (cassoni). Architecture in the Renaissance includes sacred buildings—cathedrals, monasteries, churches, and chapels; civic structures—town halls (often called palazzi in Italy), piazzas, buildings with courts and prisons, loggias, and bridges; and other secular and domestic architecture—villas, personal houses (also known as palazzi) gardens, and grottoes. The Renaissance began as an Italian phenomenon, in which humanists and artists believed they were effecting a “rebirth” of classical GrecoRoman art and life. Thus, many of the art forms (e.g., monumental sculpture) are related to classical counterparts. As the Renaissance spread throughout the Italian peninsula and Europe, it was affected by differing governments and socioreligious movements, local aesthetic traditions, and available material, as well as new technologies. The Italian Renaissance in the northern courts of Mantua and Milan, for instance, differed in many ways from that of the republics of central Italy, whereas the French Renaissance on Fontainebleau cannot be separated from the aspirations of King Francois I in the 16th century. The identity of the German Renaissance is intimately linked with Johann Gutenberg's mid15thcentury invention of the printing press as well as with the Reformation. The Burgundian Netherlands housed the most important centers for tapestries, and the port city of Venice was affected by developments and traditions in northern and southern Western Europe as well as from the East.

Despite its origins in Italy, the term that we use to describe this period, Renaissance, is the French word for “rebirth.” The earliest codified usage is believed to be found in the first volume of Honore de Balzac's Scenes From Private Life, The Ball at Sceaux of 1829, and it was subsequently codified in Jules Michelet's The Renaissance of 1855 and in Jacob Burckhardt's German work The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy of 1860. The Italian word is rinascita, used as early as Giorgio Vasari's account of Renaissance art, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Vasari listed three ages of the Italian Renaissance: first, the earliest stirrings in the works of the late Duecento (1200s) and the Trecento (1300s)—such as that of Cimabue, Giotto, Duccio, and the Pisanos; second, the early mature works of the Quattrocento Renaissance (1400s)—such as that of Brunelleschi, Donatello, Massaccio, Alberti, Verrocchio, and Mantegna; and third, the culmination of the Renaissance in works of the late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento (1500s)—such as that of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Bramante, Peruzzi, and Vasari himself. This last phase is now known as the High Renaissance, which is followed by Mannerism.

The touchstone for the original concept of a rebirth is Petrarch's 1341 letter ...