Renaissance Art
The Renaissance Mind Mirrored in Art
By: Susan Fegley Osmond
Source: World and I. 13.12 (Dec. 1998): p18. From General OneFile. Art reveals aspects of the Renaissance worldview that formed the foundations of the modern era.
This article aims to outline some basic changes in worldview that took place during the Renaissance -- a movement and an era of awakening that turned from the medieval order and laid the basis for Western civilization up to the present. Today, when the Renaissance is mentioned, what springs to most people's mind is art. Therefore, we will take painting and sculpture as our springboard for discussing some fundamental changes in attitude--using Renaissance art as a window, as it were, onto the Renaissance mind. In particular we will look at how art evidences new attitudes toward man, his place in the world, and his relationship to God.
Renaissance (from the French for "rebirth") is a term coined in the nineteenth century originally to denote the revival of art and letters under the influence of ancient Roman and Greek models. This revival began in Italy in the fourteenth century, flourished in the fifteenth, and in the sixteenth reached apogee and then crisis in Italy while it spread through most of Europe. But humanism's classical learning alone cannot account for the immense changes that took place during these centuries; moreover, movements originating in the North also contributed to these changes. Therefore the term Renaissance has also come to denote the era in general and its overriding spirit, in which desires intrinsic to human nature, generally repressed under medieval feudalism, burst forth with new fervor and resulted in a new culture.
Understood as an era and also as an inspiritus of awakening, the Renaissance includes both the movement of humanism that emanated from Italy and the northern-based Reformation (and its precursors in England and Bohemia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). These two developments should by no means be equated with each other, but they had in some respects a common root and exerted a powerful influence on each other. The era is also characterized by increasing secularization, burgeoning trade (run by a powerful merchant class), the expanding power of northern European monarchies and of vying Italian city-states, and the beginnings of the age of exploration and the scientific revolution.
It seems that the Renaissance sprang forth in response to the need for outlets through which some basic human desires, generally denied in the medieval order of things, could be expressed and find fulfillment. One sees during the Renaissance a marked increase in individual freedom and autonomy, and the acceptance of physical existence and of the desire to pursue a happy, practical life. Renaissance thinkers stressed man's intrinsic value and dignity as a being created in the image and likeness of God. Related to this was a pervasive desire to pursue a direct relationship with the Divinity founded on personal mystical experience and/or the study of Scripture, early church writings, and even pagan texts reinterpreted in Christian terms. Also fundamental to the era was the desire to understand and master nature through direct observation and the discovery of its laws and structure.
As in any period, remnants of the old worldview coexisted with and to some extent helped shape the new. In northern Europe, Gothic art and culture (as it was derisively named by Italian humanists) held sway into the sixteenth century, and, as a result, the Renaissance there had a strongly religious cast.
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries protoreformers such as John Wycliff and the Lollards in England and Jan Huss and the various branches of the Hussites in Bohemia called for lay study of the Bible and preaching in the vernacular, as well as the moral reform of the clergy. Less extreme but more pervasive was the Devotio Moderna--which stressed individual piety and education, found a focal point in Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ, and in time fused the finest elements of Scholasticism and humanism. All of these prepared the ground for the Reformation, which began in 1517. (See the February 1999 issue for a Millennial Moments artcle on the Reformation.) In the North the Renaissance spirit of revival found expression in these religious movements and also in the humanism that drifted northward from Italy. Both affected all areas of society and culture.
Gothic art and culture had never had much impact on Italy, however; traces are mostly confined to the northernmost regions. Likewise, feudalism was never so pervasive there as in northern Europe. In an environment of commerce-fueled rival city-states, the founders of the Italian Renaissance looked to Italy's glorious ancient past as an impetus for revival. Here, in rediscovered ancient texts and in the ruins of ancient buildings and sculpture, they anchored their efforts to break free of medieval frames of reference and to discover a true understanding of man, finding in classical civilization a worldview in some respects sympathetic to their own. Soon they found confidence to follow the dictates of their own observations, powers of reason, and conscience and-while continuing to learn from the revered wisdom of the ancients--to trust their own ability to surpass all previous achievements.
THUMBNAIL HISTORY
In this article we will present certain traits in the art of the fifteenth and first third of the sixteenth centuries and discuss how these indicate underlying Renaissance attitudes. Because we will go trait by trait, it will necessitate jumping around chronologically and geographically in a way that might be confusing. Therefore it would be useful to first get our bearings in a thumbnail outline of the history of art during the Renaissance, as it is usually delineated.
Renaissance art in "the South" (Italy) and that in "the North" (northern Europe) are usually treated separately. First, the early shoots of the Renaissance in fourteenth-century Italy are examined, with the beginnings of the studia humanitatis ("studies of mankind")--later called humanism--by Petrarch and others who sought out and translated into the vernacular ancient philosophical and literary texts. This coincided with a tendency in art to move away from Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic models in the direction of naturalism, informed to some degree by classical ruins and also by Franciscan humanitarianism. The most celebrated artist of this period is Giotto.
Then ensues an exploration of the Early Renaissance (spanning the fifteenth century), in which, centered mostly in republican yet Medici-dominated Florence and a few other cities, a newfound confidence in the innate dignity of man and the value of individuality (rooted in humanistic study), coupled with a passion to comprehend and utilize the divine mathematics undergirding the order of the world, fueled the creation of seminal works by Donatello, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, the Bellinis, and Leonardo da Vinci among others. Some of these artists overlap into the next period, called the High Renaissance, the geographical center of which was (mostly) Rome. There despotic popes commissioned some of the world's immortal artworks by towering figures such as Michelangelo Buonarotti and Raphael and lesser giants such as Donato Bramante and Perugino. The art of this period is distinguished by its harmony, balance, and profundity of ideas.
Following the devastating Sack of Rome in 1527 by forces of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the spotlight shifts to Venice and central Italy with artists such as Giorgione, Titian, and Antonio Correggio, as well as architect Andrea Palladio. During the mid to late sixteenth century-in the wake of the breakup of Christendom into opposing camps, the occupation of Italy by foreign powers, and the waning of Venice's trading dominance--an era of uncertainty and disillusionment set in. Reflecting this was an art style dubbed Mannerism for its extremes of emotionalism, purposeful imbalance and distortion, and expressionism. Parmigianino, Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto, and (working in Spain but Venice-trained) El Greco characterize this restless period that segued into the Baroque.
Histories of Renaissance art in the North trace at first the Gothic International Style and the innovations of the Flemish Primitives and other early Netherlandish painters in the fifteenth century. They then look mostly to developments in Germany, where Albrecht Diirer fused visionary and empirical aspects of the northern Gothic spirit with what he learned of linear perspective and rules of proportion through journeys to Italy. Meanwhile, the artist whom history has come to know as Matthias Grimewald brought Gothic mystical pietism to a haunting apogee in his many-paneled Isenheim altarpiece. Woodcuts and engravings, originating in the North, became influential both as a means to disseminate the imagery of important paintings through reproduction and as a medium for original works.
In the land where the printing press was born, the word in time surpassed the image as the motor of culture. And throughout the North, Protestants cleansed churches of images and religious articles and shut down monasteries, so the scope allowed to art narrowed drastically. Hans Holbein the Younger moved to Henry VIII's England, where his work was confined almost exclusively to portraiture. Later, seventeenth-century Dutch artists would broaden the field to also include landscapes, still lifes, genre painting, and private meditations on biblical themes.
RISE OF NATURALISM
We will now look at a selection of developments in painting and sculpture that evidence specific aspects of the Renaissance worldview. First we will discuss naturalism, which refers to the idea that art should be a mirror of nature.
Romanesque and Byzantine art did' not adhere to this idea. In a mostly illiterate and predominantly Christian society, images became the medium to educate the masses about Christian doctrine. Subject matter was prescribed, as was the manner of depiction. An elaborate system of didactic symbols was developed to identify characters, events, and important ideas. In this highly stylized art, human figures were generally devoid both of a sense of fleshed form and of individual identity. Settings were connoted by the barest of means, and human figures seemed to exist in a space beyond dimension, frequently set against a background of burnished gold leaf denoting a realm of divine illumination.
In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, sculpture in the North began the thaw into naturalism with the emergence of Gothic art. Church sculpture became somewhat more rounded, lifelike, and expressive. In Italy, as we have noted, the Gothic style took only tenuous hold. Nonetheless, in the mid to late thirteenth century strains of naturalism worked their way into art there.
An impetus for this came from English Franciscan Roger Bacon, who helped develop fledgling experimental science. He complained that the images preachers had to rely on to help educate their flock were not vivid or evocative enough. In a section of his encyclopedic Opus majus (1266-68), written expressly at the request of the pope, he called for the development of a painting method to depict palpable forms in convincingly three-dimensional space, based on the study and application of geometry and the science of optics. Response to this call can be seen in Italian frescoes of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
For artist Giorgio Vasari--the great biographer of Italian Renaissance artists--the new art had its birth with Giotto. The cycle of frescoes the Tuscan artist painted in the Arena Chapel in Padua became a sort of pilgrimage site for artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Giotto's 1305-1306 Lamentation--one of his frescos in the Arena Chapel--reveals new emotional eloquence. It is a scene of grief, yet there are different reactions to the death of Christ, all derived from the unique personalities of the characters involved. Mary, clinging to the body of her son with one arm draped across his chest, searches his countenance as if to penetrate the barrier between life and death; Saint John flings his arms out in protesting disbelief, as if all the world has been lost to him; Mary Magdalene gazes in private, tender sorrow at the beloved feet she once had washed with tears; each of the others react in similarly individual ways, while above, the angels give full vent to their sorrow.
Political developments in Italy played a significant part in the emergence of artists such as Giotto, who were confident to assert individual styles based on the observation of nature rather than the perpetuation of medieval traditions. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a number of independent city-states, fortified by their powerful European-wide trade and banking, formalized their governments as republics (Venice had even been a republic since the eighth century). These qualified democracies were governed ad hoc by guilds--associations of merchants, bankers, artisans, and other professionals. The unformali, zed nature of the city constitutions enabled men greedy for power to manipulate the quasi-democratic governments; relics of the nobility or great merchant oligarchs tended to lead the communes into despotism at the hands of a family or a clique (the fifteenth century saw the most virulent forms of this). Nonetheless, these republics--particularly Florence--offered guild-member citizens unprecedented freedom. Fourteenth-century frescoes reveal that individuality was not only evident but already prized in the Italian city-republics.
But burgeoning individuality and naturalism were not unique to Italians. In the region today known as the Netherlands and Belgium there had also sprung up prosperous cities that were semi-independent and run on republican lines by guilds. Haarlem-born Claus Sluter, an outstanding sculptor, shows the elevation of individuality in his powerfully characterized, strikingly realistic figures for the Well of Moses (1395-1403) in Dijon.
It is in the early to mid fifteenth century that we see the real flowering of the Renaissance, evident in both Italy and Flanders. In Italy a new breed of artists arose with strong, independent personalities. They knew they were forging a new art and indeed a new culture, and strove to rival and even surpass the brilliance of classical antiquity.
A NEW PERSPECTIVE
During this time we see in the service of naturalism a development that was to revolutionize art. Indeed, it defined most painting up to the twentieth century (and still holds sway in realistic painting). This was the discovery of linear or vanishing-point perspective in Florence. The principles of it were first demonstrated around 1413 by architect Filippo Brunelleschi (who later gained fame for the technical feat of designing and erecting the immense dome of Florence Cathedral). But it was architect and man of letters Leon Battista Alberti who first described the underlying geometry and a simple method in his treatise On Painting in 1435. This system was further refined by Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, and Durer.
Early pioneers devised a system of looking at the world as if through a framed window, in which the painting's panel (or picture plane) is the "glasspane." They even devised frames with grids through which the artist looked at (and could even trace) the subject to be depicted. This was not a very scientific approach, but it allowed the artist to observe and gauge the phenomenon of foreshortening. Artists had previously noticed that if, say, you gaze at the interior of a long room, the sides of the room appear to move inward, while the floor appears to move up and the ceiling down, so the wall at the far end of the room appears to be smaller than a theoretical wall on the spot where you are standing.
What Brunelleschi and Alberti discovered was that--to take our example--while your side walls are in reality pallel, if in your drawing you extend the lines of their receding top and bottom edges to a horizontal line denoting the far horizon opposite your eye level, the lines of the walls all appear to meet in a single vanishing point. With the further help of geometry they developed a system to measure "depth" in the picture. Thus it became possible to depict objects with exact dimensions placed in a measurable three-dimensional space and to draw all objects to proper scale. The result is a rendition of visual reality quite like what you see with one eye closed, or like that produced in a photograph. It's not exactly the way humans see, for we have stereoscopic vision, among other things. But it presents a convincing, readable, and systematic two-dimensional representation of three-dimensionality.
Early systems of linear perspective used a single vanishing point in the center of the picture. The system for working out the depth easily resulted in the checkerboard floors and street-grounds often found in Early Italian Renaissance paintings. But the single vanishing point system works only for simple scenes in which all planes depicted in depth are parallel to each other and all planes depicted in width are parallel to the picture plane. Any plane at a different angle would result in another vanishing point. To obtain greater naturalism, a system evolved years later that used two vanishing points (or even more) to achieve round-the-corner or up hill and down dale effects.
When linear perspective was first introduced, Florentine artists seized upon it with fervor, for here they not only had a method to render a scene in correct perspective, re-creating almost exactly what the eye sees, but they felt they had found the key to unlock the divine order of the cosmos. Since at least the time of Pythagoras in ancient Greece, people had believed that the universe was ordered-was held together, in a sense--by sacred numerical relationships and proportions, by sacred geometry. Here the artist-architects of the Renaissance seemed to have found basic principles underlying the structure of reality. No wonder they had such confidence that man as a creative being was capable of achieving divinity. Here they could experience and vicariously participate in the very process of the mathematical creation of the universe through the re-creation of "worlds" of harmony in their own works.
Geometric relations, mathematical proportion, and the mysticism of numbers played an important part in how painters designed their pictures and architects their buildings. They made the underlying structure itself embody central ideas or themes (Piero della Francesca's paintings demonstrate this most markedly).
Brunelleschi reportedly made two paintings to demonstrate the principles of perspective he discovered, but these are now lost. His good friend the sculptor Donatello was apparently the first to use Brunelleschi's findings, though rather erratically; this was in his bronze relief Feast of Herod (1423-27).
It was another friend of Brunelleschi's, the short-lived Masaccio, who made the earliest extant painting utilizing the new perspective technique consistently. The Holy Trinity With the Virgin, St. John, and Donors (c. 1425-28), a fresco on a wall of the Santa Maria Novella Church in Florence, creates the illusion of a two-tiered chapel. The bottom of this, with the tomb and skeleton of Adam, appears to jut into the space of the church in which the viewer stands. The upper part creates the optical illusion of an additional barrel-vaulted wing to the church, a "chapel of Golgatha" that houses the crucified Christ, God the Father looming behind him, and the dove of the Holy Spirit between them, with Saint John and Mary flanking the scene. The overall arrangement makes literal the Trinity through the use of the triangle--or, more exactly, the intersection of two triangles at the apex, one in the spiritual chapel and the other linking the spiritual dimension with the earthly one. Masaccio's perspectival tour de force thus served as a most effective vehicle through which a viewer could contemplate the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the process of redemption.
PESPERCTIVE AS SYMBOL
The development of linear perspective indicates important things about the territory that the Renaissance mind opened to inquiry and the new worldview this brought into being. Most obvious is a sense of being completely at home in the world and an integral part of it--quite different from the medieval feeling of being stranded in a realm of mortality while one's true habitat is some great dimensionless beyond. Earlier attempts at perspective revealed man coming down to earth, as it were, but with linear perspective he had truly landed--and not only in the realm of pictures. Medieval painting had had no extension in depth and no horizon. Renaissance man discovered extension, then discovered the horizon-and then wanted to extend his horizons!
Thus city-states and nation-states vied to expand their territories, and merchants their spheres of trade. And with the help of the geometry through which artist-architects had first made a graph of space, explorers eventually found a way to graph their way across the trackless seas. The shores no longer needed to be clung to--neither the physical shores of Europe and Africa nor the shores of knowledge itself.
Now seeming to be set on a course to fulfill the biblical dictum to become lord of creation, Renaissance man set out to master the world's territory, and likewise to master the workings of the universe through science. (Other articles in this Millennial Moments series explore these developments; see "Columbus and the Age of Exploration" in the November 1998 issue and an essay on Galileo and the scientific revolution scheduled for the April 1999 issue.)
But the graphed space that linear perspective outlines is in some sense a picture of the Western mind's approach to knowledge from here on in. It no longer primarily takes either a linear approach or a poetic-intuitive one, as one can see predominant in other cultures. Through its investigations--whether they be scientific, philosophical, or artistic--the postmedieval Western mind seeks to find underlying laws and principles and to form an understanding of how they interrelate so as to make a grid or framework upon which all knowledge can be plotted and connected and formed into a solid edifice.
Linear perspective implies the rise of rationalism as an approach to knowledge. It also shows the stage being set for the quest for objectivity in knowledge--and also the inescapable fact of subjectivity. In viewing the world as though through a window, Early Renaissance artists mentally set themselves apart from their subjects-they made themselves observers from outside a literal flame of reference. They then attempted to record everything within that frame as exactly as possible, without preconception. Early Renaissance Florentine paintings and reliefs--usually depicting frontal, straight-on scenes with a central vanishing point--particularly conveyed this sense of being objective before the truth as revealed through the world's window.
Yet, perspective also manifests the subjectivity of knowledge. What you see in your flame of reference changes depending on your position. This yields a certain angle that obstructs certain elements while it reveals others. Your perception of reality is inevitably slanted and your knowledge limited. It is also uniquely your own. Linear perspective gives unprecedented power to the individual observer. The individual becomes the main arbiter of his perceptions and of his relationship to the world.
But this can be used to control others. The subjectivity inevitable in presenting things in linear perspective led artists such as Mantegna and especially those in the later Mannerist and Baroque periods to employ extreme or unexpected angles for dramatic effect. Art became in a sense exploitative--especially during the Counter-Reformation, which sought to enforce a certain "view," to over whelm the spectator, and to manipulate him emotionally. So here we have another paradox of Western life pictorially symbolized in perspective. On the one hand, linear perspective makes the individual of primary importance--if you are the "artist" creating the scene (that is, if you have the freedom to choose your own point of view). In this it is a herald of the democratic spirit. On the other hand, it is also a forecast of authoritarian control through what is presented to people as absolute truth--what people are allowed to see.
One more interesting point about linear perspective has to do with the changing understanding of the relationship between man and God during the Renaissance. In medieval depictions there was no point of infinity such as that implied in linear perspective's vanishing point. God, the infinitely supurnal, was some divine omnipotence beyond the heavens. Perspective's vanishing point brought the infinite, as it were, into the phenomenal world.
But it did more than this. It made integral a personal, unique relationship between the eye-I and that infinite. In linear perspective the whole picture of reality hinges on the vanishing point, but where the vanishing point falls within the frame depends on the angle of vision. Thus we have a pictorial paradigm for the idea that every person will experience God uniquely, based on his viewpoint.
The linear perspective generally employed by Italians and that usually used by northerners are different in a way that seems to point toward South-North differences in relating to God during the Reformation. The Italians tended to use a central vanishing point, presenting a frontal view of deep space that psychologically did not seem to extend into the viewer's own space but halted at the picture plane (the "frame"). This can be seen most dramatically in Antonello da Messina's St. Jerome in His Study (c. 1475), in which the artist has actually depicted a barrierlike marble archway on the picture plane beyond which we view the scholar at work in his cabinet, with surrounding rooms receding inordinately back into the distance. By contrast, employing a practice prevalent in the North, Durer presents in his 1514 engraving St. Jerome in His Cabinet an oblique view that not only creates an interior of normal dimensions but gives the impression that the floor extends out under our own feet. We feel we have just entered the room and are part of the scene. Thus, in northern depictions, the infinite became not only imminent but intimate.
Linear perspective circumscribes the world so that we are cut off from the realm of the magical, so to speak--that spaceless space in medieval art from which objects seem to appear and disappear. But linear perspective opens a magnificent window where it closed a door. In religious art, it is a window--as art historian Erwin Panofsky puts it--onto "the realm of the visionary, where the miraculous becomes a direct experience of the beholder, in that the supernatural events in a sense erupt into his own, apparently natural, visual space and so permit him really to 'internalize' their supernaturalness."
Panofsky continues, "Perspective, in transforming the ousia (reality) into the phainomenon (appearance), seems to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness; but for that very reason, conversely, it expands human consciousness into a vessel for the divine."
EMPIRICAL APPROACH
While linear perspective, with its rationalistic approach, was being formulated and refined in Italy, in the North there arose an exacting form of naturalism that was based in meticulous empirical observation. This originated in Flanders, and it grew out of the tradition of intricate manuscript illumination. The innovators were later dubbed the Flemish Primitives (so called because they were the first artists to work in a sophisticated form of oil-based paint). They included such artists as Robert Campin, his apprentice Rogier van der Weyden, and Jan van Eyck, as well as their later followers.
Among the Flemish Primitives, van Eyck was the most assiduous exponent of art as a mirror of nature. His Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride (also known as Arnolfini Wedding, 1434) shows every detail of the couple's garb and refined chamber, down to individual hairs in the dog's fur and detailed reflections in the convex mirror. In the fourteenth century, Englishman William of Ockham had elaborated the theory of Nominalism, which rejected the prevailing Scholastic view that "universals," or categories, really exist and claimed instead that only individual, "particular" things do; he also claimed that knowledge (as opposed to that which can only be taken on faith) comes from direct, sense-based experience of individual things. Surely with van Eyck we have Nominalism in paint. It shows that a fundamental change has occurred in how man perceives the world.
Van Eyck has taken great care to create a sense that Arnolfini and his bride inhabit three-dimensional space, though the artist took an empirical, pragmatic approach to perspective that yields results different from the vanishing-point perspective developed around the same time in Italy. Yet by planting his figures firmly on a receding floor upon which objects at the back of the room appear smaller than those in front, and through delicately and consistently delineating light and shadow, the artist convincingly conveys depth and tangibility. He furthermore offers an honest portrayal of personality even when it is unflattering, not shrinking from capturing the sly, bloodlessly cold features of his patron (who, history records, was quite a sinister fellow). In all this--minute recording of the optical perception of the surface of things, capturing a sense of depth through scale and one-point lighting, and personality-revealing portraiture-van Eyck was an innovator in the North.
Here we see that, simultaneous with developments in Italy, the Flemish Renaissance mind has decisively broken free of medieval insubstantiality and found a home on earth--literally a defined space. Van Eyck's microscopic-telescopic vision, as it has been called, reveals a mind that not only accepts the world but eagerly investigates every particle of it, as if expecting to bring to light eternal verities clothed in the tangible. A century and a half before Francis Bacon, we see operative in the art of van Eyck and his Flemish peers an informal yet exacting empiricism at work as a method of knowledge--the use of an inductive approach whereby through the accumulation of detail upon detail a comprehensive grasp of reality can be achieved.
It must be noted, however, that the early Netherlandish painters, and van Eyck in particular, further developed the medieval passion for symbolism. Van Eyck often constructs an intricate subtext of symbols and references drawn not only from long iconographic tradition but also from his wide reading, weaving a many-layered web of meaning and inference almost as detailed and nuanced (though not always as comprehensible) as his portrayal of the visible world. This penchant for creating in a subtext of symbolism a sort of shorthand interactive exegesis or commentary--a penchant in some ways related to Scholasticism's delight in the subtleties of argument and the accumulation of authoritative opinion--remained a hallmark of northern art for centuries. It shows that a kind of microscopically investigative rationalism was simultaneously at work with empirical observation.
ATTENTION TO ATMOSPHERE
Netherlandish artists innovated the depiction of detailed landscapes in the background of their paintings. In these works we see the development of atmospheric perspective--the depiction of changes in tone and color values that can be observed in objects receding from the spectator. Because of moisture and dust particles in the air, the farther something is from the viewer the more muted is its color, tending toward blue in the far distance. The difference in atmosphere between northern Europe and the Mediterranean accounts in part for the greater interest afforded atmospheric perspective by northern painters. But, together with modeling with a consistent source of light, it is an important aspect of convincingly conveying a sense of depth.
In Italy the originator of atmospheric perspective and chiaroscuro (light and shadow) modeling was Massacio. This and his pionering work in linear perspective make him a watershed figure in the history of art--a fact well appreciated by painters of the Italian Renaissance. His cycle of frescoes in the Branacci Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence was the manifesto of the new pictorial style and became the model for all Florentine artists, including Michelangelo, who personally studied the frescoes to learn the new art of chiaroscuro.
The greatest Renaissance master of modeling and atmospheric perspective, however, was Leonardo. He developed sfumato ("smoke") modeling, the transition of tone from light to dark so gradual as to be imperceptible. (A version of this is previously apparent in van Eyck, but Leonardo expanded the tonal spectrum to include more dramatic darks, while van Eyck accurately observed the effects of not only the shadows cast by a primary light but reflected light playing in these shadows.) In works such as his first version of Virgin of the Rocks (1483-85), we can see Leonardo using sfumato modeling and atmospheric perspective to soften the overall image into a unity and also to impart a mood of gentle yet profound gravity. The harmonizing of all elements-with figures arranged in geometric forms (in Leonardo's case usually the pyramid) and all proportions in careful balance--is integral to the Renaissance ideal of beauty. But in his sfumato and delicate atmospherics Leonardo goes beyond geometrics to produce harmony through something that connotes intuitive perception. His approach--not only combining the outward expression of well-proportioned forms but harmonizing three inward ways of knowing: the intellectual, the empirical, and the emotional-intuitive--epitomizes the ideal balance achieved during the all too brief High Renaissance.
The Mannerist painters would continue to utilize chiaroscuro modeling and atmospheric perspective to convey an impression of profundity as well as special depth, but in their unbalanced paintings-such as those of Tintoretto -- the techniques are manipulated to heighten the rather hysteric emotional effect. Nonetheless, when one looks back to see how far painting had come from medieval times, you can see a radical increase in the sensitivity to and honesty about emotion, and atmospheric effects are an important part of this. A sense of mood does not exist in medieval painting, but it becomes primary in later sixteenth-century Italian and especially seventeenth-century Dutch, Spanish, and Italian painting.
RENAISSANCE INDIVIDUALISM
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of the Renaissance is the emergence of individualism. We have already discussed how the unique value of the individual is implied in linear perspective. Individualism is also revealed, perhaps more blatantly, in the care with which each of the outstanding artists of the era cultivated a unique style. It is also demonstrated in the increasing depiction of human figures as unique, complex individuals.
Although there was discernible originality in artists of the 1300s, with the fifteenth century, in both Italy and the Low Countries, we see a quantum leap in the intensification of personal style among the luminaries of the day. The manifesto for this was Donatello's marble St. Mark (1411-15) in Florence. Art historian Frederick Hartt has said, "It has been rightly claimed that this statue represents so abrupt a break with tradition that it should be considered a mutation--a fundamental declaration of the new Renaissance position with respect to the visible world."
What makes the St. Mark revolutionary is its decidedly classical gravitas and moral grandeur. The full-bodied figure stands in natural contrapposto that has nothing to do with the artificial grace of the Gothic International Style exemplified, for example, in the nearly contemporary St. John the Baptist and St. Matthew by Lorenzo Ghiberti. (These, like the St. Mark, occupied niches on the outside of Florence's grain exchange, the Orsanmichele, which was also a shrine.) St. Mark's clothing, too, is not the usual study in late Gothic decorative lyricism but is completely realistic, revealing the contours of a solid body beneath its weighty folds. (Vasari tells us of a technique, apparently originated by Donatello, in which the sculptor, making his preparatory model, would make a clay nude and then dip sheets of cloth in clay slip and drape them on the figure.)
But even more revolutionary than this is the psychological realism that Donatello brought to his depiction of the saint. Michelangelo said of the statue, "No one could fail to believe the word of such a sincere man." The most compelling thing about the figure is the concentrated power of the face, with its alert tension, assessing dangers from without while summoning inner resources to deal with them. Hartt comments, "This noble face with its expression of severe determination -- the Italian term terrible is how the Renaissance would describe it--can be thought of as a symbolic portrait of the ideal Florentine under stress .... It is a summation of the virtues demanded in an age of crisis."
More than any of his contemporaries, Donatello showed fascination with the inner life of his subjects. He remained an innovator throughout his career. His bronze David (c. 1440) was the first nude rendition of this biblical character. (In the Middle Ages and Renaissance nudity symbolized the nakedness of the soul before God; in Donatello this was combined with the humanists' admiration of the body as the encapsulation of ideal beauty.) The sinuous figure was also possibly the first freestanding statue since antiquity--quite literally the embodiment of republican individualism. In later years, the long-lived artist developed a highly expressionistic style, and it appears he forsook the humanistic ideals of his youth during a time of religious reaction in Florence dominated by its archbishop. His harrowing Mary Magdalene (c. 1453-55) is unforgettable evidence of this.
During the fifteenth century, the portrayal of convincingly individual character is sporadic, both in the South and the North. It became more pervasive during the sixteenth century.
Perhaps the best vehicle for communicating the individuality of human beings in art was the revival of the ancient art of portraiture. Portraits were almost always commissioned by patrons, and the fact that they wanted to leave some lasting memorial to themselves itself is evidence of a new attitude. In Italy, early pictorial portraits tended to be profiles, and often they recorded little more than the outward visage of the sitter. It was in Flanders that portraiture became the revelation of personality, in the art of van Eyck and van der Weyden. Van Eyck's Man in a Red Turban (1433), possibly a self-portrait, was the first in which the sitter turned his gaze directly to meet that of the viewer. Here we see a man of the world, a person of unmistakable intelligence who has his own opinions and is not about to change them. He takes things as they come and suffers no illusions. His middle-aged face, with wrinkles surrounding the skeptical eyes and thin lips, is recorded in every particular, down to the graying stubble on his chin.
In Italy, portraiture as a window onto character later reached great heights in such works as Raphael's Baldasarre Castiglione (1514-15), Leonardo's enigmatic Mona Lisa (c. 1503-1506), and many works by Titian, including The Young Englishman (c. 1540-45).
Self-portraiture also became a common practice for the first time. Gothic artists had sometimes worked apparent self-portraits into their great decorative schemes. This practice was carried on in Renaissance Italy, where artists often discreetly placed portraits of themselves in scenes. In the North, however, artists developed self-portraiture as a separate genre, devoting specific paintings to the depiction--indeed, the examination--of themselves. Chief among these was Durer.
Artists of the Renaissance further demonstrated individualism in the strength of their egos. Particularly in Italy the period is distinguished by intense rivalries and enmities between artists who sought after renown as unique creative geniuses (itself a new idea). This was all part of artists' stringent efforts to elevate their social status. For centuries before (and after) the Renaissance, those engaged in manual labor were low on the totem pole. Artists were considered mere crafstmen who had only utilitarian skills and thus required no particular education besides the routine artisan's apprenticeship. Brunelleschi and Donatello, however, acquainted themselves with humanist studies and meticulously researched ruins of antiquity firsthand. Alberti, an early exemplar of the "universal man" much extolled in the Renaissance (but rarely achieved), wrote influential treatises and, joined by many colleagues, sought to have art accepted as one of the liberal arts in education. This was ultimately achieved.
Artists with their own workshops felt more free to show they could not easily be pushed around by patrons. We have the example of Donatello: When a Genoese merchant claimed to have been overcharged because the price for a bust worked out to more than half a florin for a day's work, Donatello replied that he himself could ruin the fruits of a year's toil in an instant and shattered the bust onto the ground, adding that the merchant showed he was more used to bargaining for beans than for bronzes. (On the other hand, artists who were put in the permanent employ of princes endured virtual servitude and ran the risk of turning into glorified odd-job men.)
Artists had a new respect for their calling and for their own creative powers. Leonardo proclaimed that whatever a painter wants to do, he is "Lord and God" to do it, and that the painter's mind "is a copy of the divine mind, since it operates freely" in the creation of objects and beings out of nothing. "The divine Michelangelo"--who did not fear to defy popes when their desires threatened the integrity of his inspired vision--saw himself and his tools and stone as instruments of the divine will, and the creative process as an aspect of salvation.
Durer, the first northern artist to be profoundly influenced by Italian art and ideas as a result of several trips there, brought back from Italy the idea that the artist is not merely a craftsman but a creative genius, and he worked--with notable success--to achieve international fame. In him there was a typically northern blend of personal ambition with a mixed confidence and humility before God. A self-portrait done in 1500 creates a startling emblem in that it portrays the Artist as Christ. Lest this seem blasphemous, it must be remembered that this was still the age of the imitatio Christi in northern Europe, in which the believer strove to identify himself mystically with the model of Christ as an ideal. In his notes on the arts, Durer wrote that "the more we know, the more we resemble the likeness of Christ who truly knows all things." For Durer--a later convert to Protestantism--his creative powers were derived from Christ, and in this self-portrait he confirms to himself and to his viewers that the artist must strive for ever greater perfection, far beyond the mastery of technique or craft: In this lies true genius.
THE DIGNITY OF MAN
All of this shows that there was a new concept of man at work in the Renaissance. This view extolled the intrinsic value and dignity of man as the supreme creation of God and the microcosm of the world. In 1451-52, Florentine humanist Giannozzo Manetti wrote a treatise titled On the Dignity and Excellence of Man, in which he refuted the claims of medieval theologians that man was worthless in the sight of God. Instead, Manetti declared man "lord and king and emperor in the whole orb of the world, and not unworthy to dominate and to reign and to rule." He argued that there is nothing the human intelligence cannot encompass, no mystery of the cosmos it cannot fathom.
A later humanist, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, stressed both the freedom and the responsibility of the individual. In his influential Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), Pico has God speaking to Adam: "The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature." Pico exclaims: "O highest and most marvelous felicity of man! To him it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills." He warns that, depending on which aspects of his nature one chooses to cultivate, one moves either downward into the bestial or upward toward perfection. "Let a certain holy ambition invade our souls," he exhorts, "so that, not content with the mediocre, we shall pant after the highest and (since we may if we wish it) toil with all our strength to obtain it." Through the proper cultivation of love and reason, one may ultimately reach that state where he "is in God and God in him, nay, rather, God and himself are one."
We have already seen the latter view at work in Durer's 1500 self-portrait. In general, however, the belief in the godlike dignity of man was exemplified through the depiction of the nude human form, and this was most prevalent in humanist Italy. Some artists, such as Michelangelo and Botticelli, did not even concern themselves much with placing figures in clearly delineated three-dimensional space.
Throughout Michelangelo's long career, his main interest was the life of the human soul as expressed through the body. He often called the human body the mortal veil of divine intention. His colossal David (1501-1504) is the epitome of the heroic style for which he is best known, celebrating the nobility of the human form and the power of human will.
But the Creation of Adam (1511-12), from his grand cycle of frescoes covering the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, is the epigrammatic statement of the divine potential of man. Here the massive, beautiful, receptive figure of Adam lifts his hand--that modus of creation--to receive from the hand of a most virile yet venerable God the life of life: a divine soul. The tiny space that separates the fingers human and divine has given rise to centuries of rumination. But what is undeniably clear is that this is Father and Son. Adam is no mere vessel but an Incarnation, and God Himself shows tense concentration and excitement as He brings to life this culmination of His creation, His second self. Here we have what is perhaps posterity's greatest inheritance from the Renaissance--the confident assertion of man's everlasting destiny, though impeded by the Fall, to become the child, companion, and embodiment of God.
Here we must end our investigation of the Renaissance. Following the Sack of Rome in 1527, a darker, more complex view of man set in, and this too was reflected by Michelangelo, in his Last Judgment (1536-1541) on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. Even here, however, we see implied Pico's idea that man has been endowed by God with the power to choose what he becomes. Among the many figures is a condemned man who crouches as he covers the left half of his face and looks out in horrified self-realization. His visage brings to mind lines from a poem by Michelangelo: "My good by Heaven, my evil by myself was given me,/ By my free will, of which I am deprived."
Yet Jesus, the Master of Judgment, conducts the cycling movement of the scene with an ambiguous gesture. Though his right arm is raised with terrible power as if to slay the wicked, his left, more gentle, almost seeks to mitigate that wrath, and his face is that of an unbiased and patient judge. Some have seen in Jesus' face and in the water separating the shore of the damned from the mouth of hell evidence that Michelangelo believed man's punishment is not irrevocable. This mighty, most godlike and human Jesus, the Last Adam to whom the Almighty has entrusted His creation, has the power and authority to reengender the cosmos. He is renaissance, or rebirth, personified.
Renaissance in Art
During the Renaissance, Europe turned away from the medieval order and laid the foundations for the modern world
In Italy, the Renaissance was fueled by the rise of humanism: in northern Europe, the awakening was spurred by Italian humanism and also by the urge for religious reform.
The fundamental changes in outlook that took place during the Early and High Renaissance are reflected in art in naturalism, linear perspective., the portrayal of individuality, artists' unique styles and increased status and an appreciation of the dignity of man.
By: Susan Fegley Osmond
Source: World and I. 13.12 (Dec. 1998): p18. From General OneFile. Art reveals aspects of the Renaissance worldview that formed the foundations of the modern era.
This article aims to outline some basic changes in worldview that took place during the Renaissance -- a movement and an era of awakening that turned from the medieval order and laid the basis for Western civilization up to the present. Today, when the Renaissance is mentioned, what springs to most people's mind is art. Therefore, we will take painting and sculpture as our springboard for discussing some fundamental changes in attitude--using Renaissance art as a window, as it were, onto the Renaissance mind. In particular we will look at how art evidences new attitudes toward man, his place in the world, and his relationship to God.
Renaissance (from the French for "rebirth") is a term coined in the nineteenth century originally to denote the revival of art and letters under the influence of ancient Roman and Greek models. This revival began in Italy in the fourteenth century, flourished in the fifteenth, and in the sixteenth reached apogee and then crisis in Italy while it spread through most of Europe. But humanism's classical learning alone cannot account for the immense changes that took place during these centuries; moreover, movements originating in the North also contributed to these changes. Therefore the term Renaissance has also come to denote the era in general and its overriding spirit, in which desires intrinsic to human nature, generally repressed under medieval feudalism, burst forth with new fervor and resulted in a new culture.
Understood as an era and also as an inspiritus of awakening, the Renaissance includes both the movement of humanism that emanated from Italy and the northern-based Reformation (and its precursors in England and Bohemia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). These two developments should by no means be equated with each other, but they had in some respects a common root and exerted a powerful influence on each other. The era is also characterized by increasing secularization, burgeoning trade (run by a powerful merchant class), the expanding power of northern European monarchies and of vying Italian city-states, and the beginnings of the age of exploration and the scientific revolution.
It seems that the Renaissance sprang forth in response to the need for outlets through which some basic human desires, generally denied in the medieval order of things, could be expressed and find fulfillment. One sees during the Renaissance a marked increase in individual freedom and autonomy, and the acceptance of physical existence and of the desire to pursue a happy, practical life. Renaissance thinkers stressed man's intrinsic value and dignity as a being created in the image and likeness of God. Related to this was a pervasive desire to pursue a direct relationship with the Divinity founded on personal mystical experience and/or the study of Scripture, early church writings, and even pagan texts reinterpreted in Christian terms. Also fundamental to the era was the desire to understand and master nature through direct observation and the discovery of its laws and structure.
As in any period, remnants of the old worldview coexisted with and to some extent helped shape the new. In northern Europe, Gothic art and culture (as it was derisively named by Italian humanists) held sway into the sixteenth century, and, as a result, the Renaissance there had a strongly religious cast.
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries protoreformers such as John Wycliff and the Lollards in England and Jan Huss and the various branches of the Hussites in Bohemia called for lay study of the Bible and preaching in the vernacular, as well as the moral reform of the clergy. Less extreme but more pervasive was the Devotio Moderna--which stressed individual piety and education, found a focal point in Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ, and in time fused the finest elements of Scholasticism and humanism. All of these prepared the ground for the Reformation, which began in 1517. (See the February 1999 issue for a Millennial Moments artcle on the Reformation.) In the North the Renaissance spirit of revival found expression in these religious movements and also in the humanism that drifted northward from Italy. Both affected all areas of society and culture.
Gothic art and culture had never had much impact on Italy, however; traces are mostly confined to the northernmost regions. Likewise, feudalism was never so pervasive there as in northern Europe. In an environment of commerce-fueled rival city-states, the founders of the Italian Renaissance looked to Italy's glorious ancient past as an impetus for revival. Here, in rediscovered ancient texts and in the ruins of ancient buildings and sculpture, they anchored their efforts to break free of medieval frames of reference and to discover a true understanding of man, finding in classical civilization a worldview in some respects sympathetic to their own. Soon they found confidence to follow the dictates of their own observations, powers of reason, and conscience and-while continuing to learn from the revered wisdom of the ancients--to trust their own ability to surpass all previous achievements.
THUMBNAIL HISTORY
In this article we will present certain traits in the art of the fifteenth and first third of the sixteenth centuries and discuss how these indicate underlying Renaissance attitudes. Because we will go trait by trait, it will necessitate jumping around chronologically and geographically in a way that might be confusing. Therefore it would be useful to first get our bearings in a thumbnail outline of the history of art during the Renaissance, as it is usually delineated.
Renaissance art in "the South" (Italy) and that in "the North" (northern Europe) are usually treated separately. First, the early shoots of the Renaissance in fourteenth-century Italy are examined, with the beginnings of the studia humanitatis ("studies of mankind")--later called humanism--by Petrarch and others who sought out and translated into the vernacular ancient philosophical and literary texts. This coincided with a tendency in art to move away from Byzantine, Romanesque, and Gothic models in the direction of naturalism, informed to some degree by classical ruins and also by Franciscan humanitarianism. The most celebrated artist of this period is Giotto.
Then ensues an exploration of the Early Renaissance (spanning the fifteenth century), in which, centered mostly in republican yet Medici-dominated Florence and a few other cities, a newfound confidence in the innate dignity of man and the value of individuality (rooted in humanistic study), coupled with a passion to comprehend and utilize the divine mathematics undergirding the order of the world, fueled the creation of seminal works by Donatello, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, the Bellinis, and Leonardo da Vinci among others. Some of these artists overlap into the next period, called the High Renaissance, the geographical center of which was (mostly) Rome. There despotic popes commissioned some of the world's immortal artworks by towering figures such as Michelangelo Buonarotti and Raphael and lesser giants such as Donato Bramante and Perugino. The art of this period is distinguished by its harmony, balance, and profundity of ideas.
Following the devastating Sack of Rome in 1527 by forces of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the spotlight shifts to Venice and central Italy with artists such as Giorgione, Titian, and Antonio Correggio, as well as architect Andrea Palladio. During the mid to late sixteenth century-in the wake of the breakup of Christendom into opposing camps, the occupation of Italy by foreign powers, and the waning of Venice's trading dominance--an era of uncertainty and disillusionment set in. Reflecting this was an art style dubbed Mannerism for its extremes of emotionalism, purposeful imbalance and distortion, and expressionism. Parmigianino, Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto, and (working in Spain but Venice-trained) El Greco characterize this restless period that segued into the Baroque.
Histories of Renaissance art in the North trace at first the Gothic International Style and the innovations of the Flemish Primitives and other early Netherlandish painters in the fifteenth century. They then look mostly to developments in Germany, where Albrecht Diirer fused visionary and empirical aspects of the northern Gothic spirit with what he learned of linear perspective and rules of proportion through journeys to Italy. Meanwhile, the artist whom history has come to know as Matthias Grimewald brought Gothic mystical pietism to a haunting apogee in his many-paneled Isenheim altarpiece. Woodcuts and engravings, originating in the North, became influential both as a means to disseminate the imagery of important paintings through reproduction and as a medium for original works.
In the land where the printing press was born, the word in time surpassed the image as the motor of culture. And throughout the North, Protestants cleansed churches of images and religious articles and shut down monasteries, so the scope allowed to art narrowed drastically. Hans Holbein the Younger moved to Henry VIII's England, where his work was confined almost exclusively to portraiture. Later, seventeenth-century Dutch artists would broaden the field to also include landscapes, still lifes, genre painting, and private meditations on biblical themes.
RISE OF NATURALISM
We will now look at a selection of developments in painting and sculpture that evidence specific aspects of the Renaissance worldview. First we will discuss naturalism, which refers to the idea that art should be a mirror of nature.
Romanesque and Byzantine art did' not adhere to this idea. In a mostly illiterate and predominantly Christian society, images became the medium to educate the masses about Christian doctrine. Subject matter was prescribed, as was the manner of depiction. An elaborate system of didactic symbols was developed to identify characters, events, and important ideas. In this highly stylized art, human figures were generally devoid both of a sense of fleshed form and of individual identity. Settings were connoted by the barest of means, and human figures seemed to exist in a space beyond dimension, frequently set against a background of burnished gold leaf denoting a realm of divine illumination.
In the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, sculpture in the North began the thaw into naturalism with the emergence of Gothic art. Church sculpture became somewhat more rounded, lifelike, and expressive. In Italy, as we have noted, the Gothic style took only tenuous hold. Nonetheless, in the mid to late thirteenth century strains of naturalism worked their way into art there.
An impetus for this came from English Franciscan Roger Bacon, who helped develop fledgling experimental science. He complained that the images preachers had to rely on to help educate their flock were not vivid or evocative enough. In a section of his encyclopedic Opus majus (1266-68), written expressly at the request of the pope, he called for the development of a painting method to depict palpable forms in convincingly three-dimensional space, based on the study and application of geometry and the science of optics. Response to this call can be seen in Italian frescoes of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
For artist Giorgio Vasari--the great biographer of Italian Renaissance artists--the new art had its birth with Giotto. The cycle of frescoes the Tuscan artist painted in the Arena Chapel in Padua became a sort of pilgrimage site for artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Giotto's 1305-1306 Lamentation--one of his frescos in the Arena Chapel--reveals new emotional eloquence. It is a scene of grief, yet there are different reactions to the death of Christ, all derived from the unique personalities of the characters involved. Mary, clinging to the body of her son with one arm draped across his chest, searches his countenance as if to penetrate the barrier between life and death; Saint John flings his arms out in protesting disbelief, as if all the world has been lost to him; Mary Magdalene gazes in private, tender sorrow at the beloved feet she once had washed with tears; each of the others react in similarly individual ways, while above, the angels give full vent to their sorrow.
Political developments in Italy played a significant part in the emergence of artists such as Giotto, who were confident to assert individual styles based on the observation of nature rather than the perpetuation of medieval traditions. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a number of independent city-states, fortified by their powerful European-wide trade and banking, formalized their governments as republics (Venice had even been a republic since the eighth century). These qualified democracies were governed ad hoc by guilds--associations of merchants, bankers, artisans, and other professionals. The unformali, zed nature of the city constitutions enabled men greedy for power to manipulate the quasi-democratic governments; relics of the nobility or great merchant oligarchs tended to lead the communes into despotism at the hands of a family or a clique (the fifteenth century saw the most virulent forms of this). Nonetheless, these republics--particularly Florence--offered guild-member citizens unprecedented freedom. Fourteenth-century frescoes reveal that individuality was not only evident but already prized in the Italian city-republics.
But burgeoning individuality and naturalism were not unique to Italians. In the region today known as the Netherlands and Belgium there had also sprung up prosperous cities that were semi-independent and run on republican lines by guilds. Haarlem-born Claus Sluter, an outstanding sculptor, shows the elevation of individuality in his powerfully characterized, strikingly realistic figures for the Well of Moses (1395-1403) in Dijon.
It is in the early to mid fifteenth century that we see the real flowering of the Renaissance, evident in both Italy and Flanders. In Italy a new breed of artists arose with strong, independent personalities. They knew they were forging a new art and indeed a new culture, and strove to rival and even surpass the brilliance of classical antiquity.
A NEW PERSPECTIVE
During this time we see in the service of naturalism a development that was to revolutionize art. Indeed, it defined most painting up to the twentieth century (and still holds sway in realistic painting). This was the discovery of linear or vanishing-point perspective in Florence. The principles of it were first demonstrated around 1413 by architect Filippo Brunelleschi (who later gained fame for the technical feat of designing and erecting the immense dome of Florence Cathedral). But it was architect and man of letters Leon Battista Alberti who first described the underlying geometry and a simple method in his treatise On Painting in 1435. This system was further refined by Piero della Francesca, Leonardo, and Durer.
Early pioneers devised a system of looking at the world as if through a framed window, in which the painting's panel (or picture plane) is the "glasspane." They even devised frames with grids through which the artist looked at (and could even trace) the subject to be depicted. This was not a very scientific approach, but it allowed the artist to observe and gauge the phenomenon of foreshortening. Artists had previously noticed that if, say, you gaze at the interior of a long room, the sides of the room appear to move inward, while the floor appears to move up and the ceiling down, so the wall at the far end of the room appears to be smaller than a theoretical wall on the spot where you are standing.
What Brunelleschi and Alberti discovered was that--to take our example--while your side walls are in reality pallel, if in your drawing you extend the lines of their receding top and bottom edges to a horizontal line denoting the far horizon opposite your eye level, the lines of the walls all appear to meet in a single vanishing point. With the further help of geometry they developed a system to measure "depth" in the picture. Thus it became possible to depict objects with exact dimensions placed in a measurable three-dimensional space and to draw all objects to proper scale. The result is a rendition of visual reality quite like what you see with one eye closed, or like that produced in a photograph. It's not exactly the way humans see, for we have stereoscopic vision, among other things. But it presents a convincing, readable, and systematic two-dimensional representation of three-dimensionality.
Early systems of linear perspective used a single vanishing point in the center of the picture. The system for working out the depth easily resulted in the checkerboard floors and street-grounds often found in Early Italian Renaissance paintings. But the single vanishing point system works only for simple scenes in which all planes depicted in depth are parallel to each other and all planes depicted in width are parallel to the picture plane. Any plane at a different angle would result in another vanishing point. To obtain greater naturalism, a system evolved years later that used two vanishing points (or even more) to achieve round-the-corner or up hill and down dale effects.
When linear perspective was first introduced, Florentine artists seized upon it with fervor, for here they not only had a method to render a scene in correct perspective, re-creating almost exactly what the eye sees, but they felt they had found the key to unlock the divine order of the cosmos. Since at least the time of Pythagoras in ancient Greece, people had believed that the universe was ordered-was held together, in a sense--by sacred numerical relationships and proportions, by sacred geometry. Here the artist-architects of the Renaissance seemed to have found basic principles underlying the structure of reality. No wonder they had such confidence that man as a creative being was capable of achieving divinity. Here they could experience and vicariously participate in the very process of the mathematical creation of the universe through the re-creation of "worlds" of harmony in their own works.
Geometric relations, mathematical proportion, and the mysticism of numbers played an important part in how painters designed their pictures and architects their buildings. They made the underlying structure itself embody central ideas or themes (Piero della Francesca's paintings demonstrate this most markedly).
Brunelleschi reportedly made two paintings to demonstrate the principles of perspective he discovered, but these are now lost. His good friend the sculptor Donatello was apparently the first to use Brunelleschi's findings, though rather erratically; this was in his bronze relief Feast of Herod (1423-27).
It was another friend of Brunelleschi's, the short-lived Masaccio, who made the earliest extant painting utilizing the new perspective technique consistently. The Holy Trinity With the Virgin, St. John, and Donors (c. 1425-28), a fresco on a wall of the Santa Maria Novella Church in Florence, creates the illusion of a two-tiered chapel. The bottom of this, with the tomb and skeleton of Adam, appears to jut into the space of the church in which the viewer stands. The upper part creates the optical illusion of an additional barrel-vaulted wing to the church, a "chapel of Golgatha" that houses the crucified Christ, God the Father looming behind him, and the dove of the Holy Spirit between them, with Saint John and Mary flanking the scene. The overall arrangement makes literal the Trinity through the use of the triangle--or, more exactly, the intersection of two triangles at the apex, one in the spiritual chapel and the other linking the spiritual dimension with the earthly one. Masaccio's perspectival tour de force thus served as a most effective vehicle through which a viewer could contemplate the mysteries of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the process of redemption.
PESPERCTIVE AS SYMBOL
The development of linear perspective indicates important things about the territory that the Renaissance mind opened to inquiry and the new worldview this brought into being. Most obvious is a sense of being completely at home in the world and an integral part of it--quite different from the medieval feeling of being stranded in a realm of mortality while one's true habitat is some great dimensionless beyond. Earlier attempts at perspective revealed man coming down to earth, as it were, but with linear perspective he had truly landed--and not only in the realm of pictures. Medieval painting had had no extension in depth and no horizon. Renaissance man discovered extension, then discovered the horizon-and then wanted to extend his horizons!
Thus city-states and nation-states vied to expand their territories, and merchants their spheres of trade. And with the help of the geometry through which artist-architects had first made a graph of space, explorers eventually found a way to graph their way across the trackless seas. The shores no longer needed to be clung to--neither the physical shores of Europe and Africa nor the shores of knowledge itself.
Now seeming to be set on a course to fulfill the biblical dictum to become lord of creation, Renaissance man set out to master the world's territory, and likewise to master the workings of the universe through science. (Other articles in this Millennial Moments series explore these developments; see "Columbus and the Age of Exploration" in the November 1998 issue and an essay on Galileo and the scientific revolution scheduled for the April 1999 issue.)
But the graphed space that linear perspective outlines is in some sense a picture of the Western mind's approach to knowledge from here on in. It no longer primarily takes either a linear approach or a poetic-intuitive one, as one can see predominant in other cultures. Through its investigations--whether they be scientific, philosophical, or artistic--the postmedieval Western mind seeks to find underlying laws and principles and to form an understanding of how they interrelate so as to make a grid or framework upon which all knowledge can be plotted and connected and formed into a solid edifice.
Linear perspective implies the rise of rationalism as an approach to knowledge. It also shows the stage being set for the quest for objectivity in knowledge--and also the inescapable fact of subjectivity. In viewing the world as though through a window, Early Renaissance artists mentally set themselves apart from their subjects-they made themselves observers from outside a literal flame of reference. They then attempted to record everything within that frame as exactly as possible, without preconception. Early Renaissance Florentine paintings and reliefs--usually depicting frontal, straight-on scenes with a central vanishing point--particularly conveyed this sense of being objective before the truth as revealed through the world's window.
Yet, perspective also manifests the subjectivity of knowledge. What you see in your flame of reference changes depending on your position. This yields a certain angle that obstructs certain elements while it reveals others. Your perception of reality is inevitably slanted and your knowledge limited. It is also uniquely your own. Linear perspective gives unprecedented power to the individual observer. The individual becomes the main arbiter of his perceptions and of his relationship to the world.
But this can be used to control others. The subjectivity inevitable in presenting things in linear perspective led artists such as Mantegna and especially those in the later Mannerist and Baroque periods to employ extreme or unexpected angles for dramatic effect. Art became in a sense exploitative--especially during the Counter-Reformation, which sought to enforce a certain "view," to over whelm the spectator, and to manipulate him emotionally. So here we have another paradox of Western life pictorially symbolized in perspective. On the one hand, linear perspective makes the individual of primary importance--if you are the "artist" creating the scene (that is, if you have the freedom to choose your own point of view). In this it is a herald of the democratic spirit. On the other hand, it is also a forecast of authoritarian control through what is presented to people as absolute truth--what people are allowed to see.
One more interesting point about linear perspective has to do with the changing understanding of the relationship between man and God during the Renaissance. In medieval depictions there was no point of infinity such as that implied in linear perspective's vanishing point. God, the infinitely supurnal, was some divine omnipotence beyond the heavens. Perspective's vanishing point brought the infinite, as it were, into the phenomenal world.
But it did more than this. It made integral a personal, unique relationship between the eye-I and that infinite. In linear perspective the whole picture of reality hinges on the vanishing point, but where the vanishing point falls within the frame depends on the angle of vision. Thus we have a pictorial paradigm for the idea that every person will experience God uniquely, based on his viewpoint.
The linear perspective generally employed by Italians and that usually used by northerners are different in a way that seems to point toward South-North differences in relating to God during the Reformation. The Italians tended to use a central vanishing point, presenting a frontal view of deep space that psychologically did not seem to extend into the viewer's own space but halted at the picture plane (the "frame"). This can be seen most dramatically in Antonello da Messina's St. Jerome in His Study (c. 1475), in which the artist has actually depicted a barrierlike marble archway on the picture plane beyond which we view the scholar at work in his cabinet, with surrounding rooms receding inordinately back into the distance. By contrast, employing a practice prevalent in the North, Durer presents in his 1514 engraving St. Jerome in His Cabinet an oblique view that not only creates an interior of normal dimensions but gives the impression that the floor extends out under our own feet. We feel we have just entered the room and are part of the scene. Thus, in northern depictions, the infinite became not only imminent but intimate.
Linear perspective circumscribes the world so that we are cut off from the realm of the magical, so to speak--that spaceless space in medieval art from which objects seem to appear and disappear. But linear perspective opens a magnificent window where it closed a door. In religious art, it is a window--as art historian Erwin Panofsky puts it--onto "the realm of the visionary, where the miraculous becomes a direct experience of the beholder, in that the supernatural events in a sense erupt into his own, apparently natural, visual space and so permit him really to 'internalize' their supernaturalness."
Panofsky continues, "Perspective, in transforming the ousia (reality) into the phainomenon (appearance), seems to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness; but for that very reason, conversely, it expands human consciousness into a vessel for the divine."
EMPIRICAL APPROACH
While linear perspective, with its rationalistic approach, was being formulated and refined in Italy, in the North there arose an exacting form of naturalism that was based in meticulous empirical observation. This originated in Flanders, and it grew out of the tradition of intricate manuscript illumination. The innovators were later dubbed the Flemish Primitives (so called because they were the first artists to work in a sophisticated form of oil-based paint). They included such artists as Robert Campin, his apprentice Rogier van der Weyden, and Jan van Eyck, as well as their later followers.
Among the Flemish Primitives, van Eyck was the most assiduous exponent of art as a mirror of nature. His Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride (also known as Arnolfini Wedding, 1434) shows every detail of the couple's garb and refined chamber, down to individual hairs in the dog's fur and detailed reflections in the convex mirror. In the fourteenth century, Englishman William of Ockham had elaborated the theory of Nominalism, which rejected the prevailing Scholastic view that "universals," or categories, really exist and claimed instead that only individual, "particular" things do; he also claimed that knowledge (as opposed to that which can only be taken on faith) comes from direct, sense-based experience of individual things. Surely with van Eyck we have Nominalism in paint. It shows that a fundamental change has occurred in how man perceives the world.
Van Eyck has taken great care to create a sense that Arnolfini and his bride inhabit three-dimensional space, though the artist took an empirical, pragmatic approach to perspective that yields results different from the vanishing-point perspective developed around the same time in Italy. Yet by planting his figures firmly on a receding floor upon which objects at the back of the room appear smaller than those in front, and through delicately and consistently delineating light and shadow, the artist convincingly conveys depth and tangibility. He furthermore offers an honest portrayal of personality even when it is unflattering, not shrinking from capturing the sly, bloodlessly cold features of his patron (who, history records, was quite a sinister fellow). In all this--minute recording of the optical perception of the surface of things, capturing a sense of depth through scale and one-point lighting, and personality-revealing portraiture-van Eyck was an innovator in the North.
Here we see that, simultaneous with developments in Italy, the Flemish Renaissance mind has decisively broken free of medieval insubstantiality and found a home on earth--literally a defined space. Van Eyck's microscopic-telescopic vision, as it has been called, reveals a mind that not only accepts the world but eagerly investigates every particle of it, as if expecting to bring to light eternal verities clothed in the tangible. A century and a half before Francis Bacon, we see operative in the art of van Eyck and his Flemish peers an informal yet exacting empiricism at work as a method of knowledge--the use of an inductive approach whereby through the accumulation of detail upon detail a comprehensive grasp of reality can be achieved.
It must be noted, however, that the early Netherlandish painters, and van Eyck in particular, further developed the medieval passion for symbolism. Van Eyck often constructs an intricate subtext of symbols and references drawn not only from long iconographic tradition but also from his wide reading, weaving a many-layered web of meaning and inference almost as detailed and nuanced (though not always as comprehensible) as his portrayal of the visible world. This penchant for creating in a subtext of symbolism a sort of shorthand interactive exegesis or commentary--a penchant in some ways related to Scholasticism's delight in the subtleties of argument and the accumulation of authoritative opinion--remained a hallmark of northern art for centuries. It shows that a kind of microscopically investigative rationalism was simultaneously at work with empirical observation.
ATTENTION TO ATMOSPHERE
Netherlandish artists innovated the depiction of detailed landscapes in the background of their paintings. In these works we see the development of atmospheric perspective--the depiction of changes in tone and color values that can be observed in objects receding from the spectator. Because of moisture and dust particles in the air, the farther something is from the viewer the more muted is its color, tending toward blue in the far distance. The difference in atmosphere between northern Europe and the Mediterranean accounts in part for the greater interest afforded atmospheric perspective by northern painters. But, together with modeling with a consistent source of light, it is an important aspect of convincingly conveying a sense of depth.
In Italy the originator of atmospheric perspective and chiaroscuro (light and shadow) modeling was Massacio. This and his pionering work in linear perspective make him a watershed figure in the history of art--a fact well appreciated by painters of the Italian Renaissance. His cycle of frescoes in the Branacci Chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence was the manifesto of the new pictorial style and became the model for all Florentine artists, including Michelangelo, who personally studied the frescoes to learn the new art of chiaroscuro.
The greatest Renaissance master of modeling and atmospheric perspective, however, was Leonardo. He developed sfumato ("smoke") modeling, the transition of tone from light to dark so gradual as to be imperceptible. (A version of this is previously apparent in van Eyck, but Leonardo expanded the tonal spectrum to include more dramatic darks, while van Eyck accurately observed the effects of not only the shadows cast by a primary light but reflected light playing in these shadows.) In works such as his first version of Virgin of the Rocks (1483-85), we can see Leonardo using sfumato modeling and atmospheric perspective to soften the overall image into a unity and also to impart a mood of gentle yet profound gravity. The harmonizing of all elements-with figures arranged in geometric forms (in Leonardo's case usually the pyramid) and all proportions in careful balance--is integral to the Renaissance ideal of beauty. But in his sfumato and delicate atmospherics Leonardo goes beyond geometrics to produce harmony through something that connotes intuitive perception. His approach--not only combining the outward expression of well-proportioned forms but harmonizing three inward ways of knowing: the intellectual, the empirical, and the emotional-intuitive--epitomizes the ideal balance achieved during the all too brief High Renaissance.
The Mannerist painters would continue to utilize chiaroscuro modeling and atmospheric perspective to convey an impression of profundity as well as special depth, but in their unbalanced paintings-such as those of Tintoretto -- the techniques are manipulated to heighten the rather hysteric emotional effect. Nonetheless, when one looks back to see how far painting had come from medieval times, you can see a radical increase in the sensitivity to and honesty about emotion, and atmospheric effects are an important part of this. A sense of mood does not exist in medieval painting, but it becomes primary in later sixteenth-century Italian and especially seventeenth-century Dutch, Spanish, and Italian painting.
RENAISSANCE INDIVIDUALISM
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of the Renaissance is the emergence of individualism. We have already discussed how the unique value of the individual is implied in linear perspective. Individualism is also revealed, perhaps more blatantly, in the care with which each of the outstanding artists of the era cultivated a unique style. It is also demonstrated in the increasing depiction of human figures as unique, complex individuals.
Although there was discernible originality in artists of the 1300s, with the fifteenth century, in both Italy and the Low Countries, we see a quantum leap in the intensification of personal style among the luminaries of the day. The manifesto for this was Donatello's marble St. Mark (1411-15) in Florence. Art historian Frederick Hartt has said, "It has been rightly claimed that this statue represents so abrupt a break with tradition that it should be considered a mutation--a fundamental declaration of the new Renaissance position with respect to the visible world."
What makes the St. Mark revolutionary is its decidedly classical gravitas and moral grandeur. The full-bodied figure stands in natural contrapposto that has nothing to do with the artificial grace of the Gothic International Style exemplified, for example, in the nearly contemporary St. John the Baptist and St. Matthew by Lorenzo Ghiberti. (These, like the St. Mark, occupied niches on the outside of Florence's grain exchange, the Orsanmichele, which was also a shrine.) St. Mark's clothing, too, is not the usual study in late Gothic decorative lyricism but is completely realistic, revealing the contours of a solid body beneath its weighty folds. (Vasari tells us of a technique, apparently originated by Donatello, in which the sculptor, making his preparatory model, would make a clay nude and then dip sheets of cloth in clay slip and drape them on the figure.)
But even more revolutionary than this is the psychological realism that Donatello brought to his depiction of the saint. Michelangelo said of the statue, "No one could fail to believe the word of such a sincere man." The most compelling thing about the figure is the concentrated power of the face, with its alert tension, assessing dangers from without while summoning inner resources to deal with them. Hartt comments, "This noble face with its expression of severe determination -- the Italian term terrible is how the Renaissance would describe it--can be thought of as a symbolic portrait of the ideal Florentine under stress .... It is a summation of the virtues demanded in an age of crisis."
More than any of his contemporaries, Donatello showed fascination with the inner life of his subjects. He remained an innovator throughout his career. His bronze David (c. 1440) was the first nude rendition of this biblical character. (In the Middle Ages and Renaissance nudity symbolized the nakedness of the soul before God; in Donatello this was combined with the humanists' admiration of the body as the encapsulation of ideal beauty.) The sinuous figure was also possibly the first freestanding statue since antiquity--quite literally the embodiment of republican individualism. In later years, the long-lived artist developed a highly expressionistic style, and it appears he forsook the humanistic ideals of his youth during a time of religious reaction in Florence dominated by its archbishop. His harrowing Mary Magdalene (c. 1453-55) is unforgettable evidence of this.
During the fifteenth century, the portrayal of convincingly individual character is sporadic, both in the South and the North. It became more pervasive during the sixteenth century.
Perhaps the best vehicle for communicating the individuality of human beings in art was the revival of the ancient art of portraiture. Portraits were almost always commissioned by patrons, and the fact that they wanted to leave some lasting memorial to themselves itself is evidence of a new attitude. In Italy, early pictorial portraits tended to be profiles, and often they recorded little more than the outward visage of the sitter. It was in Flanders that portraiture became the revelation of personality, in the art of van Eyck and van der Weyden. Van Eyck's Man in a Red Turban (1433), possibly a self-portrait, was the first in which the sitter turned his gaze directly to meet that of the viewer. Here we see a man of the world, a person of unmistakable intelligence who has his own opinions and is not about to change them. He takes things as they come and suffers no illusions. His middle-aged face, with wrinkles surrounding the skeptical eyes and thin lips, is recorded in every particular, down to the graying stubble on his chin.
In Italy, portraiture as a window onto character later reached great heights in such works as Raphael's Baldasarre Castiglione (1514-15), Leonardo's enigmatic Mona Lisa (c. 1503-1506), and many works by Titian, including The Young Englishman (c. 1540-45).
Self-portraiture also became a common practice for the first time. Gothic artists had sometimes worked apparent self-portraits into their great decorative schemes. This practice was carried on in Renaissance Italy, where artists often discreetly placed portraits of themselves in scenes. In the North, however, artists developed self-portraiture as a separate genre, devoting specific paintings to the depiction--indeed, the examination--of themselves. Chief among these was Durer.
Artists of the Renaissance further demonstrated individualism in the strength of their egos. Particularly in Italy the period is distinguished by intense rivalries and enmities between artists who sought after renown as unique creative geniuses (itself a new idea). This was all part of artists' stringent efforts to elevate their social status. For centuries before (and after) the Renaissance, those engaged in manual labor were low on the totem pole. Artists were considered mere crafstmen who had only utilitarian skills and thus required no particular education besides the routine artisan's apprenticeship. Brunelleschi and Donatello, however, acquainted themselves with humanist studies and meticulously researched ruins of antiquity firsthand. Alberti, an early exemplar of the "universal man" much extolled in the Renaissance (but rarely achieved), wrote influential treatises and, joined by many colleagues, sought to have art accepted as one of the liberal arts in education. This was ultimately achieved.
Artists with their own workshops felt more free to show they could not easily be pushed around by patrons. We have the example of Donatello: When a Genoese merchant claimed to have been overcharged because the price for a bust worked out to more than half a florin for a day's work, Donatello replied that he himself could ruin the fruits of a year's toil in an instant and shattered the bust onto the ground, adding that the merchant showed he was more used to bargaining for beans than for bronzes. (On the other hand, artists who were put in the permanent employ of princes endured virtual servitude and ran the risk of turning into glorified odd-job men.)
Artists had a new respect for their calling and for their own creative powers. Leonardo proclaimed that whatever a painter wants to do, he is "Lord and God" to do it, and that the painter's mind "is a copy of the divine mind, since it operates freely" in the creation of objects and beings out of nothing. "The divine Michelangelo"--who did not fear to defy popes when their desires threatened the integrity of his inspired vision--saw himself and his tools and stone as instruments of the divine will, and the creative process as an aspect of salvation.
Durer, the first northern artist to be profoundly influenced by Italian art and ideas as a result of several trips there, brought back from Italy the idea that the artist is not merely a craftsman but a creative genius, and he worked--with notable success--to achieve international fame. In him there was a typically northern blend of personal ambition with a mixed confidence and humility before God. A self-portrait done in 1500 creates a startling emblem in that it portrays the Artist as Christ. Lest this seem blasphemous, it must be remembered that this was still the age of the imitatio Christi in northern Europe, in which the believer strove to identify himself mystically with the model of Christ as an ideal. In his notes on the arts, Durer wrote that "the more we know, the more we resemble the likeness of Christ who truly knows all things." For Durer--a later convert to Protestantism--his creative powers were derived from Christ, and in this self-portrait he confirms to himself and to his viewers that the artist must strive for ever greater perfection, far beyond the mastery of technique or craft: In this lies true genius.
THE DIGNITY OF MAN
All of this shows that there was a new concept of man at work in the Renaissance. This view extolled the intrinsic value and dignity of man as the supreme creation of God and the microcosm of the world. In 1451-52, Florentine humanist Giannozzo Manetti wrote a treatise titled On the Dignity and Excellence of Man, in which he refuted the claims of medieval theologians that man was worthless in the sight of God. Instead, Manetti declared man "lord and king and emperor in the whole orb of the world, and not unworthy to dominate and to reign and to rule." He argued that there is nothing the human intelligence cannot encompass, no mystery of the cosmos it cannot fathom.
A later humanist, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, stressed both the freedom and the responsibility of the individual. In his influential Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), Pico has God speaking to Adam: "The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us. Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee, shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature." Pico exclaims: "O highest and most marvelous felicity of man! To him it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills." He warns that, depending on which aspects of his nature one chooses to cultivate, one moves either downward into the bestial or upward toward perfection. "Let a certain holy ambition invade our souls," he exhorts, "so that, not content with the mediocre, we shall pant after the highest and (since we may if we wish it) toil with all our strength to obtain it." Through the proper cultivation of love and reason, one may ultimately reach that state where he "is in God and God in him, nay, rather, God and himself are one."
We have already seen the latter view at work in Durer's 1500 self-portrait. In general, however, the belief in the godlike dignity of man was exemplified through the depiction of the nude human form, and this was most prevalent in humanist Italy. Some artists, such as Michelangelo and Botticelli, did not even concern themselves much with placing figures in clearly delineated three-dimensional space.
Throughout Michelangelo's long career, his main interest was the life of the human soul as expressed through the body. He often called the human body the mortal veil of divine intention. His colossal David (1501-1504) is the epitome of the heroic style for which he is best known, celebrating the nobility of the human form and the power of human will.
But the Creation of Adam (1511-12), from his grand cycle of frescoes covering the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, is the epigrammatic statement of the divine potential of man. Here the massive, beautiful, receptive figure of Adam lifts his hand--that modus of creation--to receive from the hand of a most virile yet venerable God the life of life: a divine soul. The tiny space that separates the fingers human and divine has given rise to centuries of rumination. But what is undeniably clear is that this is Father and Son. Adam is no mere vessel but an Incarnation, and God Himself shows tense concentration and excitement as He brings to life this culmination of His creation, His second self. Here we have what is perhaps posterity's greatest inheritance from the Renaissance--the confident assertion of man's everlasting destiny, though impeded by the Fall, to become the child, companion, and embodiment of God.
Here we must end our investigation of the Renaissance. Following the Sack of Rome in 1527, a darker, more complex view of man set in, and this too was reflected by Michelangelo, in his Last Judgment (1536-1541) on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. Even here, however, we see implied Pico's idea that man has been endowed by God with the power to choose what he becomes. Among the many figures is a condemned man who crouches as he covers the left half of his face and looks out in horrified self-realization. His visage brings to mind lines from a poem by Michelangelo: "My good by Heaven, my evil by myself was given me,/ By my free will, of which I am deprived."
Yet Jesus, the Master of Judgment, conducts the cycling movement of the scene with an ambiguous gesture. Though his right arm is raised with terrible power as if to slay the wicked, his left, more gentle, almost seeks to mitigate that wrath, and his face is that of an unbiased and patient judge. Some have seen in Jesus' face and in the water separating the shore of the damned from the mouth of hell evidence that Michelangelo believed man's punishment is not irrevocable. This mighty, most godlike and human Jesus, the Last Adam to whom the Almighty has entrusted His creation, has the power and authority to reengender the cosmos. He is renaissance, or rebirth, personified.
Renaissance in Art
During the Renaissance, Europe turned away from the medieval order and laid the foundations for the modern world
In Italy, the Renaissance was fueled by the rise of humanism: in northern Europe, the awakening was spurred by Italian humanism and also by the urge for religious reform.
The fundamental changes in outlook that took place during the Early and High Renaissance are reflected in art in naturalism, linear perspective., the portrayal of individuality, artists' unique styles and increased status and an appreciation of the dignity of man.
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