They put great amounts of emphasis on creating a better sense of three-dimensionality by painting each part of the scenery in great detail. Many artists were known to spend hours at a time simply observing nature or people in order to gain a better understanding of how each animal looked in proportion to its natural surroundings. The most famous Early Renaissance paintings portray various scenes that focus on elements like the contrast between light and darkness, as well as realistic proportions and shapes.
This particular time was the first in history in which artists began to pay special attention to the overall level of realism in their paintings. Many of them would work to create paintings that looked as real as possible, even though the subject matter was focused on mythical figures from Roman or even Greek legend.
Most art historians and critics say that the High Renaissance lasted only a few short decades, barely 20 years by most estimates. During this time, however, it was evident that artists had taken a much greater interest in religious themes and ideals that one would expect to accompany Christianity.
One likely explanation for this rise in religious paintings was the fact that the churches in Italy controlled a majority of the wealth and this was directly-tied to the increase in the amount of religious artwork that was commissioned by church leaders. Some historians point to the death of Raphael as the end-point of the High Renaissance period, but it was more likely that it was the sacking of Rome that occurred under Charles V that brought an end to the golden age of art in the once-thriving nation of Italy.
The High Renaissance featured painting and sculpture from artists that are still, to this day, regarded as the most prolific painters and sculptors to have ever lived. Names like Michaelangelo , Raphael , Leonardo Da Vinci , and many others that remain very prominent in the world of art were the main figures of the High Renaissance era.
Michelangelo was a 16th century Florentine artist renowned for his masterpieces in sculpture, painting, and architectural design. In , Michelangelo was commissioned to create a colossal marble statue portraying David as a symbol of Florentine freedom.
David was created out of a single marble block, and stands larger than life, as it was originally intended to adorn the Florence Cathedral. No earlier Florentine artist had omitted the giant altogether. The tendons in his neck stand out tautly, his brow is furrowed, and his eyes seem to focus intently on something in the distance.
Veins bulge out of his lowered right hand, but his body is in a relaxed contrapposto pose, and he carries his sling casually thrown over his left shoulder. In the Renaissance , contrapposto poses were thought of as a distinctive feature of antique sculpture. The sculpture was intended to be placed on the exterior of the Duomo, and has become one of the most recognized works of Renaissance sculpture.
In painting, Michelangelo is renowned for his work in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo lobbied for a different and more complex scheme, representing Creation, the Downfall of Man, the Promise of Salvation through the prophets, and the Genealogy of Christ.
The work is part of a larger scheme of decoration within the chapel that represents much of the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Twelve men and women who prophesied the coming of the Jesus are painted on the pendentives supporting the ceiling. The ancestors of Christ are painted around the windows. The work is located on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, which is not a traditional placement for the subject. Typically, last judgement scenes were placed on the exit wall of churches as a way to remind the viewer of eternal punishments as they left worship.
The Last Judgment is a depiction of the second coming of Christ and the apocalypse; where the souls of humanity rise and are assigned to their various fates, as judged by Christ, surrounded by the Saints. In contrast to the earlier figures Michelangelo painted on the ceiling, the figures in The Last Judgement are heavily muscled and are in much more artificial poses, demonstrating how this work is in the Mannerist style.
In this work Michelangelo has rejected the orderly depiction of the last judgement as established by Medieval tradition in favor of a swirling scene of chaos as each soul is judged.
When the painting was revealed it was heavily criticized for its inclusion of classical imagery as well as for the amount of nude figures in somewhat suggestive poses. The ill reception that the work received may be tied to the Counter Reformation and the Council of Trent , which lead to a preference for more conservative religious art devoid of classical references. Although a number of figures were made more modest with the addition of drapery, the changes were not made until after the death of Michelangelo, demonstrating the respect and admiration that was afforded to him during his lifetime.
Michelangelo worked on the project from — Finally, although other architects were involved, Michelangelo is given credit for designing St. The effect is of a continuous wall surface that is folded or fractured at different angles, lacking the right angles that usually define change of direction at the corners of a building.
Above them the huge cornice ripples in a continuous band, giving the appearance of keeping the whole building in a state of compression. All three similarly employed novel techniques of color and composition, which established them as acclaimed artists north of Rome.
Giorgio Barbarelli da Castlefranco, known as Giorgione c. Unfortunately, art historians do not know much about Giorgione, partly because of his early death at around age 30, and partly because artists in Venice were not as individualistic as artists in Florence.
While only six paintings are accredited to him, they demonstrate his importance in the history of art as well as his innovations in painting. Giorgione was the first to paint with oil on canvas. Previously, people who used oils were painting on panel, not canvas. His works do not contain much under-drawing, demonstrating how he did not adhere to Florentine disegno, and his subject matters remain elusive and mysterious.
One of his works that demonstrates all three of these elements is The Tempest c. This work is oil on canvas, x-rays show there is very little under drawing, and the subject matter remains one of the most debated issues in art history. The Tempest , c, —, Giorgione.
Tiziano Vecelli, or Titian — , was arguably the most important member of the 16th century Venetian school, as well as one of the most versatile; he was equally adept with portraits, landscape backgrounds, and mythological and religious subjects. His painting methods, particularly in the application and use of color, would have a profound influence not only on painters of the Italian Renaissance, but on future generations of Western art.
Although his mature works may not contain the vivid, luminous tints of his early pieces, their loose brushwork and subtlety of polychromatic modulations were without precedent. In , Titian completed his well-known masterpiece, the Assumption of the Virgin, or the Assunta, for the high altar of the church of the Frari. This extraordinary piece of colorism, executed on a grand scale rarely before seen in Italy, created a sensation.
Here, Titian gave a new conception of the traditional groups of donors and holy persons moving in aerial space , the plans and different degrees set in an architectural framework.
Assunta, Titian : It took Titian two years — to complete his Assunta. Veronese is known as a supreme colorist, and for his illusionistic decorations in both fresco and oil. His most famous works are elaborate narrative cycles, executed in the dramatic and colorful style, full of majestic architectural settings and glittering pageantry. His large paintings of biblical feasts executed for the refectories of monasteries in Venice and Verona are especially notable. For example, in The Wedding at Cana, which was painted in — in collaboration with Palladio, Veronese arranged the architecture to run mostly parallel to the picture plane , accentuating the processional character of the composition.
The Wedding at Cana offers little in the representation of emotion: rather, it illustrates the carefully composed movement of its subjects along a primarily horizontal axis. Most of all, it is about the incandescence of light and color. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. The Italian Renaissance. Search for:. The High Renaissance.
The High Renaissance The High Renaissance refers to a short period of exceptional artistic production in the Italian states. Learning Objectives Describe the different periods and characteristic styles of 16th century Italian art. Mannerism , which emerged in the latter years of the Italian High Renaissance, is notable for its intellectual sophistication and its artificial as opposed to naturalistic qualities, such as elongated proportions, stylized poses, and lack of clear perspective.
Some historians regard Mannerism as a degeneration of High Renaissance classicism, or even as an interlude between High Renaissance and Baroque —in which case the dates are usually from c. Key Terms High Renaissance : The period in art history denoting the apogee of the visual arts in the Italian Renaissance. Mannerism : A style of art developed at the end of the High Renaissance, characterized by the deliberate distortion and exaggeration of perspective, especially the elongation of figures.
Key Terms High Renaissance : A period of artistic production that is viewed by art historians as the height, or the culmination, of the Renaissance period. The period is dated from — Sculpture in the High Renaissance Sculpture in the High Renaissance demonstrates the influence of classical antiquity and ideal naturalism. Learning Objectives Describe the characteristics of High Renaissance sculpture.
Key Takeaways Key Points Sculptors during the High Renaissance were deliberately quoting classical precedents and they aimed for ideal naturalism in their works. Architecture in the High Renaissance Architecture during the High Renaissance represents a culmination of the architectural developments that were made during the Renaissance. Learning Objectives Describe the important architects of the High Renaissance and their achievements.
The High Renaissance denotes a period that is seen as the culmination of the Renaissance period. The architects most representative of the High Renaissance are Donato Bramante — and Andrea Palladio — Leonardo da Vinci While Leonardo da Vinci is admired as a scientist, an academic, and an inventor, he is most famous for his achievements as the painter of several Renaissance masterpieces.
Learning Objectives Describe the works of Leonardo da Vinci that demonstrate his most innovative techniques as an artist. Despite his famous paintings, da Vinci was not a prolific painter; he was a prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that interested him.
Key Terms sfumato : In painting, the application of subtle layers of translucent paint so that there is no visible transition between colors, tones, and often objects. Raphael Raphael was an Italian Renaissance painter and architect whose work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition.
Learning Objectives Discuss Raphael influences and artistic achievements. Rome now superceded Florence as the focal point of the Early Renaissance, not least because of papal ambition to make Rome even greater than its Florentine rival. The exorbitant patronage of Pope Julius II and Pope Leo X secured and retained the services of painters like Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo, all of whom created oils and mural painting of startling novelty, plus architects like Donato Bramante , a key figure in the redevelopment of St Peter's Basilica.
Driven by Popes who wished to use art to reinforce the glory of Rome, the High Renaissance marked the zenith of the return to classical humanist values based on ancient Greek art and culture.
As the Church was the major patron, Christian art remained the major genre. For the leaders of the Florentine High Renaissance once Leonardo and Michelangelo had departed: see Fra Bartolommeo , leader ; replaced by Andrea del Sarto Meanwhile in Venice Giovanni Bellini was busy developing a separate school of Venetian painting , based on the primacy of colorito over disegno.
His pupils included the short-lived enigmatic Giorgione , Sebastiano del Piombo and Titian c. Elsewhere in Italy, High Renaissance values also influenced provincial centres like the Parma School of painting and the later Bolognese School s on. Note: Much pioneering work on the attribution of paintings during the Italian Renaissance , was done by the art scholar Bernard Berenson , who lived most of his life near Florence, and published a number of highly influential works on the Italian Renaissance.
High Renaissance Aesthetics. Ever since Giotto abandoned medieval hieratic art in favour of depicting nature, his successors from the quattrocento managed to find more and more ways to improve their portrayal of the real world. Techniques involving linear perspective and vanishing points, foreshortening , illusionistic devices, chiaroscuro and sfumato shading - all these methods were mastered during the High Renaissance. During the cinquecento , the near universal adoption of oil painting eliminated the matt colours of the 15th century, and made it possible for distance to be conveyed solely through the gradation of tones - a process known as aerial or atmospheric perspective.
Even so, despite the growing realism being achieved in their art, High Renaissance artists aspired to beauty, and harmony more than realism. Their paintings may have been based on nature but they had no interest in mere replication. Instead they looked for ultimate truth in a study of the classical world of Greek and Roman culture. It was this that provided artists with an ideal of perfection: their aesthetics.
Thus, Greek philosophy provided the secret of the perfect human type with its proportions, muscular structure, oval face, triangular forehead, straight nose, and balance - with the weight on one hip - all of which can be seen in the paintings of Raphael, and the immensely expressive sculpture of Michelangelo.
The latter in particular was never afraid to bend the realistic rules of anatomy and proportion, in order to increase his power of expression. It was through Classical Greek philosophy that Renaissance theorists and artists developed their idea of 'Humanism'.
Humanism was a way of thinking which attached more importance to Man and less importance to God. It imbued Renaissance art with its unique flavour, as exemplified in works like Leonardo's Mona Lisa a non-religious painting , Michelangelo's David - a more human than religious statue - and Raphael's cool secular fresco School of Athens. Even when High Renaissance artists painted religious paintings , or sculpted a religious scene, very often they were not glorifying God but Man.
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