Renesance Art

Renaissance Art

During the Renaissance, artists were no longer regarded as mere artisans, as they had been in the medieval past, but for the first time emerged as independent personalities, comparable to poets and writers. They sought new solutions to formal and visual problems, and many of them were also devoted to scientific experimentation. In this context, mathematical or linear perspective was developed, a system in which all objects in a painting or in low-relief sculpture are related both proportionally and rationally. As a result, the painted surface was regarded as a window on the natural world, and it became the task of painters to portray this world in their art. Consequently, painters began to devote themselves more rigorously to the rendition of landscapeÐ'--the careful depiction of trees, flowers, plants, distant mountains, and cloud-filled skies. Artists studied the effect of light out-of-doors and how the eye perceives all the diverse elements in nature. They developed aerial perspective, in which objects become increasingly less distinct and less sharply colored as they recede from the eye of the viewer. Northern painters, especially those from Flanders and the Netherlands, were as advanced as the Italians in landscape painting and contributed to the innovations of their southern contemporaries by introducing oil paint as a new medium.

Early Renaissance Painting

The first painter to employ the new techniques was Masaccio. Despite a regrettably short career (he died at the age of 27), Masaccio had a dramatic effect on the course of art. He made use of both linear and aerial perspective in his frescoes (1427?) depicting episodes in the life of Saint Peter for the Brancacci Chapel in Florence's Church of Santa Maria del Carmine. In the most famous of these scenes, the Tribute Money, Masaccio invested the figures of Christ and the apostles with a new sense of dignity, monumentality, and refinement. The Brancacci Chapel became a training ground for later painters, including Michelangelo, who copied Masaccio's figures. In the Trinity fresco (1425?, Santa Maria Novella, Florence), Masaccio, by employing some of Brunelleschi's discoveries concerning linear perspective, created for the first time a convincing illusionistic space suggesting a chapel.

The direction taken by Masaccio was shared by his contemporaries, including Paolo Uccello, who was much taken with the pictorial potentialities of linear perspective. Among his finest works are three battle scenes (Uffizi, Florence; National Gallery, London; Louvre, Paris) made in the late 1440s for the Medici Palace in Florence, in which all the participants are shown sharply foreshortened. He also did the large fresco Sir John Hawkwood (1436, Florence Cathedral), painted to simulate a bronze equestrian monument, a type known from Roman examples and soon to be revived in freestanding sculpture by Donatello. Another master of the same period was Fra Angelico, a monk, whose refined style combined the rugged new Renaissance forms with delicacy of color and treatment. Fra Angelico was particularly innovative in painting tree-filled landscapes. His works include a series of fresco decorations painted in the 1430s and 1440s for his fellow Dominicans at the Convent of San Marco in Florence.

Florence continued to maintain a commanding position in the flowering of Renaissance art in Italy, although other regions provided important masters