Post #8 - Renaissance through Realism

The Renaissance was one of the biggest turning points in art history. It was during the Renaissance that rich, wealthy families (like the Medici family), started funding artists. Art had become the hot new thing, so to invest in it and have your name on it made the patrons look good. Artists were becoming the celebrities of their time. More and more attention was being taken away from the church and instead was focused into the arts. The printing press was a contributing factor in this, but so was the idea of humanism. Humanism puts more focus on the importance of human beings, rather than divine, religious matters. 

The style of art and paintings changed heavily throughout the Renaissance. Before, with Byzantine art, the paintings were centered around religious messages, used a lot of gold in the images, and were not concerned with making their figures realistic. Artists moved away from this during the Renaissance. Early Renaissance painters, like Giotto, used a technique called fresco. In this process, the artist would paint with watercolor on wet plaster, so when it dried the colors would penetrate it and become fixed. 

One of the first Renaissance celebrities was a man named Brunelleschi. He was a sculptor, a painter, and an architect. His most notable contribution to the Renaissance was linear perspective, which allowed for paintings to look more 3D on their 2D surface. This technique used a one-point vanishing point in order to create the illusion of depth. From linear perspective came naturalism, another style that came from the Renaissance. Using the vanishing point technique, naturalism focused on the creation of more natural, real looking images. The artist Masaccio exemplified this in his painting the Holy Trinity. 

While there were many different artists throughout the Renaissance, one man truly stood out as “a true Renaissance man”. This guy was Leon Battista Alberti. He was an author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, and cryptographer. Alberti also came up with three treatises that defined art. These treatises were: perspective, sculpture, and architecture. Alberti also outlined other aspects of art. For instance, he advised artists to use color with restraint, paint the effect of gold instead of using actual gold, use black paint to outline shapes, and to spend time adding details to intricate parts of the paintings. As the Renaissance continued, more artists started using these techniques. The painter Titan utilized the concept of painting gold without gold in his painting, Detail from Portrait of Doge Marcantonio Trevisani.

During the high Renaissance was when we saw some of the greatest artists. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael flourished during this time. Da Vinci was a man of many talents. He was an inventor, painter, and scientist. He has 1000s of pages of drawings of inventions, including but not limited to a flying machine, a submarine, and weapons of war. One of his most notable paintings is the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa is famous for numerous reasons, including her enigmatic smile, her eyes that follow you, and that she’s a commoner. Another reason is that the painting was stolen, which helped it gain popularity. Michelangelo was also one of the greats. He had a bit of a temper (and was borderline autistic), but he was beyond talented. His most notable accomplishments are the Sistine Chapel, and his sculptures. Raphael’s most famous work was a painting called the School of Athens.  

The Northern Renaissance came later, with artists like Jan Van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch. They painted things like the Arnolfini Portrait and the Garden of Earthly Delights (respectively). Other things that came from this era include the camera obscura, the grid (rule of thirds), the golden ratio, and the Gutenburg Press.

Painting styles have varied over the decades. Baroque style used a lot of diagonals, movement, and dramatic colors. In protest of baroque came rocco style, which was more whimsical and sensual. People who hated rocco created neoclassical style, which was more symmetrical and had hard lines. After neoclassical came romanticism, which focused on emotions and moods. Contrastingly, realism would come to depict ordinary people and events. Realism used more earth, real colors.

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