High Renaissance & Mannerism

Unit 3: Early Europe and Colonial Americas

Historical Background

1492: Salvestro de'Medici is exiled from Florence. Family influence was already declining. The Catholic Church now becomes the largest patron of the arts.
1500-1600: Renaissance - Renaissance means a "rebirth" suggesting that the 15th and 16th centuries marked an awakening from the "dark ages". The dark ages were actually a great time period where Europe gave rise to laws, language, and economics. High Renaissance flourished in the cultivated courts of princes, doges, and popes to establish their power.
1517 - Protestant Reformation was seen as heresy in Italy, and had large repercussions on High Renaissance art. It was no longer seen with a sense of perfection, triggering Mannerist distortions that responded to this contentious time.
1527 - Spain and France began advances over the Italian peninsula, focusing on the easy pickings of the small Italian city-states with large bankrolls. Venice alone remained an independent power due to its powerful fleet bringing goods and profits around the Mediterranean. The Sack of Rome by Charles V against France, Milan, Venice, Florence and the Papacy was a six-month pillage of the city that undid many of the achievements of the early Italian Renaissance. Mannerism rose from the ashes of this.
Mannerism spoke to the tensions between the ideal, the natural, and the symmetrical against the real, the artificial, and the unbalanced.
1545-1563: The Council of Trent or the Counter-Reformation, created a new order of priests, the Jesuits. Jesuits used art as a teaching tool and a religious statement.

Patronage and Artistic Life

Every artist had to join a trade guild, which sometimes made them seem equivalent to house painters or carpenters. Even so, artists could achieve great fame, so great that monarchs competed to have them in their employ. Frances I of Frances is said to have held the dying Leonardo da Vinci in his arms, Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire lavished praise upon Titian, and Michelangelo called "divino" by his biographers.

The dominant patron of the era was Pope Julius II. Julius's ambition transformed the rather ramshackle medieval town of Rome into the artistic center and capital of the Renaissance. Julius's devotion to the arts inspired Raphael and Michelangelo to do their greatest work.

Cosimo I of Florence established the first permanent painting academy in 1563. It functioned to train artists and improve their status in society, however the most famous artists connected with powerful political forces like a pope, did not need training.

High Renaissance Painting

Sfumato

Rendered forms are in a subtle soft way to create a misty effect on the painted surface.
Sfumato has the effect of distancing the viewer from the subject by placing the subject in a hazy world removed from us.
Used often by Leonardo da Vinci.

Chiaroscuro

Chiaroscuro provides soft transitions between light and dark.
Often heightens modeling effects in a work by having the light define the forms.

Glazes

Artists like Titian increased the richness of oil-painted surfaces by applying glazes.
In painting, glazes are transparent so that the painted surface shows through.
Glazes subtly change colors by brightening them, much as varnish brightens wood.

Three-Quarter Portraits

In quattrocento, profile views in portraits were popular. In the High Renaissance, they moved away to three-quarter views.
This view minimizes facial defects that a profile view would enhance.
Like the Mona Lisa, portraits become psychological paintings, and it was not enough to just capture their likeness, but artists were meant to express the character of the figure as well.

Raphael

The idealization that characterizes Raphael's work becomes the standard in the High Renaissance expression.
Raphael specialized in balanced compositions, warm colors, and ideally proportioned figures. He also favored a triangular composition: the heavy bottom anchors forms securely and yields to a lighter touch as the viewer's eye ascends.

Triangular Compositions

Warm Colors

Ideal Proportions

Venetian High Renaissance

In contrast to the Florentines and the Romans, whose paintings valued line and contour, the Venetians bathed their figures in a soft atmospheric ambiance highlighted by a gently modulated use of light.
Bodies are senuously rendered.
Both Florentines and Venetians paint religious scenes, Florentines see them as heroic accomplishments, whereas Venetians imbue their saints with a more human touch, setting them in bucolic environments that show a genuine interest in the beauty of the natural world. This setting is called Arcadian.
The damp Venetian climate caused wooden paintings to warp and crack, frescoes would peel and flake. Artists opted for canvas which was a more secure and lightweight surface that could maintain the integrity of a work for an indefinite period.

Mannerist Paintings

Illusionistic Perspective

Mannerists chose to discard High Renaissance ideas of a perspective grid and instead wanted the eye to wander around a picture plane to create an interesting illusion.
Mannerists defy the conventional classical order and rationality established in High Renaissance work.

Still-Life/Genre Painting

The still-life is born in the Mannerist period, which was previously understood to be the lowest form of painting. It gradually becomes an accepted art form in the 17th century.
Genre paintings, or paintings of everyday life, also become more accepted in finished paintings.

Ambiguous Compositions

For many years, scholars saw the demanding compositions of Mannerist paintings as reflections of High Renaissance art.
Scholars have now realized that the unusual complexities and ambiguous spaces of Mannerist art is its most endearing quality.
Mannerist art seeks refinement in unusual compositions and contrived settings, witht the irrational spatial effects relying on exaggerated forms, obscure imagery, and symbolic enigmas. The consequence is puzzling, stimulating, and challenging.

Unit Vocabulary

Arcadian - a simple rural and rustic setting used especially in Venetian paintings of the High Renaissance; named after Arcadia, a district in Greece to which poets and painters have attributed a rural simplicity and an idyllically untroubled world

Cassone - a trunk intended for storage of clothing for a wife's trousseau

Chiaroscuro - a gradual transition from light to dark in a painting. Forms are not determined by sharp outlines, but by the meeting of lighter and darker areas

Entombment - a painting or sculpture depicting Jesus Christ's burial after his crucifixion.

Flood story - as told in Genesis 7 of the Bible, Noah and his family escape rising waters by building an ark and placing two of every animal aboard

Glazes - thin transparent layers put over a painting to alter the color and build up a rich sonorous effect

Ignudi - nude corner figures on the Sistine Chapel ceiling

Last Supper - a meal shared by Jesus Christ with his apostles the night before his death by crucifixion

Sfumato - a smoke-light or hazy effect that distances the viewer from the subject of a painting

Sibyl - a Greco-Roman prophetess whom Christians saw as prefiguring the coming of Jesus Christ

Still Life - a painting of a grouping of inanimate objects, such as flowers or fruits