Italian Renaissance Architecture and Sculptures

Submitted by: Reggie Rae M. Arbotante

III- SSC Lavoisier

Submitted to: Mrs. Cristy Reyes

Arts and Prac-Arts Teacher
 ITALIAN RENAISSANCE ART

The Italian Renaissance was one of the most productive periods in the history of art,
with large numbers of outstanding masters to be found in many centers and in all the major fields
painting, sculpture, and architecture. In Florence, in the first half of the fifteenth century, there
were great innovators in all these fields, whose work marked a beginning of a new era in the
history of art. These innovators included Masaccio in painting, Brunelleschi in architecture, and
Donatello in sculpture. Their new ideals and methods were systematized in the theoretical
writings of their friend and fellow artist Leon Battista Alberti. There can also be observed in this
period a change in the social status of the artist. Heretofore, he had been an artisan, a craftsman.
Now the attempt was made to include artists among the practitioners of the "liberal arts," which
were regarded as being on a higher level than the "mechanical arts." These efforts bore fruit, and
some of the great masters, for example, Titian and Michelangelo, by the force of their genius and
personality, were able to achieve a measure of status and respect rarely enjoyed by their
predecessors. The idea of artistic genius became popular; Michelangelo was called "divine"
because of the greatness of his creative powers.

In the Renaissance, art and science were closely connected. Both the artist and the
scientist strove for the mastery of the physical world, and the art of painting profited by two
fields of study that may be called scientific: anatomy, which made possible a more accurate
representation of the human body, and mathematical perspective. Perspective in painting is the
rendering on a two- dimensional surface of the illusion of three dimensions. Previous painters
had achieved this effect by empirical means, but the discovery of a mathematical method of
attaining a three-dimensional impression is attributed to Brunelleschi in about 1420. Henceforth,
the method could be systematically studied and explained, and it became one of the chief
instruments of artists, especially painters, in their pursuit of reality. Some men were both artists
and scientists, notably Leonardo da Vinci and Piero della Francesca. It is doubtful whether they
would have understood our distinction between art and science.

PAINTING
The techniques favored by the Florentines were tempera and fresco. For tempera painting
a dry surface was used. A wooden panel was grounded with several coats of plaster in glue, and
the composition was then copied from a drawing. The colors were tempered with egg or
vegetable albumin. The fresco technique, used for the mural paintings in Florentine churches,
involved painting on wet plaster. The sketch was first copied on the plaster wall in rough outline,
and the part on which the painter was going to work during a given day was then covered with
fresh plaster. The painter had to redraw the part that had been covered by the new plaster and add
the colors. As the plaster dried, the colors became a permanent part of it.

The High Renaissance style begins with the Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci, painted in
Milan while Leonardo was living there under the patronage of Ludovico the Moor. He worked
on the painting from about 1495 to 1497. When compared to previous paintings of the same
subject, its originality becomes apparent. All nonessentials have been eliminated; the distant
landscape, seen through the windows, heightens rather than distracts from the main subject.
 These are the qualities of the High Renaissance style: simplicity; austere rejection of the
incidental and the merely pretty; nobility and grandeur in the figures involved in actions of depth
and significance. This was the style of Raphael at the peak of his career, of Michelangelo at one
point, and of Andrea del Sarto and Correggio. By the 1530s, some of these artists were dead, and
the living ones had moved into new phases of their work, so that the High Renaissance was a
brief period in the history of art.

Florentine painting culminated in the work of Michelangelo, to whom the concluding

section of this chapter is devoted. Meanwhile a great school of painting developed in Venice. No
painters of great distinction appeared there in the fourteenth century, certainly none who could
stand comparison with Giotto.

Central Italy also produced important developments in painting. We may start with the
Sienese School. Though geographically close to Florence and influenced by it, the school had its
own independent tradition, which in its turn affected Florentine art. In the fourteenth century,
Sienese painting was of particular importance, and in the latter part of that century it determined
the course of Florentine painting and spread beyond Italy to become a formative influence in the
International Gothic style.

The painting representing Philosophy is known as the School of Athens. The great
philosophers of antiquity, each posed in such a way as to make him a representation of the kind
of philosophy that Raphael’s espoused, appear in a noble and spacious architectural setting. In
the center are Plato and Aristotle, engaged in conversation. Plato is pointing upward, in
accordance with his idealistic philosophy; while Aristotle, the investigator of nature, points
downward. The other philosophers are arranged singly or in groups, each distinct from the others
and yet contributing to the unity of the whole. All fit comfortably into the space. Throughout
there is a sense of dignity, grandeur, and serenity. Since the other walls of the room are devoted
to the other fields of human and divine knowledge, we are no doubt supposed to realize that there
is no conflict between the sacred truths of the faith and the great ideas of the secular, particularly
those of classical authors.

This brief survey of northern Italian painting, and of Italian Renaissance painting in general, may
conclude with a mention of Correggio (Antonio Allegri, c.1489-1534), who gets his name from
his native town. He is most closely connected with the city of Parma where he painted domes,
for example, in the cathedral. These show the illusionistic character that had been inaugurated by
Mantegna, who may have been his teacher, and that would be very popular with Baroque artists.
The spectator looks from below at the Virgin rising into Heaven and at the swirling masses of
figures who are witnessing the event, and feels not like a spectator but like a participant.

Correggio had a lightheartedness that made him somewhat unfit for paintings requiring profound
religious emotion, but he was superbly qualified for scenes from antique myth, especially those
of an erotic nature. He is one of the greatest of all masters of the art of rendering the flesh and a
great colorist and master of movement.

It is especially appropriate to end a discussion of Italian Renaissance painting with Correggio,

because he anticipated developments which came much later not only Mannerism and the
Baroque, but also even the art of the eighteenth century, particularly in France. The worldliness,
grace, and charm of his mythologies, even their somewhat artificial character, make him at home
in the company of such artists as Watteau and Boucher.

SCULPTURE
Lorenzo Valla had referred to a decline of painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature,
and their revival in his age. According to the tradition that developed, the revival of painting was
due to a return to nature, the revival of architecture came about through the influence of classical
antiquity, and the rebirth of sculpture resulted from a combination of the two influences.

This view of a revival of the arts was accepted and propagated by the famous sixteenth-
century art historian Giorgio Vasari. As far as sculpture is concerned, it is not wholly accurate,
since classical influences were present in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, we can begin our brief
survey of Renaissance sculpture with the artists who come first in Vasari's account, Nicola
Pisano (active 1258-78) and his son Giovanni Pisano (c.1250-1314/19). Nicola probably came
from southern Italy, but his most important work was done in Tuscany, where he worked as both
sculptor and architect. His work shows the results of careful study of ancient monuments,
including a Roman sarcophagus in Pisa, which contained reliefs telling the story of Phaedra and
Hippolytus. In his reliefs for the pulpit in the Baptistery of Pisa, there is a Madonna based on the
figure of Phaedra, a Samson derived from Hippolytus, and numerous other adaptations of themes
from the same source. He is also famous for his reliefs on the pulpit in the cathedral of Siena.

While Nicola combined Gothic and classical elements, his son Giovanni represents part
of a reaction against classical tendencies, a reaction that can be observed also in literature and
that was contemporaneous with the predominance of the International Gothic style in painting.
Nevertheless, Giovanni is equally a forerunner of the Renaissance. Although his themes and
feeling were largely medieval, he made a great advance in fidelity to nature. It has been said that
his true successor was Giotto, the painter, rather than any of the sculptors who worked under
him. In another respect also, Giovanni heralds something new; he seems to be the earliest artist
to fight for release from the classification of artisan by his insistence on the value of his own
individual personality. Though the records of his life are scanty, they show him in conflict with
other artists, employers, and even the law. The inscriptions he left on his work, especially the
pulpit in the cathedral of Pisa, show an extraordinary sense of his own worth. Though it was not
uncommon for artists to leave self-praising inscriptions on their works, Giovanni went far
beyond the others in exalting his own talents. Andrea Pisano (c.1290 1348-49) unrelated to
Giovanni and Nicola is best known for his work in Florence, which includes the bronze reliefs on
the South Doors of the Baptistery. On these doors, in the years 1330-36, he executed twenty-
eight panels with scenes from the life of John the Baptist. They are outstanding for clarity and
simplicity of design; the number of figures is kept small, and their relationships are clearly and
forcefully indicated.

Lorenzo Ghiberti (1381?-1455) is an example of the individuality and self-consciousness

that characterize the Renaissance. He wrote the earliest known autobiography of an artist, in
which his pride and self-confidence find vivid expression. The same traits may account for the
two self-portraits, which he placed on the East Doors of the Baptistery in Florence. This practice
of representing one's self among the figures in a painting or a work of sculpture became quite
common among Renaissance artists; it was a sort of signature and an expression of the artist's
own conception of his importance.

Ghiberti worked on the two Baptistery doors, with interruptions, during virtually his
whole productive life. The North Doors occupied him from 1403 to 1424, while his work on the
East Doors lasted from 1425 to 1452. On the North Doors@, he was required to follow Andrea
Pisano's pattern, with twenty-eight panels of New Testament scenes. His work has greater grace
and charm than the more simple and direct work of Pisano. He was also beginning to use
perspective, trying to give the illusion of space by the grouping of figures and the use of
landscape and architecture. His greatest achievement was the East Doors, called "Gates of
Paradise." For these doors, which carry reliefs depicting scenes for the Old Testament, he broke
away from the scheme of twenty-eight small panels and divided the surface into ten larger ones.
In each case he tells a story with several scenes on the same panel. An example is the Story of
Joseph. Here are found Joseph sold into slavery, Joseph revealing himself to his brothers, and
other episodes taken from the account in Genesis. In these magnificent works can again be seen
Ghiberti's interest in creating the illusion of depth. He accomplished this partly by the use of
mathematical perspective, presumably learned from Brunelleschi, and partly by gradations in the
relief. Architectural elements are also employed to produce perspective effects.

Many of Ghiberti's assistants on the doors became outstanding artists in their own right,
and the most outstanding of these was Donatello (c.1386-1466). He was probably the greatest
sculptor of the Italian Renaissance, with the single exception of Michelangelo, and had an
influence far beyond his own field of sculpture. Though he was affected by the revival of
antiquity and the study of ancient works, he was an original, in some ways a revolutionary, artist.
His work is marked by realism and by an emphasis on the psychological and emotional state of
his figures. His psychological range was enormous, as was his versatility; he was equally skilled
in bronze, in wood, and in stone, and in both freestanding statues and in reliefs. Three examples
from his work will illustrate something of his genius. His bronze relief Feast of Herod for the
baptismal font in the ba[tostery of the cathedral of Siena, was done during the 1420s. It shows
three scenes from the story of the beheading of John the Baptist, in three rooms arranged one
behind the other. Notable are the use of the principles of linear perspective and, above all, the
expression of strong feeling on the part of the foreground figures who see the head of John
presented on a platter to Herod. Donatello's bronze David is another witness to his originality. It
is the first freestanding nude statue of the Renaissance, and its thoughtful and meditative David,
standing over the body of the slain Goliath, is a new conception of a familiar subject. It is also an
expression of an ideal of human physical beauty.

In 1443 Donatello went to Padua, where he spent ten years. The works he created there
gave him the tremendous impact on North Italian art, which has already been mentioned. One of
these was his equestrian statue of the condottiere Erasmo da Narni, known as Gattamelata
("Honeyed Cat"). It is one of the greatest of equestrian statues, rendered with dignity, assurance,
and calm strength. In some of his other works done at the same period and in other late works, he
expresses an intensity of religious emotion, and a self-revelation hardly to be found in any other
artist and in no artist before his time.
 Luca della Robbia (1400-82), though he did important work in marble and bronze, is best
known for his development of the technique of sculpture in colored terra cotta. In this medium he
did work of unparalleled simplicity and loveliness; the only other workers in this kind of terra-
cotta sculpture were members of his family, who continued the tradition for a time, but who
never rose to Luca's level. They had no successors, and the technique died out. The true
successor of Donatello was the Florentine Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-88). He worked in a
variety of media and forms as Donatello had done. His Colleoni monument is one of the two
most famous equestrian statues of the Renaissance (the other being the Gattamelata). Colleoni
was also a condottiere and appears as a formidable and arrogant figure. The statue is less
classical than Donatello's and has a greater sense of movement. The sculpture discussed in this
chapter has been predominantly Florentine, because of the overwhelming importance of Florence
in this branch of Renaissance art. There was much work going on elsewhere in Italy, some of it
important, but reasons of space have compelled limitations in our discussion. The greatest of all
Renaissance sculptors was Michelangelo, who, as stated earlier, will be dealt with at the end of
the chapter.

ARCHITECTURE
Architecture in the Renaissance, like the other arts, was essentially Christian, though
influenced by classical ideas and especially by the architectural treatise of the Roman architect
and engineer Vitruvius, written in the first century B.C. The highest form of the art, for
Renaissance architects, was the building of churches. Under the influence of Pythagorean and
Platonic concepts, it was believed that God had created the cosmos as a mathematical harmony,
in which the different parts were related to each other in harmonic mathematical ratios. A church
built according to these ratios, therefore, would symbolize and partake of perfect beauty, and
thus would help to lift the thought of the worshippers to God. For similar reasons, the circle was
regarded by some artists and thinkers as the ideal basis for a church plan, because it was the
perfect figure and, therefore, the best symbol for God.

Vitruvius, in discussing temples, had claimed that the proportions of these buildings
should correspond with those of the human figure. He had shown that a well-built man, with
arms and legs extended, would fit perfectly into the circle and square, the most perfect figures.
This idea appealed to Renaissance artists, and accounts for their drawing of Vitruvian figures,
human figures with arms and legs outstretched, inscribed in squares and circles. Another ancient
influence was Pythagoras, who held that the basic explanation of the universe lay in numbers and
who had discovered that musical relationships could be expressed in mathematical terms. These
musical-mathematical harmonies appeared to provide a key to the structure of the whole
universe. There was a Pythagorean revival during the Renaissance, and it contributed to the
endeavor to express in the proportions of buildings the most profound religious and
philosophical conceptions. Architects applied these harmonic ratios to secular buildings as well
as to churches for example, palaces, villas, and libraries.

The first great Renaissance architect was the Florentine Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-
1446). He made several trips to Rome to study the remains of ancient buildings and learn the
principles that had been used in their construction. The knowledge thus gained helped him to
solve the problem of constructing a dome for the cathedral of Florence. Though the building of
the cathedral had begun in the last years of the thirteenth century, nobody had been able to work
out a method of constructing the dome, which had to cover a space 140 feet across.
Brunelleschi's solution was the dome that came to dominate the Florentine skyline from 1436,
the year it was completed. Among his many other achievements we may mention the loggia, or
open porch, of the Ospedale degli Innocenti (Foundling Hospital) of Florence, which was built
between 1419 and 1424. It was the first such hospital in the world and the first truly Renaissance
building. Here the architect shows the use of the mathematical proportions already referred to;
the size of the columns is the basis for the other dimensions. The round arches, supported by
slender columns, and the vaults, which consist of a series of small domes, owe much to classical
examples.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72), a man of many talents, was one of the most important
architects of the Renaissance. His purpose was to adapt the principles of classical architecture to
the needs of his time, and his most notable achievements were his churches. In designing these,
he used such classical elements as the Greek temple front and the Roman triumphal arch. One of
his designs that was widely imitated was found in the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella
in Florence, where he was called upon to redesign the facade. The high center section crowned
by a classical pediment, together with the scrolls on either side, and the organization into two
stories may be recognized in many later churches. In addition to designing many other churches
and secular buildings of importance, Alberti also wrote a treatise on architecture.

Bramante of Urbino (1444-1514) was the greatest architect of his time, though he
apparently was a painter long before he became interested in architecture. He was in Milan, at
the court of Ludovico the Moor, in 1481 or earlier, and stayed until the fall of Ludovico in 1499.
There his ideas on architecture may have been influenced by discussions with Leonardo da
Vinci, who was very much interested in architecture, though he did little or no architectural work
himself. Leonardo's drawings include some centrally planned buildings, and he may have helped
stimulate Bramante's interest in this form. From 1499 to his death, Bramante lived in Rome, and
his work there marks the High Renaissance style in architecture.

In Rome Bramante studied classical remains, and this study was decisive for his work in
those years. The Pantheon, which had long been a Christian church, was the source of most
circular churches during the sixteenth century, including Bramante's Tempietto. This tiny
masterpiece was built for Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain on the spot where St. Peter was
supposed to have been put to death. The Doric columns and the frieze of the church are adapted
from ancient models.

Bramante was one of the great artists patronized by Pope Julius II. When the pope
decided to tear down the Old St. Peter's church and build a new one on the site, he appointed
Bramante chief architect. Bramante's design called for a centrally planned church, but under later
architects this design was abandoned. Michelangelo, no lover of Bramante personally, called
Bramante's plan for St. Peter's the best one. Something of what Bramante planned for St. Peter's
may be seen in the setting of Raphael's School of Athens. The two artists, both from Urbino,
were friends, and it is believed that Bramante may have advised Raphael on the architecture in
his paintings. Raphael himself did some architectural work.
 The last great architect of the Renaissance was Palladio (Andrea di Pietro, 1508-80).
Though Padua was his birthplace, his name is chiefly associated with Vicenza, where he lived
and worked for many years. As a young man he became acquainted with the ideas of Vitruvius
and studied in Rome. The study of classical architecture and its principles affected his work
deeply and permanently. He wrote a number of books, including two popular and famous
guidebooks to Rome, an edition of Caesar's Commentaries, and an architectural treatise, Four
Books on Architecture (1570). In this last work he showed his reverence for the remains of
antiquity, which for him bore witness to the greatness and virtue of the Romans. For Palladio, the
practice of architecture was a moral act, a manifestation of virtue.