Italian Culture: Renaissance Art and Artists

Italian Renaissance art and artists represented an era when there was great cultural and intellectual upheaval in Europe.

Mention the terms Italian Culture and Renaissance Art and one is immediately reminded of Michelangelo lying on his back on rough planks held up by scaffolding and painting the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, and the enigmatic smile of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Italian culture can be experienced in the Roman architecture which can be seen in the ruins, like the Coliseum, which still remain in many parts of the country, the prescripts of the Roman Catholic Church, the distinctive taste of Italian food and wine – but most of all – in Italy’s Renaissance art and artists.

The Renaissance period was a time of great cultural upheaval which had a profound effect on European intellectual development. Having its beginnings in Italy, by the 16th century, it had spread to the rest of Europe. Its influence was felt in various aspects of intellectual pursuits such as philosophy, literature, religion, science, politics, and, of course, art. The scholars of the renaissance period applied the humanist method in every field of study, and sought human emotion and realism in art.

Renaissance scholars studied the ancient Latin and Greek texts, scouring the monastic libraries of Europe for works of antiquity that had become obscure, in their quest for improving and perfecting their worldly knowledge. This was in complete contrast to the transcendental spirituality that medieval Christianity stressed. However, that does not mean that they rejected Christianity. On the contrary, much of the greatest works of the renaissance period was devoted to it, with the Church patronizing a lot of the works of Renaissance art. However, there were subtle changes in the manner in which the intellectuals began to approach religion, which affected the cultural life of the society, which in turn influenced the artists of that period and hence was reflected in their art.

In Raphael’s School of Athens, for example, illustrious contemporaries are depicted as classical scholars, with Leonardo da Vinci being given as much importance as Plato had in his time. The development of highly realistic linear perspective was one of the distinctive aspects of Renaissance art. Giotto di Bondone, 1267-1337, a Florentine, who is regarded as the greatest Italian painter just prior to the Renaissance period, who abandoned the rigid Byzantine style, developing a more naturalistic style, is thought to be the first artist who treated a painting as a window into space.

However, it was only after the writings of Filippo Brunelleschi, 1377-1446, who is considered the first great architect of the Italian Renaissance, and Leon Battista Alberti, another pioneering theorist of Renaissance architecture, that perspective was formally accepted as an artistic technique. The development of perspective characterized a wider movement of incorporating realism into the arts. With that objective in mind, Renaissance artists also developed other techniques, such as examining light, shadow, and, as was made famous by Leonardo da Vinci, studying the human anatomy.

The inherent reason for the changes incorporated in artistic technique was a renewed interest in depicting nature in its natural beauty, as well as to resolve the fundamentals of aesthetics, the pinnacles of which can be seen in the works of some of the best of Renaissance artists like Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519, regarded as the most versatile of geniuses of the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo, 1475-1564, a Florentine sculptor, painter and architect, and Raphael, 1483-1520, whose works embody the ideals of High Renaissance. The techniques that they pioneered would be imitated a great deal by other artists.

Italian Renaissance art can be described as the artworks that were created during the early 15th century to about the middle of the 16th century. Even though the artists of that period were usually attached to particular courts and had allegiance to particular towns, nevertheless, they traveled all across Italy, often holding a diplomatic status and propagating philosophical and artistic ideas.

Renaissance art is usually split up into four periods:
Proto-Renaissance, which lasted from 1290 to 1400
Early Renaissance, which existed during 1400 to 1475
High Renaissance, from 1475 to 1525
Mannerism, from 1525 to 1600
The Proto-Renaissance period has its beginnings from the paintings of Giotto, as mentioned above, and includes the works of Taddeo Gaddi, Altichiero, and Orcagna. The Early Renaissance period is embodied by the works of Fra Angelico, Masaccio, Piero Della Francesca, Verrocchio, and Uccello. The High Renaissance period belonged to the great triad, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. And the Mannerism period is represented by Andrea del Sarto, Tintoretto, and Pontormo.

Some of the other greats of Italian Renaissance art are: Titian, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, and Bellini.

Florence is the city that is credited as being the cradle of the Renaissance, particularly Renaissance art.

All told, Italian Renaissance can be seen as an effort by the intellectuals of that era to learn about and improve the worldly and secular, both by reviving the ideas of antiquity as well as through innovative approaches to thinking, which is reflected in the art of the period.