07 Renaissance in the Visual Arts


Accounting for art

 

Example: Florence, Church of Ognissanti

 

Giotto di Bondone, 1256-1337, Ognissanti Madonna

Giotto

 

Sandro Botticelli, St. Augustine, 1480

Aug

 

       work of art

  •        How was it made? By whom? original location? original use?
  •        Who paid for it? What was their relationship with the artist? With the location of the work?
  •         Style. What are the norms? Did the artist meet those norms? Change them?

      producers: the artists

  •         Who are artists in sociological terms? How does this change?
  •         What kinds of education do they have?

Our example: Florence

  • naturalism (painting)
  • ancient models (architecture)
  • linear perspective

 

humanists: texts; artists; patrons

public competition

   “Art” and “The Arts” as categories

Modern

Renaissance: no system of “the arts”

Ars: as opposed to Nature; to Science

ex: Arte della Lana

Scholarly disciplines: Liberal arts; Humanities; Mechanical arts

  •      visual arts: mechanical arts
  •      poetry: humanities;
  •      music: quadrivium

guilds

Production of art

Kinds produced ca. 1400

  •    religious
  •    public art and architecture
  •    private: palazzi, villas

Religious art. Who pays for it: mostly private

papacy? (only local patronage)

buildings

chapels in churches

private religious art for home meditation

urban guilds may also patronize religious buildings as units

changes in worship affect art

ex: mendicant orders

patronage relationships

“The Customer”

  • Paying for a specific object
  • Deliberate support of an individual’s career
  • Support of some form of expression

shop as location of production

  • independent business
  • Some commissions  by competition
  • contracts

changes by ca. 1500

–Baxandall

 

Changes in artistic style I: Drama and realism in painting

Italy ca 1250: several imported traditions, then innovation

Ex: Giotto

  • Byzantine
  • French: “International Gothic” style
  • Friars  emotional response on part of viewer
  • Ancient models: almost none before 1500

inspire admiration

St Luke

Maddalena master: S. Luca, late 13th c (Uffizi)

Leon Battista Alberti   1404-72

  •    Padua education
  •    law degree (Bologna); cleric; at Florence cathedral

council of Florence, Eugenius IV:

(Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello)

Discovery of Vitruvius On Architecture: 1st c BCE (prob. after 27)

  • Petrarch; Poggio Bracciolini
  • published: Rome, 1486
  • ancient rules, ancient examples
  • Architect as learned person  (like Quintilian, Cicero)

Rimini, arch of Augustus

 

 

Changes in artistic style II: Perspective in painting

— Alberti, Brunelleschi

quadrivium: add perspective/optics?

Piero della Francesca, Luca Pacioli

artists need education

Influence of humanists on subject matter

Botticelli, Calumny of Apelles