1000 Paintings of Genius. Victoria Charles
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beliefs were necessary to supplement the limited tenets of Christianity. Above all, the humanists encouraged the belief that ancient civilisation was the apex of culture and one should be in a dialogue with the writers and artists of the classical world. The result was the Renaissance, the rebirth, of Greco-Roman culture. The panels, paintings and murals of Masaccio and Piero dell Francesca captured the moral firmness of ancient Roman sculptural figures, and these artists strove to show their actors as part of our world: the Renaissance perspective system is based on a single vanishing point and carefully worked out transversal lines, resulting in a spatial coherence not seen since antiquity, if ever. Even more clearly indebted to antiquity were the paintings of the northern Italian prodigy Andrea Mantegna. His archaeological studies of antique costumes, architecture, figural poses, and inscriptions resulted in the most thoroughly consistent attempt by any painter up to his time to give new life to the vanished Greco-Roman civilisation. Even a painter like Alessandro Botticelli, whose art evokes a dreamy spirit that had survived from the late Gothic style, created paintings with Venuses, Cupids, and nymphs that responded to the subject matter of the ancients and appealed to contemporary viewers touched by humanism.
It would be better to think of ‘Renaissances’ rather than a single Renaissance. This is demonstrated no more clearly than by looking at the art of the leading painters of the High Renaissance. Giorgio Vasari saw these masters as all setting out to create an art greater than Nature, as idealists who improved on reality rather than imitating it, and who thoughtfully suggested reality rather than delineating it for us in every particular detail. We recognise in these painters different embodiments of the cultural aspirations of the time. Leonardo da Vinci, trained as a painter, was equally at home in his role as a scientist, and he incorporated into art his research into the human body, plant forms, geology, and psychology. Michelangelo Buonarroti, trained as a sculptor, turned to painting and expressed his deep theological and philosophical beliefs, especially the idealism of Neoplatonism. His muscular, over-scaled and intense heroes could hardly differ any more from the graceful, smiling, supple figures of Leonardo. Raphael of Urbino was the ultimate courtier, whose paintings embody the grace, charm and sophistication of life at Renaissance courts. Giorgione and Titian, both Venetian masters, expressed with their colourism and free brushwork an epicurean sense of life, their art finding no better subject matter than in luxurious landscapes and sumptuous female nudes. All the sixteenth-century painters tried to improve on Nature, to create something greater or more beautiful than nature itself. Titian’s motto Natura Potentior Ars, ‘Art More Powerful than Nature’, could be the philosophy of all the sixteenth-century artists.
Among the achievements of the Italian Renaissance painters was that they had established their intellectual credentials. Rather than being considered as mere handicraftsmen, artists – some of whom, such as Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo, were themselves writers on this subject – made a bid to be considered on a par with other thinkers of their time. The profession of painting experienced a sharp rise in its critical fortunes in Renaissance Italy. Michelangelo, for example, was called Il Divino, ‘the Divine’, and a kind of cult sprang up around leading painters and other artists of the time. Already in 1435, Alberti urged painters to associate themselves with men of letters and mathematicians, and this paid off. The present-day inclusion of “studio art” in university curricula has its origins in the new attitude to painting that arose in Italy during the Renaissance. By the sixteenth century, rather than only commissioning particular works, art patrons across the peninsula were happy to get their hands on any product of the great individual artists: acquiring ‘a Raphael’, ‘a Michelangelo’, or ‘a Titian’ was a goal in itself, whatever the work in question.
While the Italians of the Renaissance had turned to highly organised spatial settings and idealised figural types, the northern Europeans focused on everyday reality, on optical sensations, and on the variety of life on earth. No painter has ever surpassed the Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck in his close observation of surfaces, and no one has ever seen and captured more clearly and poetically the glint of light on a pearl, the deep, resonant colours of a red cloth, or the glinting reflections that appear in glass and on metal. Scientific observation was one form of realism, while another was the intense interest at the time in the bodies of saints and on the anatomical details of the Passion of Christ. This was the age of religious theatre, when actors, dressed as biblical characters, acted out in churches and on the streets the detail of Christ’s suffering and death. It is not coincidence this was also the period when masters such as Netherlandish Rogier van der Weyden and German Matthias Grünewald painted, sometimes with excruciating clarity, the wounds, streams of blood, and pathetic countenance of the crucified Christ. The northern masters carried out their pictorial research with a skilled use of oil painting technique, a medium in which they remained in the forefront in European art until the Italians joined them only in the later fifteenth century.
Spanning north and south during the Renaissance period was the art of Albrecht Dürer of Nuremburg. He followed the Italian penchant for canonical measure of the human body and perspective, even if he retained a form of sharp expressionism of line and emotional representation that was widespread in German art. While he shared the artistic optimism of the idealistic Italians, many other northern painters retained a sense of pessimism about the human condition. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s essay on the Dignity of Man presaged Michelangelo’s belief in the perfectibility and essential beauty of the human body and soul. For their part, Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and Sebastian Brant’s satiric poem Ship of Fools were part of the same northern European cultural milieu that produced the fantastic follies of humankind shown in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights triptych and Pieter Brueghel’s raucous peasant scenes. There was hope for humankind in Paradise, but little consolation on earth for beings consumed by their passions and caught in a cycle of desire and fruitless yearning. Northern humanists, like their Italian counterparts, called for the classical virtues of moderation, restraint, and harmony and the pictures of Brueghel represented the very vices against which they warned. Unlike some of the contemporary Romanists, who had travelled from the Netherlands to Italy and been inspired by Michelangelo and other artists of the time, Brueghel travelled to Rome around 1550 but remained largely untouched by its art. He turned to local inspiration and staged his scenes amidst humble settings, earning him the undeserved nickname of “Peasant Brueghel”. He was a herald of the realism and bluntness of the northern European Baroque.
The great intellectual revolt set in motion by theologians Martin Luther and John Calvin in the sixteenth century led to an attempt by the Catholic Church to respond to the challenge of the Protestants. Various Church Councils called for a reform of the Roman Catholic Church. In the arts, the participants at the Council of Trent declared that art should be simple and accessible to the broad public. A number of Italian painters, however, whom we know as Mannerists, had instead been practising an artistry that was complex in subject matter and style. Painters eventually responded to ecclesiastical needs as well as to the ennui that necessitated a response to Mannerist stylistic formulae. We call this new era the age of the Baroque, which was ushered in initially by Caravaggio. He painted what he saw in front of him, in the most realistic if dramatically dark and theatrically concentrated manner possible, and he gained a following among the popular masses as well as with connoisseurs and even with Church officials, who were at first sceptical of his overly realistic treatment of sacred subject matter. Caravaggism swept across Italy and then the rest of Europe, and a host of painters came to adopt and adapt his chiaroscuro and his suppression of flashy colouring; his earthy and sincere actors struck a chord with viewers across the Continent who had tired of some of the artificialities of sixteenth-century art.
In addition to the Caravaggism of the early Baroque, another form of painting later called the High Baroque soon developed; the most dramatic, dynamic, and painterly of styles hitherto developed. Many of its painters built on the foundation laid by the Venetians of the sixteenth century. Peter Paul Rubens, an admirer of Titian, painted huge canvases with fleshy figures, rich landscapes, broken brushwork, and flickering light and dark. His pictorial experiments were the starting points for the art of his countrymen Jacob Jordaens and Anthony van Dyck, the latter of whom had a great following among the European elite for his noble portrait manner. Rubens brought back the world of antiquity, painting on his canvases ancient gods, goddesses and human sea creatures, but his style was anything but classical. He found a ready