THESE ARE ROUGH NOTES!!! not very well written in many cases, and certainly not for quoting! They are just a reminder of what we do in the lecture and they should not replace your own writing/thinking about the topic.
Cimabue, Giotto and Duccio are all in fact exploring the psychology of the figures they are painting and whatever one chooses to call this period in art, it is now evident that the ideas of Renaissance Humanism are taking hold in society.
At first glance Cimabue's Madonna and angels do look rather stylized and abstracted, the faces are all similar and elongated, the angels hover weightlessly stacked on top of one another. However in comparison with Byzantine models his figures are more filled out and have realistic folds in their drapery. There is an expressive and inquisitive look in each face of Cimabue's work. Byzantine icons are beautiful works of art, but were created for spiritual reasons and were never meant to reflect naturalism.
While Giorgio Vasari considered Cimabue to have started the Italian Renaissance, later art historian Frederick Hartt in his book History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture felt that Cimabue was instead the last artist of the Byzantine tradition.
Cimabue, Giotto and Duccio are all in fact exploring the psychology of the figures they are painting and whatever one chooses to call this period in art, it is now evident that the ideas of Renaissance Humanism are taking hold in society.
At first glance Cimabue's Madonna and angels do look rather stylized and abstracted, the faces are all similar and elongated, the angels hover weightlessly stacked on top of one another. However in comparison with Byzantine models his figures are more filled out and have realistic folds in their drapery. There is an expressive and inquisitive look in each face of Cimabue's work. Byzantine icons are beautiful works of art, but were created for spiritual reasons and were never meant to reflect naturalism.
While Giorgio Vasari considered Cimabue to have started the Italian Renaissance, later art historian Frederick Hartt in his book History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture felt that Cimabue was instead the last artist of the Byzantine tradition.
At first glance Cimabue's Madonna and angels do look rather stylized and abstracted, the faces are all similar and elongated, the angels hover weightlessly stacked on top of one another. However in comparison with Byzantine models his figures are more filled out and have realistic folds in their drapery. There is an expressive and inquisitive look in each face of Cimabue's work. Byzantine icons are beautiful works of art, but were created for spiritual reasons and were never meant to reflect naturalism.
While Giorgio Vasari considered Cimabue to have started the Italian Renaissance, later art historian Frederick Hartt in his book History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture felt that Cimabue was instead the last artist of the Byzantine tradition.
While Giorgio Vasari considered Cimabue to have started the Italian Renaissance, later art historian Frederick Hartt in his book History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture felt that Cimabue was instead the last artist of the Byzantine tradition.
Gothic art embodies the transition from medieval
stylization to the fully-developed realism of the Renaissance. It began in
France in the mid 12th C continuing up to early 16th C,
it developed alongside the Renaissance, before the two finally merged.
"Departing from the Byzantine notion of painting as a symbolic
image of a divine being, Duccio, the founder of Sienese painting, endowed his
figures with a new humanity, exploring the psychological relationship between
Mother and Child."2
he pictorial inventions of Giotto
can be seen in his altarpiece created for the church of Ognissanti in
Florence. Known as The Ognissanti Madonna (shown above),
Giotto's figures have a solidity and weight to them. Faces are quite
expressive and individualized rather than stylized, the throne is shown as a
realistic three dimensional space and the angels are shown convincingly in
front of one another rather than stacked on top of each other. Many art
historians consider Giotto the father of the Italian Renaissance. His
innovations in art are especially evident in his many fresco cycles where he
clearly captures the emotions in each individual.
After his time stylized
iconographic figures and altarpieces start to wane from Italian art.
Bitter rivalry between the two republics the Ghibellines who supported
the Holy Roman Empire (Siena). Due to the ties with the Holy Roman Empire along
with ties to the French papacy in Avignon, the Sienese had more artistic
influenced which were derived from the International Gothic style found in
Germany and France. This can be seen in the poses and folds of drapery in
his figures. But Duccio like Giotto is painting in a way that captures
the intelligence and personality of each saint and angel.
Arena, Chapel in Padua, Italy, the interior of which is covered with
fresco paintings by Giotto di Bondone (c. 1266-1337). Looking around its
interior – virtually, via books and online sources, since I’ve never actually
been there – I was struck by the extent to which Giotto anticipated Renaissance
era painting in his work, during a time in which the more stylized, Byzantine
approach still dominated Western religious painting. Among the most impressive
and moving of the paintings in the Chapel is one widely regarded as one of
Giotto’s masterpieces, The Lamentation.
Commissioning
art for churches was a very common way for financially well-off people to
“earn” their way into Heaven through good works.
The
Scrovegni Chaple is also commonly known as the Arena Chapel, since it was built
near the site of an ancient Roman arena. Relatively plain from the outside, the
interior of the Chapel is filled with one of the masterworks of art history.
Giotto’s cycle of frescoes was begun around 1303 (some speculate that, as an
architect, he may have designed the Chapel as well). His work may have been
completed in time for the Chapel’s consecration in 1305, although it may also
have continued as late as 1310.
Depictions
of The Lamentation traditionally show Jesus’s body, having been removed from
the cross, being mourned by family members and friends. In the visual
iconography of that time, Biblical figures are usually marked out by their
halos. By the eleventh century, the Lamentation had become a frequently
depicted scene, with Mary and Jesus of course at the center of the drama.
Returning to
Giotto’s painting, in the foreground are five figures surrounding and forming a
circle around Jesus’s body, which we can see does not touch the ground. Three
of the figures are women, wearing halos and biblical clothing, holding Jesus’s
body. Two others are turned away from us. Two hold aloft Jesus’s hands. At
Jesus’s feet is Mary Magdalene, recognizable by her long red hair.
There is a sense of three dimensions, if a little more compressed than
what we would see in paintings a century or two later. The muted pastel colors
are fairly typical of fresco painting; the blue azurite used for the sky, once
probably quite brilliant, has also faded. The humans wear clothing that drapes
naturally, and their facial and bodily expressions are recognizably emotional.
What most strongly separates Giotto from his contemporaries is the
dramatic and emotional power of his work. Look at the intensity of the grief,
and the variety of its expression, in both the faces and the physical postures.
Throughout the Middle Ages most of the intellectuals and scholars were
clerics. Their studies focused on God and his Universe. They were concerned
with the precise demonstration of what was true. The intellectual activity of
that era is known as Scholasticism. This overlapped with the development of a
new form of intellectual inquiry, what we call Humanism. Humanists represented
a new type of intellectual – they were mostly laymen and they were fascinated
with the literature of Greek and Roman antiquity. They reformulated the
insights of Christian scholars to give a new account of the nature of the human
being, human society and the arts and sciences of civilisation. In particular,
the rediscovery of Ancient Greek texts revealed knowledge relating to philosophy,
mathematics and science. In the Medieval period education focused on the
teaching of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, arithmetic, geometry, astonomy and
musical theory based on mathematical concepts; at university level they taught
theology, law and medicine. One of the enduring legacies of humanism was the
introduction of other subjects including poetry, history and moral philosophy,
what we now call the Humanities – literature, arts, philosophy, and so on.
In 1334 at the age of 67 Giotto was commissioned to take
over the design and construction of Florence Cathedral. This is something we
see throughout this period, that painters were also architects or sculptors,
the separation between the disciplines was not so defined. .Giotto concentrated
on the campanile (bell tower) for the cathedral. His design was in harmony with the
polychromy of the cathedral.
Through this work, Giotto has become, together with Brunelleschi (dome
of the cathedral of Florence) and Alberti (with
his treatise De re
aedificatoria, 1450), one of the founding fathers of Italian Renaissance
architecture.
Baptistry in Florence is part of the cathedral complex, built earlier
between 1059 and 1128, probably on the site of a Roman building. The
architecture is in Florentine Romanesque style, which has a strong influence on the subsequent development of Renaissance architecture. The Baptistry
is renowned for its three sets of artistically important bronze doors with relief
sculptures. The south doors were done by Andrea Pisano during the 14th
C. Showing scenes from the life of St. John the Baptist – this panel shows John’s disciples visiting
him in prison – John is not visible himself as he is inside the prison praying.
In 1401 the
Cloth Importer’s Guild decided to commission new doors, and they announced a
competition. VIDEO
In 1425 he
received an additional commission for the East Doors. Big change in style.
Brunelleschi,
who didn’t win the competition also made a transition from being a goldsmith to
being an architect, and he received the commission to build the dome for the
cathedral, a hugely tricky engineering operation. Buttresses were forbidden by the city fathers,
and because it was impossible to obtain rafters for scaffolding long and strong
enough (and in sufficient quantity) for the task, it was unclear how a dome of
that size could be constructed without it collapsing under its own weight in
the process. There were other technical stresses and problems to be considered.
The wool merchants' guild, held a competition to solve the
problem. The two main competitors were Ghiberti and Brunelleschi, with Brunelleschi
winning and receiving the commission. This work took up most of the rest of his
life and involved feats of mathematics and invention – he had to invent
mechanisms to get stones up to the top.
Brunelleschi also experimented with perspective
Al Hasan – Book of Optics 1011 to 1021.
What we see emerging out of Florence in the 14th and 15th
Centuries, is a shift in perspective, towards empirical observation – looking
at the world, measuring, calculating, weighing. Interest in developing
technologies to do these things. Italy was a trading centre for goods coming
from the East, trade routes had been opened up to the east, goods coming in
like silk, cinnamon, spices, ivory. Merchant class who buy and sell, the
beginnings of capitalism although it doesn’t take that name yet. The possibility
of developing personal wealth leads to an interest in the material world.
People don’t want to turn their back on religion, but they want a world view
that allows them to be religious, good servants of god but also interested in
worldly things.
The Masaccio
is located in the Basilica of Santa Maria
Novella in Florence, which dates from 1246 – 1360. The façade is in a style
called Tuscan Gothic. There are three portals spanned by round arches, while the rest of the lower part of
the facade is spanned by blind arches, separated by pilasters, with below
Gothic pointed arches, striped in green and white, capping noblemen's tombs.
This same design continues in the adjoining wall around the old churchyard.
The upper part of the façade was
designed by Leone Battista Alberti. Who inlaid the black and white marble on
the façade between 1456 and 1470. Alberti was famous for his treatise on
architecture De Re Aedificatoria, based on the book De
Architectura of the classical Roman writer etrusvius Alberti attempted to bring the ideals of
humanist architecture, proportion and classically-inspired detailing, to bear
on this design while also creating harmony with the already existing medieval part
of the facade. His contribution consists of a broad frieze decorated with
squares. Everything above it, including the four white-green pilasters and a
round window, crowned by a pediment with the Dominican solar
emblem, and flanked on both sides by enormous S-curved volutes. The four columns with Corinthian
capitals on the lower part of the facade were also added. The pediment and the
frieze are clearly inspired by antiquity, but the S-curved scrolls in the upper
part are new and without precedent in antiquity. The scrolls (or variations of
them), found in churches all over Italy, all find their origin here in the
design of this church.
Paulo Uccello
Andrea Mantegna born in 1431 – his flinty,
metallic and somewhat stony figures and landscapes are evidence of a sculptural
approach to painting. One of his great aims was optical illusion, carried out
by a mastery of perspective which, though not always mathematically correct,
attained an astonishing effect in those times. main legacy in considered the
introduction of spatial illusionism.
Piero della Francesca was a painter who
worked in Florence in this period also. He was known to be a also known as a mathematician and geometer ,
and his worked is characterized by a serene humanism, combined with geometry
and mathematical perspective. Flagellation of Christ is an enigmatic painting –
the action is peculiar, it has a dreamlike quality to it, the violence on one
side, the serenity and calm in the rest.
The Baptism of Christ is another of della
Francesca’s best known works – typical subject, but not a typical treatment.
Stillness of figures, calm. Strict geometry, Christ and the dove in the centre,
perfect verticals, horizontals in the belts, the dove, the clouds, - the arch
is echoed in shapes. Interest in the mathematical foundations of beauty and
harmony. Tuscan landscape, Formality of the composition.
Sandro Botticelli was born in 1445. His
work is considered representative of the grace and use of line that often
characterises Florentine painting.
Primavera is understood as a metaphor for
the Florentine new spring of culture,
everything flourishing and taking on new forms. Completely non-religious
subject, drawing on Ancient Roman myths for its subject, Mercury, the Three
Graces, ,Venus, Flora, Chloris,Zephyrus.
Late in his life he came under the
influence of a preacher called Savonarola, who condemned the pagan imagery and
lavish lifestyles that were in vogue.
Botticelli abandoned this type of work
and became very religious – this is one of his later paintings, which shows
something of a stylistic return to the international gothic style.
I wanted to finish up with Gentile de Fabriano’s work from 1420, which
was painted in Florence. De Fabriano seems to have begun his painting career in
Venice which had a very different tradition to Florence, and we will be looking
at that next week. He travelled around quite a lot, and he is best known for
his work in the International Gothic style, so this style as I mentioned before
continued alongside these other developments.
