notes from lecture 4

THESE NOTES ARE A STUDY AID ONLY. DO NOT QUOTE FROM THESE NOTES OR COPY THEM IN ANY WAY, AS THEY ARE NOT REFERENCED. 

Albrecht Durer is sometimes called the Leonardo of the Northern Renaissance. Multi-skilled, insatiably curious, given to making very detailed sketches from life. He took his first journey to Italy at the age of 24, and his work shows how he began to integrate Italian developments into his own work.

Venetian influence combined with a Northern European sensibility.

The Renaissance describes a moment – a period of about 120 years, where the cultural works present a kind of belief  and confidence in humanity – the possibility of harmony, perfection, order; nowhere is this better represented than in Raphael’s painting.

Following the death of Raphael at the beginning of the 16^th C, the confidence that his work characterised seemed to give way to a kind of anxiety, partly as a result of the developing social and religious instability that I discussed last week. Italian art went through a very different stylistic period, from about 1520 – 1580. The term Mannerism is often used to describe this development which directly succeeded that of the Renaissance and preceded the Baroque. The term is really pejorative – mannered suggests over-stylisation, trying too hard – certainly we see very elaborate distortion, imbalance, a lack of or a kind of twisted perspective, and a sort of anxiety. Many of those artists who worked in this way were in fact Raphael's students Jacopo da Pontormo being one of those – his compositions exhibit a disturbing psychological tension.  

Venetian Painting in the 16th Century, carrying on from its painterly character in the 15^th C saw the increasing use of canvas rather than wood, which encouraged looser brushstroked. Painters experimented with textural differences by applying thick and think applications of paint. They also developed new compositional approaches, like asymmetry, constructions on the diagonal, and they developed new subjects like landscape and the female nude.

Tintoretto Last Supper; While Leonardo depicted the scene from a frontal perspective, with the figures seated at a table placed parallel to the picture plane, this composition departs radically from that, with the centre of the scene occupied not by the apostles but instead by secondary characters, such as a woman carrying a dish and the servants taking the dishes from the table. The table at which the apostles sit recedes into space on a steep diagonal. The focus is on light and motion. There are characteristics that are typical of Mannerism -  complex and radically asymmetrical composition. The movement and emphasis on the everday and vernacular —the setting is similar to a Venetian inn—points the way to the Baroque which is to follow.

Mannerism emerged at a few other points in Europe – a school developed at Fontainbleu in France and in Prague. Rare English example . . . .

Northern Europe at this time. Hans Holbein he really didn’t belong neatly to any style or tradition. He drew and painted with a precision and attention to detail that we recognise from the work of Van Eyck and van der Weyden. His portraits were renowned in their time for their likeness; there is also a kind of penetration into the character – as a result he was commissioned to paint painted many of the famous figures of the day. He was never content with outward appearance, he embedded layers of symbolism, allusion, and paradox in his art "