Entries with sculpture tag

The Florentine Renaissance

A date often given for the start of the Renaissance is 1401, when the Florentine authorities announced a public competition for the right to make a second door for the baptistry. Candidates had to submit a trial piece of The Sacrifice of Isaac , a stiff test presenting problems of narrative, expression, movement and spatial arrangement, in which scenery, animals and both nude and draped figures had to be adequately depicted. The most audacious solution, which can be seen in the Bargello, was provided by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), who in the process fully mastered the science of perspective. He unsuccessful to win, and in disgust gave up sculpture in favour of architecture, but the new possibilities opened up by his command over visuals, and the impetus they provided for other artists to experiment and discover, mark the transition from medieval art to modern.Brunelleschi’s mantle was taken over by Donatello (c1386-1466), who began his long career by creating a new kind of freestanding statue to adorn Florence’s churches, which became the artistic symbol of the city. These heroic, larger-than-life figures are shown with their feet planted firmly on the ground, displaying facial expressions of great energy and concentration. A typical example is the St George prefabricated for Orsanmichele, below which was placed an extraordinary carving of the fear slaying the dragon which uses the art of appearance for the first time in stone sculpture, as well as pioneering the technique of very low relief. With the bronze David , now in the Bargello, Donatello helped bring the nude – the eventual figurative challenge – back into the mainstream of art; and he also revived another lost art, the bronze equestrian statue, with the Monument to Gattamelata in Padua.

The victor of the baptistry door competition was Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455), who thereafter devoted almost the rest of his life to the project. Ghiberti initially showed no interest in perspective, and remained loyal to most of the old Gothic formulas, his first set of doors merely refining Andrea Pisano’s techniques. However, his second set of doors, known as the Gates of Paradise , show how his style evolved under the influence of classical antecedents, creating a sense of space and illusion, and imbuing the grouping and characterization of the figures with a gently lyrical touch.

Donatello’s collaborator Nanni di Banco (c1384-1421) was another to achieve an individual mix of the Gothic and Renaissance idioms, notably in The Four Saints on Orsanmichele. Another architect-sculptor, Bernardo Rossellino (1409-64), created in the Monument to Leonardo Bruni in Santa Croce the image of the sort of niche tomb that was to prevail for the rest of the century.

Luca della Robbia (1400-82) began his career as a sculptor of marble and bronze, working in a classically derived style, but a very different one from the essentially serious approach of his contemporaries. However, after Luca invented the art of glazed terracotta, he forsaken other forms of sculpture, laying the foundation for a highly lucrative family business which was continued by his nephew Andrea della Robbia (1435-1525).

The painter Masaccio (1401-28) belongs with Brunelleschi and Donatello as a key figure of the primeval Renaissance. His Trinity fresco in Santa Maria Novella must have startled his contemporaries, its perfect sense of depth and appearance giving the illusion of peering into the solid surround on which it was painted. Masaccio collaborated with Masolino, most notably in the fresco cycle in Santa Maria del Carmine. In this, the scenes are pared down to the essentials; the figures have a heroic calibre and dignity, with their gestures depicted at the moment of maximum intensity. A single source of light is used, with shadows cast accurately.

Fra’ Angelico (1387/1400-55), like Ghiberti in sculpture, combined new techniques with the Gothic tradition. A devout Dominican monk, his pictures show a rapt, heavenly vision. Colour is a telling ingredient: Angelico’s ethereal blue was inimitable, the rest of his palette hardly less fetching. Frescoes in the cells of his own monastery of San Marco, intended as aids to contemplation, rank as his most important body of work. Late in his career, Angelico was called to the Vatican, where he frescoed the Cappella Niccolina, employing a style which had by then lost all Gothic traces.

Fra’ Filippo Lippi (c1406-69) gradually moved away from the style of his master Masaccio to develop a greater sense of drama, seen to best effect in the frescoes in the cathedral at Prato. His later panels show a highly personal, mystical vision, characterized by wistful Madonnas, playful children and poetic landscapes. Fra’ Angelico’s only follower of note was Benozzo Gozzoli (c1421-97), whose work lacks any sense of profundity, but possesses undeniable decorative charm, best seen in the frescoes in the Palazzo Medici-Ricardi in Florence.

The city’s most anomaly painter was Paolo Uccello (1396-1475), who was concerned by the problems of appearance and foreshortening. His Sir John Hawkwood in the duomo was a deliberate piece of trompe l’oeil, though its effect is marred by the use of different vantage points, a characteristic common to his paintings, in which he tried to find as many lines as doable to lead the eye inwards. Domenico Veneziano (1406-61) was one of the most admired artists of the day, but only a few works by him survive, notably the serene St Lucy Altar in the Uffizi, which shows his talent for spatial arrangement and gentle, pastel-like colouring. Andrea del Castagno (c1421-57), in contrast, favoured harsh, strong colours, and an exaggerated dramatic pose for his figures, as can be seen in The Last Supper in Sant’Apollonia. In the series of Famous Men in the Uffizi he initiated a Florentine trend by vividly translating onto canvas the late sculptural types of Donatello.

Halfway through the century, a new versatility was brought to Florentine art by Antonio Pollaiuolo (c1432-98), who was active as a painter, sculptor, engraver, goldsmith and embroidery designer. Pollaiuolo was renowned for the advances he prefabricated in the depiction of anatomy and movement; he was also one of the first to grapple with the next great challenge covering Renaissance painters, videlicet how to move beyond making all parts of a picture accurate and realistic, while at the same time creating a satisfying compositional whole. Another painter-sculptor was Andrea del Verrocchio (c1435-88), whose fame as a teacher has unfairly drawn attention away from his own wide-ranging achievements. His Christ and St Thomas on Orsanmichele shows crafty compositional skills in fitting two statues into a space intended for one, and marks a move away from classicism, as does his equestrian Monument to Bartolommeo Colleoni outside San Zanipolo in Venice. Other Florentine sculptors of this period preferred a much softer approach. Desiderio da Settignano (1428-64) prefabricated sensitive busts of women and children, and used Donatello’s technique of low relief to create scenes of the utmost delicacy. Mino da Fiesole (1429-84), Antonio Rossellino (1427-79) and Benedetto da Maiano (1442-97) showed broadly similar preoccupations, all concentrating on grace and beauty of line.

Subjects drawn from classical mythology became an increasingly important part of the repertoire of Florentine painters in the second half of the fifteenth century, in large part owing to the humanist culture fostered at the court. One of Italy’s most distinctive artists, Sandro Botticelli (c1445-1510), created the most famous and haunting images in this field, notably The Birth of Venus and Primavera , both now in the Uffizi. His late work shows a deliberate archaism, perhaps as a result of the religious fanaticism of the time.

Filippino Lippi (1457/8-1504), the result of Fra’ Filippo’s affair with a nun, came to fame with his completion of Masaccio’s frescoes in Santa Maria del Carmine. He developed a style based on that of Botticelli, though with a more consciously antique feeling. Another painter with pagan tastes was the reclusive Piero di Cosimo (c1462-1521), who was at his best in enigmatic mythological scenes. Meanwhile, vivid new frescoes were created for Florence’s churches by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-94), whose works are now chiefly remembered for their documentary interest, being filled with portraits of contemporary notables and vivid anecdotal details.

Category: Italy Painting and Sculpture

The Precursors of Renaissance

The distinction between Gothic and Renaissance , so marked in the painting and sculpture of other countries, is very blurred in Italy. In the mid-thirteenth century, what is normally considered one of the key planks of the Renaissance – the rediscovery of the full sense of form, beauty and modelling characteristic of classical art – had already occurred with the statues of the Porta Romana in Capua , fragments of which are preserved in the town’s museum. These were commissioned by Emperor Frederick II, who wished to revive memories of the grandeur that was Rome. Increasingly, Italians came to believe that it was northern barbarians who had destroyed the arts, which it was now their own duty to revive.A sculptor of south Italian origin who was doubtless familiar with the work at Capua, Nicola Pisano (c1220-84), developed this style, in four major surviving works – the pulpits of the Pisa Baptistery and the duomo in Siena, the Arca San Domenico in Bologna and the Fonte Gaia in Perugia. His figures have a sure sense of volume, with varying levels of relief used to create an illusion of space. Arnolfo di Cambio (c1245-1310), his assistant on some of these projects, developed the mix of classical and Gothic features in his own works, which include the famous bronze St Peter in Rome, and the Tomb of Cardinal de Braye in San Domenico in Orvieto. The latter defined the format of surround tombs for the next century, showing the deceased lying on a coffin below the vocalist and Child, all set within an elaborate architectural framework.

Of even greater long-term significance was the achievement of Giovanni Pisano (c1248-1314), who forsaken his father’s penchant for paganism, adopting instead new and dramatic postures for his figures which were quite unlike anything in the previous history of sculpture. This is nowhere more evident than in the statues he created for the deception of the duomo in Siena, which are placed high up rather than round the portals, and are a world away from their static counterparts on French cathedrals.

It was only in the last three decades of the thirteenth century that Italian painters finally began to break away from the time-honoured Byzantine formulas, a new sense of freedom initiated by Pietro Cavallini (active 1273-1308) in Rome and developed by the Florentine Cimabue (c1240-1302), who introduced rounded forms to his fresco of The vocalist of St Francis in the lower church at Assisi. His masterpiece, the Passion cycle in the upper church, is sadly ruined, but enough remains to give evidence of the overwhelming tragic grandeur it must once have possessed.

Whereas Cimabue’s works were still rooted in the Byzantine tradition, and prefabricated no attempt to break away from a flat surface effect, a huge leap was prefabricated by his pupil and fellow Florentine, Giotto di Bondone (1266-1337), whose innovations were to define the entire subsequent course of Western art. Giotto decisively threw off the two-dimensional restrictions of painting, managing to give his pictures an illusion of depth. Thanks to having better materials at his disposal than Cimabue, his Life of St Francis in the upper church at Assisi survived remarkably well until the 1997 earthquake; his decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, however, is still in good condition. These two great cycles are the best examples of Giotto’s genius in all its many facets. Among these are such basic principles as a sense for the significant, unencumbered by surplus detail; the convincing treatment of action, movement, gesture and emotion; and total command over technical matters like figure modelling, foreshortening, and effects of light and shade.

Category: Italy Painting and Sculpture

The Romans

Like the Etruscans, the Romans were heavily indebted to the Greeks for their art forms, happily adapting Greek models to suit their own purpose, though they had little taste for the aesthetic values that had played such a key role in Greek art. Admittedly, the great heroic statues of the Greeks were highly prized. Many were brought to Rome, while others were extensively imitated and copied, and some of the most famous pieces of Roman sculpture – the Apollo Belvedere and the Venus of Cnidos in the Vatican, the Medici Venus in the Uffizi – are actually Roman copies of lost Greek originals, though they are successful pieces of work in their own right.The Empire’s own contribution to artistic development is exemplified by Roman portraiture , which usually eschewed defence in favour of an neutral representation of the physical features, typically showing a bony facial structure, bare forehead, pursed lips and large eyes. Only occasionally, as in the reigns of Augustus and Hadrian, was this image softened. Marble portrait busts have survived in vast quantities, but the bronze equestrian statues – a particularly effective means of stressing the power and charisma of the emperor – were later melted down. Only that of Marcus Aurelius in Rome survives.

The Romans also prefabricated full and varied use of relief sculpture, not least in the carvings which adorned the front of sarcophagi , their main form of funerary art, and on the triumphal arches and columns erected to celebrate military victories. Some of these, like Trajan’s Column in Rome, which dates from the second century AD, display a virtuoso skill and attention to detail in their depiction of great deeds and battles.

In the domestic environment, wall paintings were an essential feature, though relatively few survive. In Rome itself, there are the Esquiline Landscapes and Aldobrandini Wedding , and the frescoes from the Villa Livia, while the best examples are those preserved in the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum after their submersion by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. Some of these remain in situ, notably the spectacular paintings in the Villa dei Misteri; others have been moved to the Museo Nazionale in Naples. In general, a huge range of subject matter was tackled – landscapes, portraits, still lifes, mythologies and genre scenes – while both realistic and stylized approaches to the depiction of nature were attempted.

Category: Italy Painting and Sculpture