ARTH218

 

 


Introduction to the course

 

 

Defining High Renaissance and Mannerism

 

  • Traditionally the term Renaissance is used to refer to that era in Europe, beginning approximately in the 14th century, in which a new style in painting, sculpture and architecture was forged in succession to that of Gothic.

 

  • In a broader cultural sense, the Renaissance refers to the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern age.

 

  • Literally the French word Renaissance means “rebirth”, so this period is basically characterized by an increasing concern on the recovery of classical antiquity, and an increasing sense of individualism and worldliness.

 

  • Art historians have distinguished several sub-categories within the historical period called the Renaissance:

 

      • Italian Renaissance                
                • Pre/ProtoRenaissance (13th-14th cent.)
                • Early Renaissance (15th century)
                • High Renaissance (early 16th century)
                • Mannerism (mid 16th century)

 

      • Northern Renaissance
                • 15th century- Late Middle Ages
                • 16th century- Renaissance properly

 

§         Giorgio Vasari, a 16th century painter, was the first to write a history of the art that took place in his time. He was aware of the great development of art in his age, and he understood art and stylistic development as an organic evolution – a progression from infancy, to youth, and finally to maturity.

 

§         In his Lives of the most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects published in 1550, Vasari identified the infancy of the art of his time with the figures of Cimabue and his pupil Giotto di Bondone.

 

§         This first phase, primi lumi, was followed by the period of growth and improvement (augumento) that we today label the Early Renaissance

 

§         Finally this period of youth is succeeded by a third epoch, which extended to Vasari’s own time, the time of perfection ( perfezione), attained with Michelangelo.

 

§         High Renaissance was a brief phenomenon confined essentially to Italy in about the first two decades of the 16th century and supremely embodied in some of the work of that time by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. It is generally accepted that artists of the High Renaissance developed more monumental forms and created unified and harmonious compositions that reject the decorative details of 15th-century art.

 

§         Mannerism is the name given to the stylistic phase in the art of Europe between the High Renaissance and the Baroque, covering the period from c. 1510–20 to 1600, and also called late Renaissance. Although 16th-century artists took the formal vocabulary of the High Renaissance as their point of departure, they used it in ways that were diametrically opposed to the harmonious ideal it originally served.