Painting

To appreciate the differences between early Renaissance painting, which largely means northern Italian art, and the medieval (or Gothic) painting that it eventually superseded, we must realize that medieval paintings had a relatively flat picture plane with stiff, two-dimensional figures. Although individual objects could be rendered realistically, the overall picture usually resembled the iconic style of Byzantine paintings. Often there was no background to the composition, only a gilt surface occasionally decorated with punched or incised patterns. Giotto di Bondone’s (1267-1337) frescoes of the Lives of the Virgin and Christ painted between 1305 and 1308 for the Arena Chapel in Padua, with their well-proportioned figures and various lifelike gestures, are among the earliest representations of the new art form. Giotto, in fact, was designated by Vasari in his Lives as the founder of Renaissance painting, on the basis of the assumption that Giotto

3.1 Apparatus for translating three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional drawings. Woodcut by Albrecht Durer, published 1525. (Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library)

Had painted the frescoes in the upper church of San Francesco in Assisi. Although most scholars now believe that another artist executed those works, Vasari’s assessment of Giotto’s significance was not inappropriate. Frescoes, or mural paintings, were the first medium in which Renaissance artists excelled, followed closely by paintings on wood panels and illuminated manuscripts. The single greatest achievement of painting during the Renaissance was the understanding of perspective, which was used by artists in both southern and northern Europe by the mid-15th century. The other major achievement was a new understanding of how to render form and mass, or a “sculptural” feeling for figures in two-dimensional space.

Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise on painting, De pic-tura (1435), included the first published description of one-point perspective, or linear perspective. Alberti referred to the “centric point” (vanishing point) to describe the method used to create the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface. He and the architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) may have been working on this concept together in Florence. Because linear perspective can be used to situate human and mythological figures properly within pictorial space, it was one of the most important advances in Renaissance art. Alberti emphasized that the story (istoria) or narrative of a painting was its main purpose, and that story was expressed through figures. He assumed that artists knew anatomy, which was crucial for the composition: “Before dressing a man, we must first draw him nude, then we enfold him in draperies. So in painting the nude we place first his bones and muscles which we then cover with flesh so that it is not difficult to understand where each muscle is beneath” (Alberti 1966, p. 73). A new sense of precision entered artistic vocabulary with Alberti’s text, as compositions were based on measurements and accurate proportions in figures and buildings. Alberti encouraged painters to introduce a sense of movement by using the contrapposto pose found in ancient statues, in which one foot is placed slightly forward, balanced by a turn of the head or an extended arm. This particular pose became important not only for Renaissance painting, but also for sculpture. By the 1520s in Italy, many artists were creating works featuring twisted and exaggerated figures, with

Art and Visual Culture

3.2 Linear perspective illustrated in a woodcut of the interior of a building. Hieronymus Rodler, Perspectiva, Frankfurt, 1546. (Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s Inc., © 2003)

Dramatic lighting or texture highlighting these figures in the style known as Mannerism that influenced other Renaissance art of the latter 16th century. By the turn of the century, Mannerism had evolved into the grand exuberance of baroque.