Chapter “Introduction”, section “Art of Italy”. General history of art. Volume III. Renaissance art. Author: E.I. Rotenberg; under the general editorship of Yu.D. Kolpinsky and E.I. Rotenberg (Moscow, State Publishing House "Art", 1962)
Italy made a contribution of exceptional importance to the history of artistic culture of the Renaissance. The very scale of the greatest flowering that marked the Italian Renaissance seems especially striking in contrast with the small territorial dimensions of those urban republics where the culture of this era was born and experienced its high rise. Art in these centuries took public life a situation unprecedented before. Artistic creation seemed to become an insatiable need of the people of the Renaissance era, an expression of their inexhaustible energy. In the advanced centers of Italy, a passion for art captured the widest strata of society - from the ruling circles to ordinary people. The construction of public buildings, the installation of monuments, and the decoration of the main buildings of the city were a matter of national importance and the subject of attention of senior officials. The appearance of outstanding works of art turned into a major social event. The universal admiration for outstanding masters can be evidenced by the fact that the greatest geniuses of the era - Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo - received the name divino - divine from their contemporaries.
In terms of its productivity, the Renaissance, which spanned about three centuries in Italy, is quite comparable to the entire millennium during which the art of the Middle Ages developed. The very physical scale of everything that was created by the masters of the Italian Renaissance evokes amazement - majestic municipal buildings and huge cathedrals, magnificent patrician palaces and villas, works of sculpture in all its forms, countless monuments of painting - fresco cycles, monumental altar compositions and easel paintings . Drawing and engraving, handwritten miniatures and newly emerging printed graphics, decorative and applied arts in all its forms - there was, in essence, not a single area of artistic life that was not experiencing a rapid rise. But perhaps even more striking is the unusually high artistic level of the art of the Italian Renaissance, its truly global significance as one of the peaks of human culture.
The culture of the Renaissance was not the property of Italy alone: its sphere of distribution covered many of the countries of Europe. At the same time, in one country or another, individual stages of the evolution of Renaissance art found their primary expression. But in Italy, a new culture not only arose earlier than in other countries, the very path of its development was distinguished by an exceptional sequence of all stages - from the Proto-Renaissance to the late Renaissance, and in each of these stages Italian art gave high results, surpassing most cases of achievement of art schools in other countries (In art history, by tradition, the Italian names of those centuries in which the birth and development of Renaissance art in Italy fall (each of the named centuries represents a certain milestone in this evolution). Thus, the 13th century is called Ducento, the 14th - trecento, 15th - quattrocento, 16th - cinquecento.). Thanks to this, Renaissance artistic culture reached a special fullness of expression in Italy, appearing, so to speak, in its most integral and classically completed form.
The explanation for this fact is related to the specific conditions in which the historical development of Renaissance Italy took place. The social base that contributed to the emergence of a new culture was determined here extremely early. Already in the 12th-13th centuries, when Byzantium and the Arabs as a result of the Crusades were pushed away from traditional trade routes in the Mediterranean region, northern Italian cities, and above all Venice, Pisa and Genoa, seized into their hands all intermediary trade between Western Europe and East. During these same centuries, handicraft production experienced its rise in centers such as Mila, Florence, Siena and Bologna. The accumulated wealth was invested on a large scale in industry, trade, and banking. Political power in the cities was seized by the popolan estate, that is, artisans and merchants united in guilds. Relying on their growing economic and political power, they began to fight the local feudal lords, seeking the complete deprivation of their political rights. The strengthening of Italian cities allowed them to successfully repel the onslaught from other states, primarily the German emperors.
By this time, cities in other European countries had also embarked on the path of defending their communal rights from the claims of powerful feudal lords. However, the rich Italian cities differed in this respect from the urban centers on the other side of the Alps in one decisive feature. In exceptionally favorable conditions of political independence and freedom from feudal institutions, forms of a new, capitalist way of life arose in the cities of Italy. The earliest forms of capitalist production were most clearly manifested in the cloth industry of Italian cities, primarily Florence, where forms of dispersed and centralized manufacture were already in use, and the so-called senior guilds, which were unions of entrepreneurs, established a system of brutal exploitation of wage workers. Evidence of how far Italy was ahead of other countries on the path of economic and social development can be seen in the fact that already in the 14th century. Italy knew not only anti-feudal movements of peasants that unfolded in certain regions of the country (for example, the uprising of Fra Dolcino in 1307), or uprisings of the urban plebs (the movement led by Cola di Rienzi in Rome in 1347-1354), but also uprisings of oppressed workers against entrepreneurs in the most advanced industrial centers (the Ciompi revolt in Florence in 1374). In Italy, earlier than anywhere else, the formation of the early bourgeoisie began - that new social class that the Polanian circles represented. It is important to emphasize that this early bourgeoisie bore within itself signs of a fundamental difference from the medieval burghers. The essence of this difference is associated primarily with economic factors, since it was in Italy that early capitalist forms of production emerged. But no less important is the fact that in the advanced centers the Italian bourgeoisie of the 14th century. possessed full political power, extending it to land holdings adjacent to the cities. The burghers did not know such complete power in other European countries, whose political rights usually did not go beyond the limits of municipal privileges. It was the unity of economic and political power that gave the popolan class of Italy those special features that distinguished it both from the medieval burghers and from the bourgeoisie of the post-Renaissance era in the absolutist states of the 17th century.
The collapse of the feudal class system and the emergence of new social relations entailed fundamental shifts in worldview and culture. The revolutionary nature of the social revolution that constituted the essence of the Renaissance manifested itself in the advanced urban republics of Italy with exceptional brightness.
In social and ideological terms, the Renaissance in Italy was a complex and contradictory process of the destruction of the old and the formation of the new, when reactionary and progressive elements were in a state of intense struggle, and legal institutions, social order, customs, as well as the ideological foundations themselves, have not yet acquired the inviolability sanctified by time and state-church authority. Therefore, such qualities of people of that time as personal energy and initiative, courage and perseverance in achieving their goals found extremely favorable soil in Italy and could be revealed here to the greatest extent. It is not for nothing that it was in Italy that the very type of Renaissance man developed in its greatest brightness and completeness.
The fact that Italy provided a unique example of a long-term and unusually fruitful evolution of Renaissance art in all its stages is primarily due to the fact that the real influence of progressive social circles in the economic and political sphere remained here until the first decades of the 16th century. This influence was also effective during the period when in many centers of the country the transition from the communal system to the so-called tyrannies began (from the 14th century). The strengthening of centralized power by transferring it into the hands of one ruler (who came from feudal or the richest merchant families) was a consequence of the intensification of the class struggle between the ruling bourgeois circles and the mass of the urban lower classes. But the economic and social structure Italian cities were still largely based on previous conquests, and it was not without reason that the abuse of power on the part of those rulers who tried to establish a regime of open personal dictatorship was followed by active protests by broad sections of the urban population, often leading to the expulsion of tyrants. These or those changes in the forms of political power that occurred during the period under review could not destroy the very spirit of free cities, which in the advanced centers of Italy was preserved until the tragic finale of the Renaissance.
This situation distinguished Renaissance Italy from other European countries, where new social forces replaced the old legal order later and the chronological length of the Renaissance itself was therefore correspondingly shorter. And since the new social class was not able to take such strong positions in these countries as in Italy, the Renaissance revolution was expressed in them in less decisive forms and the shifts in artistic culture themselves did not have such a pronounced revolutionary character.
However, going ahead of other countries along the path of social and cultural progress, Italy found itself behind them in another important historical issue: the political unity of the country, its transformation into a strong and centralized state was impossible for it. Herein lay the roots of Italy's historical tragedy. Since the time when the large monarchies neighboring it, and above all France, as well as the Holy Roman Empire, which included the German states and Spain, became powerful powers, Italy, divided into many warring regions, found itself defenseless against the onslaught of foreign armies . The campaign to Italy undertaken by the French in 1494 ushered in a period of wars of conquest that ended in the mid-16th century. the seizure by the Spaniards of almost the entire territory of the country and the loss of its independence for several centuries. Calls for the unification of Italy from the best minds of the country and individual practical attempts in this direction could not overcome the traditional separatism of the Italian states.
The roots of this separatism should be sought not only in the selfish policies of individual rulers, especially the popes, these worst enemies of the unity of Italy, but above all in the very basis of the economic and social system established during the Renaissance in the advanced regions and centers of the country. The spread of a new economic and social structure within the framework of a single all-Italian state turned out to be impracticable at that time, not only because the forms of the communal system of urban republics could not be transferred to the management of the entire country, but also because of economic factors: the creation of a unified economic system on an entire scale. It was impossible for Italy at the level of productive forces at that time. The widespread development of the early bourgeoisie, which had full political rights, characteristic of Italy, could only occur within the confines of small urban republics. In other words, the fragmentation of the country was one of the inevitable prerequisites for the flourishing of such a powerful Renaissance culture as the culture of Italy, for such a flourishing was possible only in the conditions of separate independent city-states. As the course of historical events has shown, in centralized monarchies Renaissance art did not acquire such a pronounced revolutionary character as in Italy. This conclusion is confirmed by the fact that if, politically, Italy over time became dependent on such strong absolutist powers as France and Spain, then in cultural and artistic terms - even during the period when Italy lost its independence - the dependence was the opposite. .
Thus, in the very preconditions of the greatest rise of the culture of the Italian Renaissance, lay the reasons for the collapse that awaited it. This, of course, does not mean at all that calls for the unification of the country, which especially intensified during the period of severe political crisis in Italy in the first decades of the 16th century, were not of a progressive nature. These calls not only corresponded to the aspirations of broad sections of the population, whose social gains and independence were under threat, they were also a reflection of the real process of increasing cultural consolidation of various regions of Italy. Disunited at the dawn of the Renaissance due to the unevenness of their cultural development, many regions of the country by the 16th century were already connected by deep spiritual unity. What remained impossible in the state-political sphere was accomplished in the ideological and artistic sphere. Republican Florence and papal Rome were warring states, but the greatest Florentine masters worked in both Florence and Rome, and the artistic content of their Roman works was at the level of the most progressive ideals of the freedom-loving Florentine Republic.
The exceptionally fruitful development of Renaissance art in Italy was facilitated not only by social, but also by historical and artistic factors. Italian Renaissance art owes its origin not to any one, but to several sources. In the period preceding the Renaissance, Italy was a meeting point for several medieval cultures. Unlike other countries, both main lines of medieval art in Europe - Byzantine and Romano-Gothic, complicated in certain areas of Italy by the influence of the art of the East - found equally significant expression here. Both lines contributed their share to the development of Renaissance art. From Byzantine painting, the Italian Proto-Renaissance adopted an ideally beautiful structure of images and forms of monumental painting cycles; The Gothic figurative system contributed to the penetration of emotional excitement and a more specific perception of reality into the art of the 14th century. But even more important was the fact that Italy was the custodian of the artistic heritage of the ancient world. In one form or another, the ancient tradition found its refraction already in medieval Italian art, for example, in the sculpture of the Hohenstaufen era, but only in the Renaissance, starting from the 15th century, did ancient art open to the eyes of artists in its true light as an aesthetically perfect expression of the laws of reality itself . The combination of these factors created in Italy the most favorable soil for the emergence and rise of Renaissance art.
One of the indicators of the highest level of development of Italian Renaissance art was its characteristic broad development of scientific and theoretical thought. The early appearance of theoretical works in Italy was in itself evidence of the important fact that representatives of advanced Italian art realized the essence of the revolution that had taken place in culture. This awareness of creative activity greatly stimulated artistic progress, for it allowed Italian masters to move forward not by groping, but by purposefully setting and solving certain problems.
The interest of artists in scientific problems at that time was all the more natural because in their objective knowledge of the world they relied not only on its emotional perception, but also on a rational understanding of the underlying laws. The fusion of scientific and artistic knowledge characteristic of the Renaissance was the reason that many of the artists were at the same time outstanding scientists. This feature is expressed in the most vivid form in the personality of Leonardo da Vinci, but to one degree or another it was characteristic of many figures of Italian artistic culture.
Theoretical thought in Renaissance Italy developed in two main directions. On the one hand, this is the problem of the aesthetic ideal, in solving which the artists relied on the ideas of Italian humanists about the high purpose of man, about ethical standards, about the place that he occupies in nature and society. On the other hand, these are practical issues of realizing this artistic ideal through the means of new, Renaissance art. The knowledge of the Renaissance masters in the field of anatomy, the theory of perspective and the doctrine of proportions, which was the result of scientific comprehension of the world, contributed to the development of those means of visual language with the help of which these masters were able to objectively reflect reality in art. Theoretical works devoted to various types of art examined a wide variety of issues of artistic practice. Suffice it to cite as examples the development of questions of mathematical perspective and its application in painting, carried out by Brunelleschi, Alberti and Piero della Francesca, a comprehensive body of artistic knowledge and theoretical conclusions, which consists of countless notes by Leonardo da Vinci, writings and statements on sculpture by Ghiberti, Michelangelo and Cellini, architectural treatises by Alberti, Averlino, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Palladio, Vignola. Finally, in the person of Giorgio Vasari, the culture of the Italian Renaissance put forward the first art historian who, in his biographies of Italian artists, attempted to comprehend the art of his era in historical terms. The content and breadth of coverage of these works is confirmed by the fact that the ideas and conclusions of Italian theorists retained their practical significance for many centuries after their appearance.
This applies even more to the creative achievements masters of the Italian Renaissance, who made a major contribution to all types of plastic arts, often predetermining the paths of their development in subsequent eras.
In the architecture of Renaissance Italy, the main types of public and residential buildings used since then in European architecture were created and those means of architectural language were developed that became the basis of architectural thinking for a long time. historical period. The dominance of the secular principle in Italian architecture was expressed not only in the predominance of public and private buildings for secular purposes, but also in the fact that in the very figurative content of religious buildings, spiritualistic elements were eliminated - they gave way to new, humanistic ideals. In secular architecture, the leading place was occupied by the type of residential city house-palace (palazzo) - initially the home of representatives of wealthy merchant or business families, and in the 16th century. - residence of a nobleman or ruler of the state. Acquiring over time the features of a building not only private, but also public, the Renaissance palazzo also served as a prototype for public buildings in subsequent centuries. In Italian church architecture, special attention was paid to the image of a centric domed structure. This image corresponded to the prevailing idea of a perfect architectural form during the Renaissance, which expressed the idea of a Renaissance personality in harmonious balance with the surrounding world. The most mature solutions to this problem were given by Bramante and Michelangelo in their projects for the Cathedral of St. Peter's in Rome.
As for the language of architecture itself, the decisive factor here was the revival and development on a new basis of the ancient order system. For the architects of Renaissance Italy, the order was an architectural system designed to visually express the tectonic structure of the building. The proportionality inherent in the order to man was considered as one of the foundations of the humanistic ideological content of the architectural image. Italian architects expanded the compositional capabilities of the order in comparison with the ancient masters, managing to find an organic combination with a wall, arch and vault. They imagine the entire volume of the building as being permeated by an order structure, which achieves a deep figurative unity of the structure with its surrounding natural environment, since the classical orders themselves reflect certain natural patterns.
In urban planning, the architects of Renaissance Italy faced great difficulties, especially in the early period, since most cities had dense capital buildings already in the Middle Ages. However, advanced theorists and practitioners of early Renaissance architecture set themselves major urban planning problems, viewing them as pressing tasks of tomorrow. If their bold city-planning plans were not fully feasible at that time and therefore remained the property of architectural treatises, then certain important tasks, in particular the problem of creating a city center - developing principles for developing the main square of the city - were found in the 16th century. its brilliant solution, for example, in Piazza San Marco in Venice and in the Capitoline Square in Rome.
In the fine arts, Renaissance Italy provided the most striking example of the self-determination of individual types of art, which previously, throughout the Middle Ages, were subordinately dependent on architecture, but have now acquired complete figurative independence. In ideological terms, this process meant the liberation of sculpture and painting from the religious-spiritualistic dogmas of the Middle Ages that fettered them and a turn to images saturated with new, humanistic content. In parallel with this, the emergence and formation of new types and genres of fine art took place, in which new ideological content was expressed. Sculpture, for example, after a thousand-year hiatus, finally regained the basis of its figurative expressiveness, turning to the free-standing statue and group. The scope of figurative coverage of sculpture has also expanded. Along with traditional images associated with the Christian cult and ancient mythology, which are reflected general ideas about a person, its object also turned out to be a specific human individuality, which was manifested in the creation of monumental monuments to rulers and condottieres, as well as in the widespread dissemination of sculptural portraits in the form of a portrait bust. A type of sculpture, such as relief, which was so developed in the Middle Ages, is also undergoing a radical transformation, the figurative possibilities of which, thanks to the use of techniques of pictorial-perspective depiction of space, are expanded due to a more complete comprehensive display of the living environment surrounding a person.
As for painting, here, along with the unprecedented flowering of the monumental fresco composition, it is necessary to especially emphasize the fact of the emergence of easel painting, which marked the beginning of a new stage in the evolution of fine art. Among the painting genres, along with compositions on biblical and mythological themes, which occupied a dominant position in Renaissance painting in Italy, one should highlight the portrait, which experienced its first flowering in this era. The first important steps were also taken in such new genres as history painting in the proper sense of the word and landscape.
Having played a decisive role in the process of emancipation of certain types of fine art, the Italian Renaissance at the same time preserved and developed one of the most valuable qualities of medieval artistic culture - the principle of synthesis of various types of art, their unification into a common figurative ensemble. This was facilitated by the heightened sense of artistic organization inherent in Italian masters, which is manifested in them both in the general design of any complex architectural and artistic complex, and in every detail included in this complex separate work. At the same time, in contrast to the medieval understanding of synthesis, where sculpture and painting are subordinate to architecture, the principles of Renaissance synthesis are based on the peculiar equality of each type of art, due to which the specific qualities of sculpture and painting within the framework of the general artistic ensemble acquire increased efficiency of aesthetic impact. Here it is important to emphasize that signs of participation in a large figurative system are carried not only by works that are directly included in any artistic complex for their intended purpose, but also by individual independent monuments of sculpture and painting. Whether it is Michelangelo's colossal David or Raphael's miniature Madonna Connestabile, each of these works potentially contains qualities that allow it to be considered as a possible part of some general artistic ensemble.
This specifically Italian monumental-synthetic warehouse of Renaissance art was facilitated by the very nature of the artistic images of sculpture and painting. In Italy, unlike other European countries, the aesthetic ideal of the Renaissance man developed very early, going back to the humanist teaching about uomo universale, about the perfect man, in whom physical beauty and strength of spirit are harmoniously combined. The leading feature of this image is the concept of virtu (valor), which has a very broad meaning and expresses the active principle in a person, the purposefulness of his will, the ability to implement his lofty plans in spite of all obstacles. This specific quality of the Renaissance figurative ideal is not expressed by all Italian artists in such a way. open form, as, for example, in Masaccio, Andrea del Castagno, Mantegna and Michelangelo - masters whose work is dominated by images of a heroic nature. But it is always present in images of a harmonious nature, for example in Raphael and Giorgione, for the harmony of Renaissance images is far from relaxed peace - behind it one can always feel the internal activity of the hero and his awareness of his moral strength.
Over the course of the 15th and 16th centuries, this aesthetic ideal did not remain unchanged: depending on the individual stages of the evolution of Renaissance art, its various aspects were outlined. In the images of the early Renaissance, for example, the features of unshakable internal integrity are more clearly expressed. The spiritual world of the heroes of the High Renaissance is more complex and richer, providing the most striking example of the harmonious worldview characteristic of the art of this period. In subsequent decades, with the growth of insoluble social contradictions, internal tension intensified in the images of Italian masters, and a feeling of dissonance and tragic conflict appeared. But throughout the Renaissance era, Italian sculptors and painters remained committed to a collective image, to a generalized artistic language. It was precisely thanks to the desire for the most general expression of artistic ideals that Italian masters were able, to a greater extent than masters from other countries, to create images of such a broad sound. This is the root of the peculiar universality of their figurative language, which turned out to be a kind of norm and example of Renaissance art in general.
The enormous role for Italian art of deeply developed humanistic ideas was already manifested in the unconditionally dominant position that the human image found in it - one of the indicators of this was the typical Italian admiration for the beautiful human body, which was considered by humanists and artists as the receptacle of a beautiful soul. The everyday and natural environment surrounding humans in most cases did not become the object of the same close attention for Italian masters. This pronounced anthropocentrism, the ability to reveal one’s ideas about the world primarily through the image of a person, informs the heroes of the masters Italian Renaissance such comprehensive depth of content. The path from the general to the individual, from the whole to the particular, is characteristic of Italians not only in monumental images, where their very ideal qualities are a necessary form of artistic generalization, but also in such a genre as portraiture. And in his portrait works, the Italian painter proceeds from a certain type of human personality, in relation to which he perceives each specific model. In accordance with this, in the Italian Renaissance portrait, in contrast to portrait images in the art of other countries, the typifying principle prevails over the individualizing tendencies.
But the dominance of a certain ideal in Italian art did not at all mean leveling and excessive uniformity of artistic solutions. The unity of ideological and figurative premises not only did not exclude the diversity of creative talents of each of the huge number of masters working in this era, but, on the contrary, highlighted their individual characteristics even more clearly. Even within one, and moreover, the shortest phase of Renaissance art - those three decades in which the High Renaissance falls, we can easily discern differences in the perception of the human image among the greatest masters of this period. Thus, Leonardo's characters stand out for their deep spirituality and intellectual richness; Raphael's art is dominated by a sense of harmonic clarity; Michelangelo's titanic images provide the most vivid expression of the heroic effectiveness of man of this era. If we turn to Venetian painters, Giorgione’s images attract with their subtle lyricism, while Titian’s sensual fullness and variety of emotional movements are more pronounced. The same applies to the visual language of Italian painters: if among the Florentine-Roman masters linear-plastic means of expression dominate, then among the Venetians the coloristic principle is of decisive importance.
Certain aspects of Renaissance figurative perception received different refractions in the art of the Italian Renaissance, depending on the various Stages of its evolution and on the traditions that developed in individual territorial art schools. Since the economic and cultural development of the Italian states was not uniform, their contribution to the art of the Renaissance was correspondingly different throughout its individual periods. Of the many artistic centers of the country, three should be singled out - Florence, Rome and Venice, the art of which, in a certain historical sequence, represented the main line of the Italian Renaissance for three centuries.
The historical role of Florence in shaping the culture of the Renaissance is especially significant. Florence was at the forefront of new art from the time of the Proto-Renaissance until High Renaissance. The capital of Tuscany turned out to be the focus of the economic, political and cultural life of Italy from the 13th to the beginning of the 16th century, and the events of its history, having lost their purely local character, acquired pan-Italian significance. The same applies entirely to Florentine art of these centuries. Florence was the birthplace or place of creative activity of many of the greatest masters from Giotto to Michelangelo.
From the end of the 15th - beginning of the 16th century. Rome, along with Florence, is emerging as the leading center of the country's artistic life. Using its special position as the capital of the Catholic world, Rome becomes one of the strongest states in Italy, claiming a leading role among them. Accordingly, the artistic policy of the Roman popes is developing, who, in order to strengthen the authority of the Roman pontificate, attract the largest architects, sculptors and painters to their court. The rise of Rome as the country's main artistic center coincided with the beginning of the High Renaissance; Rome retained its leading position during the first three decades of the 16th century. The best works of Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo and many other masters working in Rome created during these years marked the zenith of the Renaissance. But with the loss of political independence by the Italian states, during the crisis of Renaissance culture, papal Rome turned into a stronghold of ideological reaction, taking the form of counter-reformation. Since the 40s, when the Counter-Reformation opened a broad attack on the gains of Renaissance culture, the third largest artistic center, Venice, has been the keeper and continuer of progressive Renaissance ideals.
Venice was the last of the strong Italian republics to defend its independence and retain a considerable share of its enormous wealth. Remaining until the end of the 16th century. a major center of Renaissance culture, it became a stronghold of the hopes of enslaved Italy. It was Venice that was destined to provide the most fruitful revelation of the figurative qualities of the Italian late Renaissance. The work of Titian in the last period of his activity, as well as the largest representatives of the second generation of Venetian painters of the 16th century. - Veronese and Tintoretto were not only an expression of the realistic principles of Renaissance art at a new historical stage - it paved the way for those most historically promising elements of Renaissance realism, which were continued and developed in a new great artistic era - in the painting of the 17th century.
Already for its time, the art of the Italian Renaissance had an exceptionally wide pan-European significance. Ahead of the rest of Europe on the path of evolution of Renaissance art in chronological terms. Italy was also ahead of them in solving many of the most important artistic problems put forward by the era. Therefore, for all other national Renaissance cultures, turning to the work of Italian masters entailed a sharp leap in the formation of new, realistic art. Already in the 16th century, achieving a certain level of artistic maturity in European countries was impossible without a deep creative mastery of the achievements of Italian art. Such great painters as Dürer and Holbein in Germany, El Greco in Spain, such major architects as the Dutchman Cornelis Floris, the Spaniard Juan de Herrera, the Englishman Pnigo Jones, owe much to the study of the art of Renaissance Italy. The sphere of activity of the Italian architects and painters themselves was exceptional in its vastness, spreading throughout Europe from Spain to Ancient Rus'. But perhaps even more significant is the role of the Italian Renaissance as the foundation of the culture of modern times, as one of the highest embodiments of realistic art and the greatest school of artistic excellence.
There are people who argue: if a person is not interested in art, he has nothing to do in Italy. It sounds too categorical, but there is some truth in this: to be in Italy and pass by Italian art is simply to rob yourself. According to experts, two thirds of all works of fine art are concentrated in Italy. Think about it: in small Italy - two thirds, and in the whole wide world - the remaining third.
For us, Tuscany will forever remain the birthplace of the Renaissance, which gave the world dozens of brilliant names. Such titans as Giotto di Bondone, Michelangelo Buanarotti, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli were born here, and in Tuscan Florence the artists Raphael Santi, Perugino, Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio were formed. All over the world, following the Italians, Tuscan geniuses are called not by their surnames, but simply by their first names: Giotto, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo... Like, say, we - Alexander Sergeevich...
We would not look so closely at centuries distant from us if the Renaissance were only one of the stages in the development of art. No, the Renaissance of the 15th-16th centuries meant a revolutionary turn in the way of life: it was the emergence of humanity from the Middle Ages with its feudal relations, a turn from the dictates of the system to an awareness of the value of the individual, its freedom and beauty. The trading city-republics that flourished in Tuscany, whose population - merchants, artisans, bankers - were not involved in ossified medieval relations, decisively turned to the meanings that still form the basis of the Western European lifestyle. In contrast to church ones, secular cultural centers began to be created. It was then that printing began in Europe. In philosophy and public consciousness ideas of humanism formed and began to prevail.
When you walk through the museums and palaces of Florence, you drive between the Tuscan hills covered with vineyards and olive groves, you can’t help but think about why the Renaissance began here in Tuscany. What is the reason? Why did this particular land give birth to so many gigantic talents in a short time?
Is it the fact that this soil is so generous and favorable to people? Or is it that the simple, the earthly, coexist so closely with the beautiful and sublime? Or maybe the reason is the natural Tuscan temperament, artistry and sense of beauty? Or is everything simpler, and it’s all about wonderful wine and wonderful food that give a person lightness, optimism and tireless vitality? How can we explain the fact that the Tuscan rulers and rich people, first of all the Medici, knowing a lot about art, generation after generation paid for talent and innovation, but did not pay for vulgarity and routine?
Renaissance periods
As a rule, the beginning of the Renaissance is considered to be the first half of the 15th century, but sometimes researchers identify the so-called Proto-Renaissance of the 13th-14th centuries, associated with the activities of Giotto, di Combio, Cimabue, and the Pisano family, which anticipated and laid the foundations for the subsequent Renaissance.
The Early Renaissance dates back to 1420-1500. (XIV century) During this period, new approaches, techniques, and views on art were just growing through the centuries-old canon. This is the heyday of Gerlandaio, Verrocchio, Fra Filippo Lippi.
The High Renaissance dates back to 1500-1527. This period of art is associated with the appearance of the new Pope Julius II in the Vatican. It was on the initiative of Julius II that in those years many new palaces and temples were built in Rome, including the main Catholic church, St. Peter's Cathedral, and beautiful frescoes and sculptures were created. The legacy of the Middle Ages has been completely eliminated, the playful beauty of the Early Renaissance is replaced by mature calm and dignity. Architecture, sculpture and painting exist in harmony and complement each other. The grandiose orders of Julius II were carried out by Raphael, Michelangelo, Perugino, Leonardo. At the same time, Botticelli created his best works in Florence.
Many researchers end the Renaissance with the year 1527 - the year of the sack of Rome by armies of renegade mercenaries and the expulsion of the Medici from Florence under the influence of the socially accusatory sermons of Savonarola. But more often it is customary to single out the Late Renaissance from 1527 to the 1620s. Majority outstanding artists The Renaissance died out, mannerism was gaining strength in art, but Michelangelo, Correggio, Titian and Palladio, who continued to create, extended the Renaissance for several more decades.
Renaissance in the visual arts
Renaissance art replaced medieval art, in which the Byzantine icon-painting canon dominated. The overwhelming majority of the subjects of the images were religious, even in cases where the customer was not a church. The heroes are usually saints, very often the Virgin Mary surrounded by angels. The figures were idealized (saints are not supposed to have flesh and blood), the characters’ feelings were schematic: repentance, humility, religious tenderness, religious fear; the composition was flat and had no background; the high pathos of the plot was emphasized by a smooth golden background. Art called for submission to fate and had little in common with life - in fact, nothing else was required from art.
Rebelling against the canon, Renaissance artists increasingly began to turn to ancient Roman classical art and revive its ideals - hence, in fact, the term Renaissance itself. The themes increasingly became everyday things, the characters in the paintings experienced feelings familiar to everyone: anger, joy, despair, motherly love, melancholy, compassion. Even saints were depicted by artists as living people, not devoid of earthly emotions. The spaces of the paintings were filled with real Tuscan landscapes, green hills and olive groves, vineyards and forests. Increasingly, the subject of the image became the naked body.
In this section we have tried to provide some information about the most important figures of the Italian, mainly Florentine Renaissance, trying to focus on what distinguished each artist from the others and where in Tuscany his work can be found.
“Revival” – revival, return to life. At first glance, this is a rather strange definition for an era of cultural flourishing. However, this is not an exaggeration at all. Such dramatic changes in the art and thinking of European peoples had a banal and terrible reason - death.
Just three years in the middle of the 14th century became a sharp divider between eras. During this period of time, the population of Italian Florence was rapidly dying from the plague. The Black Death did not distinguish between ranks and merits; there was not a single person left who could not bear the brunt of the loss of loved ones. Centuries-old foundations were crumbling, faith in the future disappeared, there was no hope left in God... When the pandemic receded and the nightmare stopped, the city residents realized that it would no longer be possible to live in the old way.
The material world has changed greatly: even the poorest of the survivors had “extra” property, inherited, at the expense of the lost owners of houses, the housing problem was resolved by itself, the rested land turned out to be surprisingly generous, the fertile soil without much effort gave excellent harvests, the demand for which now, however, was quite low. Factory managers and wealthy landowners began to experience a shortage of workers, who were now simply in short supply, and commoners were no longer eager to take the first offer that came their way, having the opportunity to choose and bargain for more favorable conditions. This gave many Florentines free time for reflection, communication and creativity.
In addition to the word “renasci” (“to revive”), another word was just as often used in relation to the era: “reviviscere” (“to revive”). The Renaissance people believed that they were reviving the classics, and they themselves experienced a feeling of rebirth.
An even greater revolution took place in the minds of people, the worldview changed radically: greater independence appeared from the church, which showed itself helpless in the face of disaster, thoughts turned to material existence, to knowing oneself not as God’s creation, but as part of Mother Nature.
Florence lost about half of its population. However, this alone cannot explain the emergence of the Renaissance in this city. There was a combination of reasons of different significance, as well as a factor of chance. Some historians attribute the cultural flourishing to the Medici family, the most influential Florentine family of that time, which patronized artists and literally “grew” new geniuses with their monetary donations. It is precisely this policy of the rulers of Florence that still causes controversy among experts: either the city was very lucky in the Middle Ages to give birth to talented people, or special conditions contributed to the development of geniuses, whose talents were unlikely to ever manifest themselves in ordinary society.
Literature
The beginning of the Renaissance in Italian literature is very easy to trace - writers moved away from traditional techniques and began to write in their native language, which, it should be noted, in those days was very far from the literary canons. Before the beginning of the era, the core of the libraries consisted of Greek and Latin texts, as well as more modern works in French and Provençal. During the Renaissance, the formation of Italian literary language occurred largely due to translations of classical works. Even “combined” works appeared, the authors of which supplemented the ancient texts with their own reflections and imitations.
During the Renaissance, the combination of Christian subjects with physicality resulted in images of languid Madonnas. The angels looked like playful kids - “putti” - and like ancient cupids. The combination of sublime spirituality and sensuality was expressed in numerous “Venuses”.
The “voice” of the early Renaissance in Italy was the great Florentines Francesco Petrarca and Dante Alighieri. In Dante's Divine Comedy, there is a clear influence of the medieval worldview and a strong Christian motif. But Petrarch already represented the movement of Renaissance humanism, turning in his work to classical antiquity and modernity. In addition, Petrarch became the father of the Italian sonnet, the form and style of which was later adopted by many other poets, including the Englishman Shakespeare.
Petrarch's student, Giovanni Boccaccio, wrote the famous “Decameron” - an allegorical collection of one hundred short stories, including tragic, philosophical, and erotic ones. This work of Boccaccio, as well as others, became a rich source of inspiration for many English writers.
Niccolo Machiavelli was a philosopher and political thinker. His contribution to the literature of that time consists of works of reflection that are widely known in Western society. The treatise “The Prince” is the most discussed work of the political theorist, which became the basis for the theory of “Machiavellianism”.
Philosophy
Petrarch, who worked at the dawn of the Renaissance, also became the main founder of the philosophical doctrine of that era - humanism. This trend put the mind and will of man in first place. The theory did not contradict the foundations of Christianity, although it did not recognize the concept original sin, viewing humans as inherently virtuous beings.
Most of all, the new movement resonated with ancient philosophy, giving rise to a wave of interest in ancient texts. It was at this time that the fashion for searching for lost manuscripts appeared. The hunt was sponsored by wealthy townspeople, and each find was immediately translated into modern languages and published in book form. This approach not only filled libraries, but also significantly increased the availability of literature and the size of the reading population. The general level of education has increased noticeably.
Although philosophy was of great importance during the Renaissance, these years are often characterized as a period of stagnation. Thinkers refuted the spiritual theory of Christianity, but did not have a sufficient basis to continue to develop the research of their ancient ancestors. Usually the content of works preserved from that time boils down to admiration for classical theories and models.
There is also a rethinking of death. Now life becomes not a preparation for a “heavenly” existence, but a full-fledged path that ends with the death of the body. Renaissance philosophers are trying to convey the idea that “ eternal life“will be received by those who can leave a mark behind themselves, be it untold wealth or works of art.
The development of knowledge during the Renaissance greatly influenced people's understanding of the world today. Thanks to Copernicus and the Great Geographical Discoveries, ideas about the size of the Earth and its place in the Universe changed. The works of Paracelsus and Vesalius gave rise to scientific medicine and anatomy.
The first step of Renaissance science was a return to the classical theory of Ptolemy about the structure of the universe. There is a general desire to explain the unknown by material laws; most theories are based on building rigid logical sequences.
Of course, the most outstanding scientist of the Renaissance is Leonardo da Vinci. He is known for outstanding research in a variety of disciplines. One of the most interesting works of the Florentine genius relates to the definition of the ideality of man. Leonardo shared the humanists' view of the righteousness of the newborn, but the question of how to preserve all the traits of virtue and physical perfection remained a mystery. And for the final refutation of the divinity of man it was necessary to find the true source of life and reason. Da Vinci made many discoveries in various scientific fields; his works are still the subject of study by descendants. And who knows what kind of legacy he would have left us if his life had been even longer.
Italian science of the late Renaissance was represented by Galileo Galilei. The young scientist, born in Pisa, did not immediately decide on the exact direction of his work. He entered the medical faculty, but quickly switched to mathematics. Having received an academic degree, he began teaching applied disciplines (geometry, mechanics, optics, etc.), becoming increasingly immersed in the problems of astronomy, the influence of planets and luminaries, and at the same time becoming interested in astrology. It was Galileo Galilei who was the first to clearly draw analogies between the laws of nature and mathematics. In his work, he often used the method of inductive reasoning, using a logical chain to build transitions from particular provisions to more general ones. Some of Galileo's ideas turned out to be quite erroneous, but most of them were intended as confirmation of his basic theory about the movement of the Earth around the Sun. The academicians of that time refuted it, and the brilliant Tuscan was “besieged” with the help of the powerful Inquisition. According to the main historical version, the scientist publicly abandoned his theory towards the end of his life.
Renaissance science strived for “modernity,” which was expressed largely in technical achievements. Intelligence began to be considered the property of the rich. It was fashionable to have a scientist at court, and if he surpassed his neighbors in knowledge, then it was prestigious. Yesterday’s merchants themselves were not averse to plunging into science, sometimes choosing such “spectacular” areas as alchemy, medicine and meteorology. Science was often freely mixed with magic and superstition.
During the Renaissance, the @ sign was used. Then it denoted a measure of weight (arrub) equal to 12 - 13 kilograms.
It was during the Renaissance that alchemy appeared - an early form of chemistry that included as many supernatural principles as truly scientific ones. Most alchemists were obsessed with the idea of turning lead into gold, and this mythical process is still identified with the concept of alchemy. Long before the creation of the periodic system of elements, alchemists proposed their vision: all substances, in their opinion, consisted of a mixture of sulfur and mercury. All experiments were based on this assumption. Later, a third was added to the two main elements - salt.
It is worth noting the geographical achievements of the XIV-XVII centuries. This is the time of great geographical discoveries. A particularly noticeable mark in this area was left by the Portuguese and the famous Florentine Amerigo Vespucci, whose name is immortalized in the most significant discovery of that time - the American continents.
Painting, sculpture, architecture
The fine art of the Italian Renaissance spread from Florence, and it largely determined the high cultural level of the city, which glorified it for many years. Here, as in other areas, there is a return to the ancient principles of classical art. Excessive pretentiousness disappears, the works become more “natural”. Artists deviate from the strict canons of religious painting and create the greatest iconographic masterpieces in a new, freer and more realistic manner. In addition to deeper work with light and shadow than before, there is an active study of human anatomy.
Harmony, proportionality, and symmetry are returning to architecture. Gothic buildings expressing medieval religious fear are becoming a thing of the past, giving way to classical arches, domes, and columns. Architects of the early Renaissance worked in Florence, but in later years they were actively invited to Rome, where many outstanding structures were erected, which later became architectural monuments. At the end of the Renaissance, mannerism was born, of which Michelangelo was a prominent representative. A distinctive feature of this style is the emphasized monumentality of individual elements, which for a long time was perceived sharply negatively by representatives of classical art.
The return to antiquity was most clearly manifested in sculpture. The classic nude became an example of beauty, which again began to be depicted in contrapposto (the characteristic position of the body resting on one leg, which allows one to expressively convey the nature of the movement). Prominent figures of Renaissance sculpture were Donatello and Michelangelo, whose statue of David became the pinnacle of Renaissance art.
During the Renaissance in Italy, women with large pupils were considered the most beautiful. Italian women dripped an infusion of belladonna, a poisonous plant, into their eyes, which dilated the pupils. The name "belladonna" is translated from Italian as "beautiful woman."
Renaissance humanism influenced all aspects of social creativity. The music of the Renaissance ceased to be overly academic, having undergone a great influence of folk motifs. In church practice, choral polyphonic singing has become widespread.
Diversity musical styles led to the emergence of new musical instruments: viols, lutes, harpsichords. They were quite easy to use and could be used in companies or small concerts. Church music, much more solemn, required an appropriate instrument, which in those years was the organ.
Renaissance humanism suggested new approaches to such an important stage of personality development as learning. During the heyday of the Renaissance, a tendency appeared towards the development of personal qualities with youth. Group education gave way to individual education, when the student knew exactly what he wanted and went towards the intended goal, relying in everything on his master teacher.
The centuries of the Italian Renaissance became not only a source of incredible cultural progress, but also a time of strong contradictions: ancient philosophy and the conclusions of modern thinkers collided, which led to a fundamental change in both life itself and its perception.
His homeland was Italy, which at the end of the Middle Ages gave rise to the most developed culture in Europe.
By its location, Italy was a direct heir to ancient Roman culture, the influence of which was felt throughout its history. Since Antiquity, its spiritual life was also influenced by Greek culture, especially after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when a large number of Byzantine scholars moved to Italy.
However, the Renaissance was not reduced to simple copying of ancient traditions; it was a more complex and deeper phenomenon of world history, new in its scale and worldview. The refined and complex culture of the Middle Ages played no less a role in its origin than the culture of the ancient era, therefore, in many respects, the Renaissance was a direct continuation of the Middle Ages.
Italy remained politically fragmented into several competing states, but economically many of them were the most developed countries Europe. For a long time, Italian states occupied leading positions in trade between East and West. It was in the cities of Northern Italy that new forms of industrial production and banking, political activity and diplomatic art arose. High level economic development, on the one hand, and rich intellectual life, on the other, turned these cities into centers of formation of a new European culture. Italian urban culture became the breeding ground in which the preconditions of the Renaissance could become a reality.
The first capital of the Italian Renaissance was the main city of Tuscany Florence, where a unique combination of circumstances developed that contributed to the rapid rise of culture. At the height of the Renaissance, the center of Renaissance art moved to Rome. Popes Julius II and Leo X then made enormous efforts to revive the former glory of the Eternal City, thanks to which it truly turned into a center of world art. The third largest center of the Italian Renaissance was Venice, where Renaissance art acquired a unique coloring, determined by local characteristics.
art
One of the most prominent figures of the Italian Renaissance was Leonardo da Vinci(1452-1519). He combined many talents - painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, original thinker. His painting represents one of the peaks in the development of world art. With his experimental observations, the great Leonardo enriched almost all areas of science of his time.
An equally great artist competed with the genius of Leonardo da Vinci Michelangelo(1475-1564), who was also distinguished by his diversity of talents. Michelangelo became famous as a sculptor and architect, painter and poet. The frescoes of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, where Michelangelo painted 600 square meters, brought him eternal fame. m scenes from the Old Testament. According to his design, the grandiose dome of St. Peter's Cathedral was built, which to this day has not been surpassed in either size or grandeur. The architectural appearance of the entire historical center of Rome is still inextricably linked with the name of Michelangelo.
A special role in the development of Renaissance painting belonged to Sandro Botticelli(1445-1510). He entered the history of world culture as the creator of subtle, spiritualized images, combining the sublimity of late medieval painting with close attention to the human personality, which characterized modern times.
The pinnacle of Italian art of that era is creativity Raphael(1483-1520). In his works the pictorial canons of the High Renaissance reached their apogee.
The Venetian school of painting also occupies an honorable place in the history of Renaissance art, the most outstanding representative of which is Titian(1470/80s - 1576). Titian brought everything he learned from his predecessors to perfection, and the free style of painting he created had a great influence on the subsequent development of world painting. Material from the site
Architecture
Architecture also experienced a genuine revolution during the Renaissance. The improvement of construction technology allowed the masters of the Renaissance to solve architectural problems that were inaccessible to the architects of previous times. The founders of the new architectural style were the outstanding masters of Florence, primarily F. Brunelleschi, who created the monumental dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. But the main type architectural structure During this period, it is no longer a church building, but a secular one - palazzo(castle). The Renaissance style in architecture is characterized by monumentality and emphasized simplicity of facades and the convenience of spacious interiors.
"Renaissance" (in French "Renaissance", in Italian "Rinascimento") is a term first introduced by Giorgio Vasari, an architect, painter and art historian of the 16th century, to define a historical era that was determined by the early stage of development of bourgeois relations in Western Europe. This grandiose cultural movement was called upon, by reviving antiquity to a new life after a thousand years of oblivion and reviving the best in the fading Middle Ages, to open up prospects for development Western culture New time.
The culture of the Renaissance, associated primarily with the emergence of the bourgeoisie in feudal society, originated in Italy. The term “Renaissance” in relation to the culture of this era is not accidental. It is in Italy, the birthplace of antiquity, that the ancient ideal of a beautiful, harmonious person is being revived. Man again becomes the main theme of art. From antiquity comes the awareness that the most perfect form in nature is the human body. This does not mean, of course, that the Renaissance repeats the ancient period in art. As rightly noted by art historians, it should be remembered that humanity has never completely parted with antiquity, except in the deepest centuries of barbarism (VI-VIII centuries), and then, as we know, at the end of the 8th century the so-called “Carolingian revival,” no matter how conventional this term may be, then “Ottonian” at the end of the 10th-11th centuries. Yes, and the high Middle Ages, Gothic knew ancient philosophy, revering Aristotle, and history, and poetry. Behind the culture of the Renaissance stands a thousand years of the Middle Ages, Christian religion, a new worldview that gave rise to new aesthetic ideals, enriching art with new subjects and new stylistics. The humanistic culture of the Renaissance is permeated with the dream of a new man and his new spiritual development. The Renaissance is characterized by the perception of antiquity as a distant past and therefore as “an ideal that one can yearn for,” and not as “a reality that can be used, but also feared” (E. Panofsky).
Antiquity at this time acquires an independent value. The attitude towards it becomes, as correctly noted, not only and not so much educational as romantic, even among such an expert on antiquity as Mantegna. From antiquity, the Renaissance began to perceive man as a microcosm, “a small semblance of the large cosmos - the macrocosm,” in all its diversity. For Italian humanists, the main thing was a person’s focus on himself. The person became open to the world. His fate is to a large extent in his own hands - this is a fundamental difference from the perception of man in the ancient world, in which he was valued according to the degree of involvement in the world of the gods. And the artist in the Renaissance era is perceived primarily as an individual, as a person, as such.
The Renaissance was not at all a return to antiquity; it created a new culture, bringing the New Age closer. The countdown of the New Time from the Renaissance is made only by historians of art and culture (for history these are still the Middle Ages, and the New Time begins with the revolutions of the 17th century), for the Renaissance “transformed minds, not life, imagination, not reality, culture, but not civilization."
The chronological framework of the Italian Renaissance covers the time from the second half of the 13th to the first half of the 16th century. Within this period, the Renaissance is divided into several stages: the second half of the XIII-XIV centuries - Proto-Renaissance (pre-Renaissance) and Trecento; XV century - early Renaissance (Quattrocento); end of the 15th - first third of the 16th century - High Renaissance (the term Cinquecento is used less often in science).
In 1527, Rome was sacked by German landsknechts; from 1530, Florence, from a free city-state, a city-commune, became an ordinary central city of a feudal duchy. The feudal-Catholic reaction (Counter-Reformation) begins, and 1530 can rightfully be considered the end date of the development of the Renaissance. Precisely development, because the influence of Renaissance art extends to the entire 16th century. In addition, some areas of Italy are generally lagging behind in this development and the culture of, for example, the Venetian Republic still remains in the mainstream of the Renaissance throughout the 16th century.
The picture of the development of Italian Renaissance culture is very varied, which is due to the different levels of economic and political development of different cities of Italy, the varying degrees of power and strength of the bourgeoisie of these city-states, city-communes, and their varying degrees of connection with feudal traditions.
The leading art schools in the art of the Italian Renaissance were in the 14th century. such as Siena and Florentine, in the 15th century - Florentine, Umbrian, Paduan, Venetian, in the 16th century - Roman and Venetian.
From the second half of the 13th century - at the beginning of the 14th century. In the fight against local feudal lords, the Florentine burghers grew stronger. Florence was one of the first to turn into a rich republic with a constitution adopted in 1293, with a rapidly developing bourgeois way of life and an emerging bourgeois culture. The Florentine Republic existed for almost one hundred and fifty years, amassing wealth in the wool and silk trade and becoming famous for its manufactories.
Changes in the art of Italy were primarily reflected in sculpture. They were prepared by the sculptural works of the master Niccolò Pisano (reliefs of the pulpit of the Baptistery in the city of Pisa), in which a clear influence of antiquity can be traced. Then in monumental painting - in mosaics and frescoes by Pietro Cavallini (Roman churches of Santa Maria in Trastevere and Santa Cecilia in Trastevere). But the true beginning of a new era is rightly associated with the name of the painter Giotto di Bondone (1266?-1337). Of Giotto's works, the best preserved are the frescoes of the Chapel del Arena, or Scrovegni Chapel (named after the customer) in the city of Padua (1303-1306). Giotto's later paintings in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence (Peruzzi Chapel and Bardi Chapel). In the Chapel del Arena, the frescoes are arranged in three rows along a blank wall. The interior of the simple single-nave chapel is illuminated by five windows on the opposite wall. Below, on a picturesquely imitated base made of pink and gray squares, there are 14 allegorical figures of vices and virtues. Above the entrance to the chapel there is a painting “The Last Judgment”, on the opposite wall there is a scene of “The Annunciation”. Giotto connected 38 scenes from the life of Christ and Mary into a single harmonious whole, creating a majestic epic cycle. Gospel stories are presented by Giotto as real events. Telling in living language about problems that concern people at all times: about kindness and mutual understanding (“The Meeting of Mary and Elizabeth”, “The Meeting of Joachim and Anna at the Golden Gate”), deceit and betrayal (“The Kiss of Judas”, “The Flagellation of Christ”), about the depth of grief, meekness, humility and eternal all-consuming maternal love (“Lamentation”). Scenes are full of internal tension, such as “The Raising of Lazarus,” and sometimes piercing in their tragedy, like the composition “Carrying the Cross.”
Instead of the dissociation of individual figures and individual scenes characteristic of medieval painting, Giotto managed to create a coherent story, a whole narrative about the complex inner life of the heroes. Thanks to the strict selection of details, he focused on the essentials. Instead of the conventional golden background of Byzantine mosaics, Giotto introduces a landscape background. The figures, although they are still massive and inactive, acquire volume and natural movement. A three-dimensional space appears, which is achieved not by a perspective deepening (the solution to perspective was still a matter of the future), but by a certain arrangement of figures at a distance from each other on the plane of the wall (“The Appearance of an Angel to St. Anne”). However, the desire to correctly convey the anatomy of the human figure was already evident (“The Last Supper”, “The Nativity of Christ”). And if in Byzantine painting the figures seemed to float and hang in space, then the heroes of Giott’s frescoes found solid ground under their feet (“The Departure of Mary to the House of Joseph”). Giotto introduces everyday features into his images, creating the impression of authenticity of the situation and conveying a certain mood. His characters are vividly characterized human types. In one of the most expressive frescoes of the “Kiss of Judas” cycle, Giotto places the figures of Christ and Judas in the center of the composition against the backdrop of rising spears and raised arms and expresses his idea by contrasting two different profiles: a noble, clear in the impeccability of forms, an almost anciently beautiful face Christ and the ugly and repulsive, with an ugly convex forehead and a degenerately cut off chin - Judas. More than one generation of artists will learn dramatic richness, psychological and emotional expressiveness from Giotto. He managed to turn even vices and virtues into living human characters, overcoming traditional medieval allegorism. Giotto's images are majestic and monumental, his language is stern and laconic, but understandable to everyone entering the chapel. It is not for nothing that the chapel’s paintings were later called “the gospel for the illiterate.” Giotto's search for the transfer of space, the plasticity of figures, and the expressiveness of movement made his art a whole stage in the Renaissance.
Giotto di Bondone. Kiss of Judas. Fresco of the Chapel del Arena. Padua
Giotto was not only a painter: according to his design, the wonderful bell tower of the Florence Cathedral was built, which to this day adorns Florence with its light through silhouette, contrasting with the powerful dome of the cathedral.
During the Trecento period, the city of Siena also became the center of artistic culture. Siena art does not have the burgher character that it had in Florence. The culture of Siena is aristocratic, permeated with a feudal worldview and the spirit of churchliness. The works of the Siena school are elegant, decorative, festive, but also much more archaic than the Florentine ones, full of Gothicism. Thus, in the art of Duccio di Buoninsegna (circa 1250-1319), “the first flower of this garden,” according to Berenson, there are still many Byzantine features; These are mainly altar compositions, tempera painting on board, on a gold background with Gothic elements, in an architectural frame in the form of wimpergs and pointed arches. In his Madonnas (the famous “Maesta” - “Glorification of Mary”), despite the archaic design and composition, there is a lot of sincerity, lyrical feeling, and high spirituality. This is created with the help of a soft, smooth rhythm (both linear and plastic), giving Duccio’s works a special picturesque musicality.
One of the famous masters of the Siena Trecento is Simone Martini (1284-1344). Perhaps his long stay in Avignon imparted to his art some features of Northern Gothic: Martini's figures are elongated and, as a rule, presented on a golden background. But at the same time, Simone Martini tries to model the form with chiaroscuro, imparts natural movement to the figures, and tries to convey a certain psychological state, as he did in the image of the Madonna from the Annunciation scene.
In 1328, Simone Martini was commissioned to paint frescoes in the Siena city government building - Palazzo Publica: Martini painted the figure of the Siena condottiere Guidoriccio da Fogliano, the head of the mercenary troops, on horseback, against the backdrop of the Siena towers. There is something indomitable in the firm gait of the horse and the upright sitting figure of the warrior, expressing the spirit of the Renaissance itself with its faith in human capabilities, in the will of man, in the right of the strong. The laconic and harsh landscape background of the fresco perfectly conveys the general appearance of the Siena landscape with its red hills and bright blue sky, and to this day surprises with the fidelity of its generalized image.
In the same Palazzo Publice, another Siena master, Ambrogio Lorenzetti (about 1280-1348), painted frescoes. On two walls are scenes showing the “Effects of Good and Bad Government.” The allegorical figure of “good government” is surrounded by allegories of virtues, among which there is a well-preserved (the frescoes are generally in poor preservation) figure of “Peace” in antique clothes with a laurel wreath on his head. But the most interesting things in this cycle of paintings are not the edifying allegories, but completely real scenes of everyday life, both urban and rural: the market, merchants’ shops, donkeys loaded with bales of goods, a cavalcade of rich townspeople, vineyards, plowing peasants, an image of the harvest. Perhaps the most captivating scene is a round dance of smartly dressed boys and girls dancing in the city square. Thanks to the satisfactory preservation of this part of the fresco, one can pay tribute to the skill of the artist, who with great love conveyed the mood of the scene itself, and the features of everyday life, furnishings, and costume - everything that makes up the precious aroma of the era; feel his finest coloristic talent (for, first of all, the fresco amazes with its exquisite, muted, subtly harmonized coloring).
Lorenzetti died in 1348, when a plague epidemic decimated the inhabitants of Italy. The tragic events of 1348 are inspired by the fresco on the wall of the Pisa cemetery Campo Santo, the author of which has not yet been identified (Orcagna? Traini? Vitale da Bologna?). Painted on a subject about death (memento mori), which was common in the Middle Ages, “The Triumph of Death” with its edifying, traditional depiction of death with a scythe, the struggle of angels and devils for human souls turns under the master’s brush into the triumph of life: a brilliant cavalcade of ladies and gentlemen is not overshadowed by the view open coffins; boys and girls in the “Garden of Love” scene enthusiastically listen to music, despite the approach of death in the form of a bat with a scythe. The landscape of an orange grove, rich secular costumes, and a loving depiction of specific details transform a tragic plot into a secular work of art, full of jubilation and joy of life. With such a major chord, the development of Trecento art ends.
The signs of a new, bourgeois culture and the emergence of a new, bourgeois worldview were especially clearly manifested in the 15th century, during the Quattrocento period. But precisely because the process of the formation of a new culture and a new worldview was not completed during this period (this happened later, in the era of the final decomposition and collapse of feudal relations), the 15th century is full of creative freedom, bold daring, and admiration for human individuality. This is truly the age of humanism. In addition, this is an era full of faith in the limitless power of the mind, an era of intellectualism. The perception of reality is tested by experience, experiment, and controlled by reason. Hence the spirit of order and measure that is so characteristic of the art of the Renaissance. Geometry, mathematics, anatomy, the study of the proportions of the human body are of great importance for artists; it is then that they begin to carefully study the structure of man; in the 15th century Italian artists also solved the problem of rectilinear perspective, which had already matured in the art of the Trecento.
Antiquity played a huge role in the formation of the secular culture of the Quattrocento. The 15th century demonstrates direct connections with the Renaissance culture. The Platonic Academy is founded in Florence; the Laurentian Library contains a rich collection of ancient manuscripts. The first art museums appeared, filled with statues, fragments of ancient architecture, marbles, coins, and ceramics. Ancient Rome is being restored. The beauty of the suffering Laocoon, the beautiful Apollo (Belvedere) and Venus (Medicine) will soon appear before the astonished Europe.
We must not forget, however, that the influence of antiquity is layered on the centuries-old and strong traditions of the Middle Ages, on Christian art. Pagan and Christian plots are intertwined and transformed, imparting a specifically complex character to the culture of the Renaissance. Quattrocento draws its plots and images from both Holy Scripture and ancient mythology, from knightly legends, from the artist’s own observations of momentary life. As P. Muratov once poetically wrote, “for them the story of Esther, and the story of Griselda, and the story of Eurydice took place in the same country. Beautiful birds, dragons, oriental sages, nymphs, ancient heroes and magical animals live there, and this country is simply a fairy tale country.”
But it was in the Quattrocento that the aesthetics of Renaissance art, the type of Renaissance culture, took shape.
Florentine school of the 15th century. The first role in Quattrocento fell to Florence. A city founded on the lands of the ancient culture of Villanova, then the Etruscans, in the 4th century. converted to Christianity (his famous baptistery dates back to 488), from the 12th century. already a wealthy city-commune that left its mark on the art of the Trecento with the sculptures of the Guisano family and the genius of Dante and Giotto, Florence becomes the main center of Renaissance culture in the era of the Quattrocento. Since 1434, power in Florence passes to Cosimo de' Medici, the founder of the banking dynasty of ducal patrons of the arts, descended from doctors (it is not for nothing that the image of three pills is preserved in their coat of arms). With them began the “age of medical culture.”
In the architecture of Italy only in the 15th century. The features of a new style begin to appear. Philippe Brunelleschi (1377-1446) completed the Florence Cathedral with a gigantic dome in 1434, a generally Gothic building founded in 1295 by Arnolfo di Cambio (in 1334 Giotto erected the already mentioned campanile nearby - a bell tower 32 m high). The lantern of the octagonal dome (the diameter of which is 43 m - no less than the Roman Pantheon), which still dominates the panorama of the city, has pilasters of an antique character with semicircular arches on which the lantern ceiling rests. The Pazzi Chapel at the Church of Santa Croce, built by Brunelleschi between 1430 and 1443, rectangular in plan, with six Corinthian columns on the facade, a cornice on paired pilasters, a portico crowned with a spherical dome, bears the features of constructive clarity, ancient simplicity, harmony and proportionality, which becomes characteristic of all Renaissance art. These features manifested themselves even more clearly in secular architecture, for example, in the building of the Orphanage in Florence, also built by Brunelleschi, in which the gallery on the first floor, which on the second floor turns into a smooth wall with a cornice and windows, served as a model for all Renaissance architecture. The Quattrocento also created its own image of a secular city palace (palazzo): as a rule, three-story, with a fortress-like appearance thanks to the masonry of rough-hewn stones, especially emphasizing the first floor, but at the same time clear and precise in its design. These are Palazzo Pitti, the construction of which began in 1469 according to the design of Leon Battista Alberti; Palazzo Medici (Riccardi), built even earlier by Michelzo da Bartolomeo; Palazzo Rucellai, designed by Alberti. The clarity of the floor division, rusticism, the large role of pilasters, double (paired) windows, and an emphasized cornice are the characteristic features of these palaces. Further, this type, being modified, found development on Roman and Venetian soil. By turning to the use of ancient heritage and the order system, Renaissance architecture marked a new stage in architecture. The secular architecture of the palazzo is characterized by a combination of external fortress-like inaccessibility and power with the internal atmosphere of the comfort of early Italian villas. In church architecture, one more feature should be noted: the facades of churches and campaniles are faced with multi-colored marble, causing the facade to become “striped” - a characteristic feature of the Italian Quattrocento, and it developed primarily in Florence.
Arnolfo di Cambio, F. Brunelleschi. Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence (with Giotto's bell tower)
The year of birth of the new Quattrocento sculpture can be considered 1401, when a guild organization of merchants announced a competition for the sculptural decoration of the doors of the baptistery of the Florence Cathedral. Of the three doors of the baptistery, one was already decorated in the 30s of the 14th century. sculptural reliefs by Andrea Pisano. There were two more to be completed. The competition was attended by such masters as the architect Brunelleschi, Jacopo della Quercia, Lorenzo Ghiberti and others. The competition did not reveal a winner. It was only recognized that the designs of Brunelleschi and Ghiberti were much superior to those of the other competitors, and they were offered to work on the doors in the future “on an equal footing.” Brunelleschi refused such an offer and the order completely passed to Ghiberti. Lorenzo Ghiberti (1381-1455), famous in art and as a theorist, author of three books of “Commentaries” - the first in the history of Renaissance art, created complex multi-figure compositions on biblical subjects that unfold against landscape and architectural backgrounds. There are many gothic influences in the performance style. Ghiberti's art is aristocratic and refined in spirit, full of external effects, which was more to the taste of the customer than the democratic, courageous art of Quercia. The sculptor who was destined to solve many problems of European plastic art for centuries to come - round sculpture, monument, equestrian monument - was Donato di Niccolo di Betto Barda, known in the history of art as Donatello (1386?-1466). Donatello's creative path was very difficult. Gothic reminiscences are also observed in his art, as, for example, in the figure of the marble David (the sculptor’s early work). In the figure of the Apostle Mark for the Florentine church of Orsan Michele (10s of the 15th century), Donatello solves the problem of staging a human figure in full height according to the laws of plasticity, developed in ancient times by Polycletus, but consigned to oblivion in the Middle Ages. The apostle stands leaning on his right leg, while his left leg is moved back and bent at the knee, only slightly maintaining the balance of the figure. This movement is emphasized by the folds of the cloak, falling along the right leg, and the complex pattern of flexible lines of these folds, scattering along the left.
Donatello. St. George. Florence. National Museum
For another niche of the same building, by order of the gunsmith workshop, Donatello executed a statue of St. George, embodying the already clearly expressed ideal of the early Renaissance, the sense of self-awareness and confidence in this brightly individual image is emphasized by the free, calm pose of the figure, reminiscent of a column, which brings “St. George” with the best examples of Greek sculpture from the high classical period. This is “not the humanized god of antiquity, but the deified man of the new era,” according to one researcher (N. Punin).
The realistic beginning of Donatello's art was fully expressed in the images of the prophets for the bell tower of Giotto (1416-1430), which he executed from specific individuals, which made these images, in fact, portraits of his contemporaries. Donatello also studied portraits especially. One of the first portrait busts, typical of the Renaissance, is rightly considered to be the portrait of Niccolo Uzano, a political figure in Florence of those years, executed by Donatello in terracotta.
Donatello's trip to Rome in 1432 with Brunelleschi and the study of ancient monuments there inspired Donatello to create a whole series of works that were pagan in spirit, close in form to ancient sculpture, such as the marble angels on the singing platform of the Florence Cathedral. A complex combination of ancient influences (in the interpretation of forms, folds of clothing) and a highly solemn, deeply religious mood is the relief “Annunciation” from the Church of Santa Croce in Florence.
In the bronze “David” (30s), Donatello again returns to ancient traditions, but of the late Greek classic. A simple shepherd, the winner of the giant Goliath, who saved the inhabitants of Judea from the yoke of the Philistines and later became king, David became one of the favorite images of Renaissance art. Donatello portrayed him as very young, ideally beautiful, like Praxitelean Hermes. But Donatello was not afraid to introduce such an everyday detail as a shepherd’s hat - a sign of his simple origin.
S. Botticelli. Birth of Venus. Florence, Uffizi
Donatello also holds the honor of creating the first equestrian monument in the Renaissance. In 1443-1453 in Padua he casts an equestrian statue of the condottiere Erasmo di Narni, nicknamed Gattamelata (“motley cat”). The wide, free modeling of the form creates a monumental image of a military commander, the head of mercenary troops, a condottiere with a marshal's baton in his hand, dressed in armor, but with a naked (by the way, made from a mask and therefore expressively portrait) head, on a heavy, majestic horse. The horse's left front leg rests on its core. Like the rider on a horse, the pedestal is simple, clear and strict. The image of Gattamelata is undoubtedly executed under the influence of ancient spatial solutions, especially the image of Marcus Aurelius.
The monument to Gattamelata stands in the square in front of the Padua Cathedral of St. Anthony, whose altar reliefs were also executed by Donatello (1445-1450). Using the best traditions of medieval art, having studied ancient plastic arts, Donatello came to his own decisions, to images of deep humanity and true realism, which explains his enormous influence on all subsequent European sculpture. No wonder he was called one of the three fathers of the Renaissance, along with Brunelleschi and Masaccio.
Donatello's most famous student is Andrea Verrocchio (1436-1488), who was also a painter (as a painter he is better known for being Leonardo's teacher). Verrocchio was inspired by the same themes as Donatello. But the bronze “David” by Verrocchio, executed already at the end of the Florentine Quattrocento, is more refined, elegant, the modeling of its form is extremely detailed. All this makes the sculpture less monumental than the image of Donatello.
For the Venetian square near the church of San Giovanni e Paolo Verrocchio created the equestrian monument of the condottiere Colleoni. There is a certain theatricality in the rider's pose and in the prancing gait of the horse. The profile of the high pedestal is folded, designed so that the silhouette of the rider is clearly visible against the sky, in the middle of a small square surrounded by tall buildings. Verrocchio’s features of sophistication are fully consistent with the aristocratization of tastes that is characteristic of Florence at the end of the 15th century, although undoubtedly, thanks to Verrocchio’s talent, his monument has both the majesty and integrity of the monumental image. Condottiere Verrocchio is not so much an image of a specific person as a generalized type characteristic of that era.
The leading role in the painting of the Florentine Quattrocento fell to the lot of the artist Tommaso di Giovanni di Simone Cassai Guidi, known as Masaccio (1401-1428). We can say that Masaccio solved the most pressing problems of pictorial art that Giotto had posed a century earlier. Already in the two main scenes of the painting in the Brancacci Chapel of the Florentine church of Santa Maria del Carmine - “Il tribute” and “The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise” - Masaccio showed himself to be an artist for whom it was clear how to place figures in space , how to connect them with each other and with the landscape, what are the laws of anatomy of the human body. Masaccio's scenes are full of drama, life truth: in “Expulsion from Paradise,” Adam covered his face with his hands in shame. Eva sobs, throwing her head back in despair. In the “Tax” scene, three scenes are combined: Christ with his disciples at the city gates, stopped by a tax collector, is the central composition; Peter, at the behest of Christ, catching a fish in order to get out of it the coin necessary for payment (didrachm, or statir, hence the other name of the fresco - “Miracle with the statir”) - composition on the left; the scene of paying taxes to the collector is on the right. The very principle of connecting three scenes on one plane is still archaic, but the way these scenes were written - taking into account linear and aerial perspective - was a true revelation both for Masaccio’s contemporaries and for all subsequent masters. Masaccio was the first to solve the main problems of the Quattrocento - linear and aerial perspective. Hills and trees go into the distance, forming a natural environment in which the heroes live and with which the figures are organically connected. Naturally, the central group is located in the landscape - Jesus and his disciples. Between the figures a kind of air environment is created. Masaccio was not afraid to convey portrait features to the group of Christ’s disciples in the center: in the right extreme figure, contemporaries saw Masaccio himself, in the face to the left of Christ they saw a resemblance to Donatello. The lighting was also natural: it corresponded to the real light falling from the right side of the chapel.
From the moment of their appearance, Masaccio's frescoes contributed to the fact that the church of Santa Maria del Carmine turned into a kind of academy, where generations of artists studied, right up to Michelangelo, who was undoubtedly influenced by Masaccio. Masaccio’s ability to connect figures and landscape into a single action, to dramatically and at the same time quite naturally convey the life of nature and people - this is the great merit of the painter, which determined his place in art. And this is all the more surprising since Masaccio lived in the world for a little more than a quarter of a century.
A number of artists, following Masaccio, developed the problems of perspective, movement and anatomy of the human body, so in science they received the name of perspectivists and analysts. These are painters such as Paolo Uccello, Andrea Castagno, and the Umbrian painter Domenico Veneziano.
There was also a more archaic movement among Florentine artists, expressing conservative tastes. Some of these artists were monks, which is why in art history they were called monastic artists. One of the most famous among them was fra (i.e. brother - the address of a monk to a monk) Giovanni Beato Angelico da Fiesole (1387-1455). And although he was a monk of the gloomy Dominican order, there is nothing harsh or ascetic in his art. The images of his Madonnas, painted according to medieval traditions, often on a golden background, are full of lyricism, peace and contemplation, and the landscape backgrounds are permeated with the enlightened sense of cheerfulness characteristic of the Renaissance. This feeling is further strengthened in the work of Beato’s student Angelico Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1498), for example in his famous fresco of the Palazzo Medici (Riccardi) “Procession of the Magi”, in the composition of which he introduced an image of the family of the ruler of Florence, Cosimo Medici.
Power in Florence passed to this banker, as already mentioned, in 1434. For many years, the Medici dynasty stood at the head of Florence, which went from a democratic form of government to an aristocratic one, which affected the development of the art of that time.
Medical culture is deeply secular. Only in Italy of the 15th century. one could imagine one’s beloved, Lucrezia Buti, who had once been kidnapped from a monastery, and one’s children in the image of the Madonna and Christ with John, as Filippo Lippi (1406-1469), the favorite artist of Cosimo de’ Medici, did in one of his works. Legends arose about Lippi's life. He himself was a monk, but left the monastery, became a wandering artist, kidnapped a nun from the monastery and died, according to Vasari, poisoned by the relatives of a young woman with whom he fell in love in old age. Religious themes, which were embodied by the artists of the Florentine Quattrocento, turned into secular works with a lot of everyday details, with portraits of contemporaries, filled with living human feelings and experiences.
In the second half of the 15th century. With the strengthening of the role of the patrician in art, grace and luxury become even more important. The Gospel scenes depicted by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494) on the walls of the Church of Santa Maria Novella, in fact, represent an interpretation of scenes from the life of the upper strata of Florentine society.
Florentine art reached particular sophistication at the end of the century, during the reign of Cosimo's grandson, Lorenzo de' Medici, nicknamed the Magnificent (1449-1492). A sober and even cruel politician, a real tyrant, Lorenzo was at the same time one of the most educated people of his time. A poet, philosopher, humanist, philanthropist, pagan in outlook, prone, however, to religious exaltation, he turned his court into the center of artistic culture of the time, where writers such as Poliziano, scientists and philosophers such as Pico della Mirandola, great artists such as Botticelli and Michelangelo. Hunts, carnivals, tournaments follow each other, participants express themselves in the arts of painting, music, sculpture, eloquence and poetry. But in the culture of the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent there is a lot of contradictory things, it is too pampered, permeated with moods of decadence, closed in a narrow social environment.
The most typical artist of the late Florentine Quattrocento, an exponent of the aesthetic ideals of the court of Lorenzo Medici, was Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, 1445-1510), a student of Philippe Lippi. The Uffizi Gallery houses two of his famous paintings: The Birth of Venus (c. 1483-1484) and Spring (Primavera; c. 1477-1478). In the first, Botticelli depicts how a beautiful goddess, born from the foam of the sea, under the blowing winds in a shell glides along the surface of the sea to the shore. Already here all the main features of Botticelli’s writing were reflected: his decorativeness, elegance, the lyrical and romantic nature of the images, his amazing ability to create a fantastic landscape, impasto, almost in relief, applying paints, his characteristic “Gothicism” (elongated weightless figures, as if not touching the ground) . Botticelli creates a very specific type of face, especially for women: an elongated oval, plump lips, seemingly tear-stained eyes. We meet the same type in “Spring,” the theme of which is inspired by one of Poliziano’s poems. Botticelli does not like a specific, explained plot. In the painting “Primavera” the figures of Spring, Madonna, Mercury, the Three Graces, a nymph, a marshmallow, etc. are combined into a single composition, presented among fantastic nature, the image of which Botticelli was able to convey in his own way, like an enchanted garden. But the face of Spring, scattering flowers from its hem, is frozen in detachment, it is almost tragic, which is not at all associated with the joy that it brings. His images of Madonnas are endowed with these same features; His “Salome”, “Exiled”, etc. are characterized even more tragically and nervously.
In the 80s, together with Ghirlandaio and Perugino, Botticelli painted the walls of the Sistine Chapel, and thus his frescoes were destined to compete for centuries with the paintings of Michelangelo completed half a century later. Botticelli's latest works, mainly Lamentations, are inspired by the image and tragic fate of Savonarola, under whose influence the artist found himself in the 80-90s. The passionate sermons of the Dominican monk, directed not only against the tyrant Medici, the corruption of the papacy and the decline of religion, but also against the entire culture of the Renaissance, led to the fanatical bonfires of Savonarola, where the immortal creations of Renaissance culture and the works of Botticelli were burned. For the last ten years he wrote nothing, being in tragic melancholy after the execution of Savonarola.
By the end of the 15th century. Florence, like all leading cities in Italy, entered a period of economic and socio-political crisis. By the 30s of the 16th century, Florence lost its independence as a city-commune, remaining simply the main city of the Duchy of Tuscany, and ceased to be the center of artistic life. But the Florentine school of Quattrocento left its mark on all the art of the Renaissance. It was the first to solve problems of linear and aerial perspective, anatomy of the human body, accurate drawing, and natural movement; color, however, was not the strongest side of the work of Florentine masters.
Umbrian school of the 15th century. To the northeast of Tuscany are the lands of Umbria. Here in the 15th century. there were no such major cities, large spaces were occupied by landowners' lands, therefore feudal, medieval traditions lived longer in art and were more clearly expressed. The courtly, chivalrous character of Umbrian art of the 14th century. very close to Siena. Through Venice, the Umbrian cities maintained connections with Northern Europe and Byzantium. Umbrian art is decorative, ornate, lyrical, dreamy and deeply religious; Unlike Tuscany, color plays a major role in it.
All these features were already evident in the works of such Umbrian masters as Gentile de Fabriano, the future teacher of Raphael Perugino, Pinturicchio, Melozzo da Forli. But the largest master of Umbria in the 15th century. was Piero della Francesca (1420?-1492). He studied with Domenico Veneziano, worked in Florence, was familiar with Brunelleschi and Ghiberti, like the Florentines he was interested in problems of perspective and even left behind a treatise on this topic. Until Titian, Piero della Francesca was one of the greatest colorists. He developed color relationships in the most subtle way, used the valer technique, i.e., he knew how to convey different apertures of color and combine colors with a light-air environment, so that art historians subsequently called him one of the first plein air painters (i.e., working in the open air) in all of Western Europe art. Francesca was the greatest monumentalist, a master not primarily of easel painting (although he left behind portraits, for example the portrait of the Duke of Urbino Federigo de Montefeltro and his wife Battista Sforza, stored in the Uffizi Gallery - 1465), but of monumental and decorative painting. His gift as a monumentalist is perfectly visible in the frescoes in the Church of San Francesco in Arezzo, written in the 50-60s (“The Dream of Constantine”, “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon”, etc.), with their amazing sense of linear and plastic rhythm, with extreme simplicity of form to enhance the epic solemnity, majesty of images, elevated above the random, ordinary. Francesca, as a true Quattrocento artist, believed in the high mission of man, in his ability to improve.
Padua school of the 15th century. The creativity of Paduan masters develops under the sign of admiration for ancient art. Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), the greatest artist of the Paduan school, was a student and adopted son of Francesco Squarcione, a collector and connoisseur of ancient art, who conveyed to him his admiration for the “severe grandeur of the ancients.” Padua is located in northern Italy, its connections with Germany and France were quite close in the 15th century, and Gothic features in the art of the Quattrocento are quite natural. Padua also experienced great influence from the Florentine school. Giotto, Uccello, Donatello, and F. Lippi worked here. But most of all, the already mentioned influence of antiquity, mainly Roman, affected the Padua school. Mantegna introduced images of ancient monuments into his compositions. Like Francesca, Mantegna was primarily a muralist. In the Ovetari Chapel of the Eremitani Church of Padua (late 40s - 50s), Mantegna presented the story of St. Jacob as if the action takes place in some city of the Roman Empire. All compositions amaze with the boldness of spatial solutions. Unlike Francesca, Mantegna’s figures seem to be protruding from the wall, destroying the plane; they are always presented in complex angles, such as, for example, a warrior standing with his back to the audience, stunnedly contemplating the miracle that St. Jacob.
In the palace of the Mantuan rulers Castello di Corto, commissioned by the patron of the arts and lover of antiquities Lodovico Gonzaga, Mantegna painted the “marriage room” (Camera degli Sposi), depicting the Gonzaga family portrait and scenes from the court life of Mantua. The ceiling fresco, depicting a round gallery in the very center of the vault with people looking through the railings, is, in fact, the first illusionistic decoration in Western European art. The skilfully painted clouds further enhance the impression of a breakthrough into the sky.
Mantegna’s passion for antiquity, which was especially evident in the 9 preparatory grisaille panels on the themes of “The Triumphs of Caesar” and in his late work “Parnassus,” was combined with a subtle understanding of the specifics of technique and genre and with a creative rethinking of the traditions of Northern Gothic. This is clearly visible in one of his most famous works - the “Crucifixion” from the altar image of the Church of San Zeno in Verona. Severity and tragedy emanate from the crosses with martyrs, from the group on the left led by Mary, frozen, petrified in her suffering, from the entire rocky lifeless landscape, to which the blood-red peak of the mountain flaming against the dark green sky gives an ominous character. The drama of what is happening is emphasized by a group of Roman soldiers acting out the clothes of Christ. Mantegna has a clear drawing, rigid outline, anatomically verified proportions, bold perspective, cold coloring, emphasizing the severity and restrained suffering of his images. A great visionary, a bold innovator, Mantegna was a singer of heroic personality. Mantegna did a lot of engraving (on copper) and had a great influence on Dürer.
Of Mantegna's contemporaries, the artists of Ferrara and Bologna (Cosimo Tura, Francesco Cossa, Lorenzo Costa, etc.) are closest to the Padua school. Ferrara, a city in northeastern Italy, was to some extent even a rival of Venice. But the feudal-aristocratic way of life contributed to the long preservation of Gothic traditions in art (although at the court of the Dukes of Este they greatly appreciated and carefully studied antiquity and even introduced the Latin language into use). The influence of both the actual Italian (Mantegna, Piero della Francesca) and Dutch (Rogier van der Weyden) masters. Francesco Cossa became famous for the frescoes of the country palace of the Dukes of Este “Schifanoia” (“Unboring”) with scenes of hunts, competitions, triumphs, conveying all the splendor of the court. life. Cossa’s student Lorenzo Costa, in addition to monumental painting, was engaged in portraiture (see his female portrait in the Hermitage).
Venetian school of the 15th century. During the Renaissance, Venice developed somewhat differently than other Italian cities. Its advantageous geographical position on the islands of the North-Western Adriatic, its powerful fleet and open trade routes with the East, primarily with Byzantium (until the 10th century, Venice was generally part of the Byzantine Empire), quickly made it rich. The Crusades brought new income to the Venetian Republic. But from the end of the 13th century. the process of aristocratization of its political system began. Patricianism delayed the sprouts of a new, burgher culture, and thus the Renaissance in Venice was delayed by almost half a century.
The Quattrocento in Venice begins with the names of artists such as Pisanello and Gentile de Fabriano, who together painted the Doge's Palace; finds its full expression in the work of such a master as Vittorio Carpaccio. His series of paintings on religious subjects in oil on canvas for Venetian schools - societies of the laity (scuolo) depicts the motley Venetian life, the contemporary Venetian crowd, and the Venetian landscape. But the development path of the early Renaissance is most clearly visible in the work of the Bellini family: Jacopo Bellini and his two sons - Gentile and Giovanni. The most famous in art is the latter, often called Gianbellino (1430-1516) in his homeland. He began with a harsh style in the spirit of the Paduans, but later moved on to soft picturesqueness, rich golden coloring, the secrets of which, as well as a subtle feeling, he passed on to his student Titian.
Gianbellino’s Madonnas, “very simple, serious, not sad or smiling, but always immersed in even and important thoughtfulness” (P. Muratov), seem to dissolve in the landscape, always organic with it (“Madonna with Trees”). His allegorical paintings are full of a philosophical and contemplative mood, sometimes they even cannot be deciphered by any plot, but they perfectly convey the essence of the figurative principle (“Souls of Purgatory”). The Bellini brothers, like Antonello da Messina, are also known in the history of art for having improved the oil technique, which Italian masters had only recently become familiar with.
The Venetian school completes the development of the art of the Quattrocento. The 15th century brought to the Italian state a true revival of ancient traditions, but on a new basis - understood and comprehended by the people of the new era. Each type of art left behind some important solutions to new problems; architecture - type of secular palazzo; sculpture is an image of a person, not a deity, as in antiquity; painting developed a religious picture of a Christian or ancient subject, but gave it secular features. All this was an important contribution of Quattrocento to the art of the Renaissance.
From the end of the 15th century, Italy began to experience all the consequences of unfavorable economic rivalry with Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands. The northern cities of Europe organize a series of military campaigns against Italy, which is fragmented and losing its power. This difficult period brings to life the idea of unifying the country, an idea that could not but excite the best minds of Italy.
It is well known that certain periods of the flowering of art may not coincide with the general development of society, its material and economic status. During difficult times for Italy, the short-lived “golden age” of the Italian Renaissance began - the so-called High Renaissance, the highest point of the flowering of Italian art. The High Renaissance thus coincided with the period of fierce struggle of Italian cities for independence. The art of this time was permeated with humanism, faith in the creative powers of man, in the unlimited possibilities of his capabilities, in the reasonable structure of the world, in the triumph of progress. In art, the problems of civic duty, high moral qualities, heroic deeds, the image of a beautiful, harmoniously developed, strong in spirit and body hero man who managed to rise above the level of everyday life came to the fore. The search for such an ideal led art to synthesis, generalization, to the disclosure of general patterns of phenomena, to the identification of their logical relationship. The art of the High Renaissance abandons particulars and insignificant details in the name of a generalized image, in the name of the desire for a harmonious synthesis of the beautiful aspects of life. This is one of the main differences between the High Renaissance and the early one.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the first artist to clearly embody this difference. He was born in Anchiano, near the village of Vinci; his father was a notary who moved to Florence in 1469. Leonardo's first teacher was Andrea Verrocchio. The figure of an angel in the teacher’s painting “Baptism” already clearly demonstrates the difference in the artist’s perception of the world of the past era and the new era: no frontal flatness of Verrocchio, the finest cut-off modeling of volume and extraordinary spirituality of the image. Researchers date the “Madonna with a Flower” (“Benois Madonna,” as it was previously called, after the owners) to the time of Verrocchio’s departure from the workshop. During this period, Leonardo was undoubtedly influenced for some time by Botticelli. His “Annunciation” in detail still reveals close connections with the Quattrocento, but the calm, perfect beauty of the figures of Mary and the Archangel, the color structure of the painting, and the compositional orderliness speak of the worldview of the artist of the new era, characteristic of the High Renaissance.
From the 80s of the 15th century. Two unfinished compositions by Leonardo have survived: “The Adoration of the Magi” and “St. Jerome." Probably in the mid-80s, “Madonna Litta” was also created using the ancient tempera technique, in whose image the type of Leonardo’s female beauty was expressed: heavy, half-lowered eyelids and a subtle smile give the Madonna’s face a special spirituality.
Leonardo da Vinci. Self-portrait. Turin, library
Florence, however, did not seem to be very welcoming to the artist during these years, and in 1482, having learned that the Duke of Milan Lodovico Sforza, better known as Lodovico Moro, was looking for a sculptor to create a monument to his father Francesco Sforza, Leonardo offered his services Duke and leaves for Milan. Note that in a letter to Moreau, Leonardo first of all listed his merits as a military engineer (bridge builder, fortifier, “artilleryman,” ship builder), land reclamation worker, architect, and only then as a sculptor and painter.
Combining scientific and creative principles, possessing both logical and artistic thinking, Leonardo spent his whole life engaged in scientific research along with the fine arts; distracted, he seemed slow and left behind little art. At the Milanese court, Leonardo worked as an artist, technical scientist, inventor, mathematician and anatomist. At the same time, having found himself in the service of Moreau, he seems to be created for a social life, similar to that led by the Milanese nobleman.
The strengthening and decoration of the Milan fortress (Castello Sforzesso), the design of constant celebrations and numerous weddings, and scientific studies took Leonardo away from art. With all this, the Milanese period, which lasted from 1482 to 1499, was one of the most fruitful in the master’s work, which marked the beginning of his artistic maturity. It was from this time that Leonardo became the leading artist in Italy: in architecture he was busy designing an ideal city, in sculpture - creating an equestrian monument, in painting - painting a large altar image. And each of the creations he created was a discovery in art.
The first major work he performed in Milan was “Madonna of the Rocks” (or “Madonna of the Grotto”). This is the first monumental altar composition of the High Renaissance, interesting also because it fully expressed the features of Leonardo's style of writing. Having created a generalized, collective, ideally beautiful image in the image of the Madonna with the infants Christ and John and the angel, while maintaining all the features of vital persuasiveness, Leonardo, as it were, summed up all the quests of the Quattrocento era and turned his gaze to the future.
Leonardo da Vinci. Madonna in the grotto. Paris, Louvre
The composition of the picture is constructive, logical, and strictly verified. The group of four people forms a kind of pyramid, but the gesture of Mary's hand and the pointing finger of the angel create a circular movement within the painting, and the gaze naturally moves from one to the other. Peace emanates from the figures of the Madonna and the angel, but at the same time they also inspire a certain sense of mystery, disturbing mystery, emphasized by the fantastic view of the grotto itself and the landscape background. In fact, this is no longer just a landscape background, but a certain environment in which the depicted persons interact. The creation of this environment is also facilitated by that special quality of Leonardo’s painting, which is called “sfumato”: an airy haze that envelops all objects, softens the contours, forming a certain light-airy atmosphere.
Most great job Leonardo in Milan, the highest achievement of his art was the painting of the wall of the refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria della Grazie on the subject of “The Last Supper” (1495-1498). Christ meets with his disciples for the last time at dinner to announce to them the betrayal of one of them. “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me.” Leonardo depicted the moment of reaction of all twelve to the words of the teacher. This reaction is different, but there is no external affectation in the picture, everything is full of restrained internal movement. The artist changed the composition many times, but did not change the main principle: the composition is based on precise mathematical calculations. Thirteen people sit at a long table, parallel to the line of the canvas: two are in profile to the viewer on the sides of the table, and eleven are facing. The key to the composition is the figure of Christ, placed in the center, against the backdrop of a doorway, behind which a landscape opens; Christ's eyes are lowered, on his face there is submission to the higher will, sadness, consciousness of the inevitability of the fate awaiting him. The remaining twelve people are divided into four groups of three people each. All faces are illuminated, with the exception of the face of Judas, turned in profile to the viewer and with his back to the light source, which corresponded to Leonardo’s plan: to distinguish him from the other students, to make his black, treacherous essence almost physically tangible.
Leonardo da Vinci. Last Supper. Painting of the refectory of the monastery of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan
For Leonardo, art and science existed inseparably. While engaged in art, he did scientific research, experiments, observations, he went through perspective into the field of optics and physics, through problems of proportions - into anatomy and mathematics, etc. “The Last Supper” completes a whole stage in the artist’s scientific research. It is also a new stage in art. Many Quattrocento artists painted The Last Supper. For Leonardo, the main thing is through reaction different people, characters, temperaments, personalities, to reveal the eternal questions of humanity: about love and hatred, devotion and betrayal, nobility and meanness, greed, which is what makes Leonardo’s work so modern, so exciting to this day. People show themselves in different ways at the moment of emotional shock: Christ’s beloved disciple John, all drooping, meekly lowering his eyes, Peter grabbed a knife, Jacob spread his hands in bewilderment, Andrei convulsively raised his hands. Only Christ remains in a state of complete peace and self-absorption, whose figure is the semantic, spatial, coloristic center of the picture, imparting the unity of the entire composition. It is no coincidence that the blue and red tones that dominate the painting sound most intensely in Christ’s clothing: a blue cloak, a red tunic.
Unlike many of Quattrocento's works, Leonardo's paintings do not contain any illusionistic techniques that allow the real space to transform into the depicted. But the painting located along the wall of the refectory subjugated the entire interior. And this Leonardian ability to subjugate space to a large extent paved the way for Raphael and Michelangelo.
The fate of Leonardo's murals is tragic: he himself contributed to its rapid disintegration by experimenting with mixing tempera and oil, experimenting with paints and primers. Later, a door was broken in the wall and moisture and vapors began to penetrate into the refectory, which did not contribute to the preservation of the painting. Those who burst in at the end of the 18th century. In Italy, the Bonapartists built a stable, a grain warehouse, and then a prison in the refectory. During the Second World War, a bomb hit the refectory, and the wall only miraculously survived, while the opposite and side walls collapsed. In the 50s, the painting was cleared of layers and fundamentally restored.
Leonardo took time off from studying anatomy, geometry, fortification, land reclamation, linguistics, versification, and music to work on “The Horse,” an equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, for which he primarily came to Milan and which he completed in full size in the early 90s in clay. The monument was not destined to be embodied in bronze: in 1499 the French invaded Milan and Gascon crossbowmen shot the equestrian monument. We can judge Leonardo's sculpture by his drawings made at different stages of work. The monument, about 7 m high, was supposed to be 1.5 times higher than the equestrian statues of Donatello and Verrocchio; it was not for nothing that contemporaries called it the “great colossus”. From a dynamic composition with a rider on a rearing horse trampling the enemy, Leonardo moved to a calmer solution to the figure of Sforza, solemnly sitting on a mighty horse.
In 1499, the years of Leonardo’s wanderings began: Mantua, Venice and, finally, the artist’s hometown of Florence, where he painted the cardboard “St. Anna with Mary on her lap,” from which he creates an oil painting in Milan (where he returned in 1506). Leonardo spent a short time in the service of Caesar Borgia, and in the spring of 1503 he returned to Florence, where he received from Pietro Soderini, now a Gonfaloniere for life, an order to paint the wall of the new hall of the Palazzo Signoria (the opposite wall was to be painted by Michelangelo). Leonardo made a cardboard on the theme of the battle of the Milanese and Florentines at Anghiari - the moment of a fierce battle for the banner, Michelangelo - the Battle of Cascina - the moment when, following an alarm signal, soldiers emerge from the pond. Contemporaries left evidence that the second cardboard was a great success precisely because it depicts not the fierce, almost bestial anger, rage and excitement of people grappling to death, as in Leonardo, but beautiful young healthy youths rushing to get dressed and enter into battle - sublime an image of heroism and valor. But both cardboards were not preserved, were not embodied in painting, and we know about Leonard’s plan only from a few drawings.
In Florence, Leonardo began another painting: a portrait of the merchant del Giocondo's wife, Mona Lisa, which became one of the most famous paintings in the world. Hundreds of pages have been written about the portrait: how Leonardo arranged the sessions, inviting musicians so that the smile on the model’s face would not fade, how long (as is typical for Leonardo) he delayed the work, how he tried to thoroughly convey every feature of this living face. The portrait of Mona Lisa Gioconda is a decisive step towards the development of Renaissance art. For the first time, the portrait genre became on the same level as compositions on religious and mythological themes. Despite all the undeniable physiognomic similarities, Quattrocento’s portraits were distinguished by, if not external, then internal constraint. The majesty of the Mona Lisa is conveyed by the mere juxtaposition of her emphatically voluminous figure, strongly pushed out to the edge of the canvas, with a landscape with rocks and streams visible as if from afar, melting, alluring, elusive and therefore, despite all the reality of the motif, fantastic. This same elusiveness is also present in the very appearance of Gioconda, in her face, in which one senses a strong-willed principle, an intense intellectual life, in her gaze, intelligent and insightful, as if continuously watching the viewer, in her barely noticeable, bewitching smile.
In the portrait of Mona Lisa, a degree of generalization has been achieved that, while preserving all the uniqueness of the individuality depicted, allows us to consider the image as typical of the High Renaissance. And this is, first of all, the difference between Leonard’s portrait and the portraits of the early Renaissance. This generalization, the main idea of which is a sense of one’s own significance, a high right to an independent spiritual life, was achieved by a number of certain formal moments: both the smooth contour of the figure and the soft modeling of the face and hands, shrouded in Leonardo’s “sfumato”. At the same time, without ever falling into minute detail, without allowing a single naturalistic note, Leonardo creates such a feeling of a living body that allowed Vasari to exclaim that one could see the pulse beating in the hollow of Mona Lisa’s neck.
In 1506 Leonardo left for Milan, which already belonged to the French. Last years at home - these are years of wandering between Florence, Rome, Milan, filled, however, with scientific research and creative pursuits, mainly painting. Burdened by his own unsettledness, a feeling of lack of recognition, a feeling of loneliness in his native Florence, torn, like all of Italy, by external and internal enemies, Leonardo in 1515, at the suggestion of the French king Francis I, left for France forever.
Leonardo was the greatest artist of his time, a genius who opened new horizons of art. He left behind few works, but each of them was a stage in the history of culture. Leonardo is also known as a versatile scientist. His scientific discoveries, for example, his research in the field of aircraft, are of interest in our age of astronautics. Thousands of pages of Leonardo's manuscripts, covering literally every field of knowledge, testify to the universality of his genius.
The ideas of monumental art of the Renaissance, in which the traditions of antiquity and the spirit of Christianity merged, found their most vivid expression in the work of Raphael (1483-1520). In his art, two main tasks found a mature solution: the plastic perfection of the human body, expressing the inner harmony of a comprehensively developed personality, in which Raphael followed antiquity, and a complex multi-figure composition that conveys all the diversity of the world. These problems were resolved by Leonardo in “The Last Supper” with his characteristic logic. Raphael enriched these possibilities, achieving amazing freedom in depicting space and the movement of the human figure in it, impeccable harmony between the environment and man. The diverse life phenomena under Raphael’s brush simply and naturally formed into an architectonically clear composition, but behind all this stood the strict precision of every detail, the elusive logic of construction, and wise self-restraint, which makes his works classic. None of the Renaissance masters perceived the pagan essence of antiquity as deeply and naturally as Raphael; It is not without reason that he is considered the artist who most fully connected ancient traditions with Western European art of the modern era.
Rafael Santi was born in 1483 in the city of Urbino, one of the centers of artistic culture in Italy, at the court of the Duke of Urbino, in the family of a court painter and poet, who was the first teacher of the future master. The early period of Raphael's work is perfectly characterized by small painting in the form of a tondo “Madonna Conestabile”, with its simplicity and laconicism of strictly selected details (with all the timidity of the composition) and the special, inherent in all Raphael’s works, subtle lyricism and a sense of peace. In 1500, Raphael left Urbino for Perugia to study in the workshop of the famous Umbrian artist Perugino, under whose influence The Betrothal of Mary (1504) was written. The sense of rhythm, proportionality of plastic masses, spatial intervals, the relationship between figures and background, coordination of basic tones (in “The Betrothal” these are golden, red and green in combination with a soft blue sky background) create the harmony that is already evident in Raphael’s early works and distinguishes him from the artists of the previous era. In 1504, Raphael moved to Florence, the artistic atmosphere of which was already saturated with the trends of the High Renaissance and contributed to his search for a perfect harmonious image.
Throughout his life, Raphael searched for this image in the Madonna; his numerous works interpreting the image of the Madonna earned him worldwide fame. The merit of the artist, first of all, is that he was able to embody all the subtlest shades of feelings in the idea of motherhood, to combine lyricism and deep emotionality with monumental grandeur. This is visible in all his Madonnas, starting with the youthfully timid “Madonna Conestabile”: in the “Madonna of the Greens”, “Madonna with the Goldfinch”, “Madonna in the Armchair” and especially at the pinnacle of Raphael’s spirit and skill - in the “Sistine Madonna”. Undoubtedly, this was the way to overcome the simple-minded interpretation of serene and bright maternal love for an image saturated with high spirituality and tragedy, built on a perfect harmonic rhythm: plastic, coloristic, linear. But it was also a path of consistent idealization. However, in “The Sistine Madonna” this idealizing principle is relegated to the background and gives way to the tragic feeling emanating from this ideally beautiful young woman with the baby God in her arms, whom she gives to atone for human sins. The Madonna's gaze, directed past, or rather through the viewer, is full of mournful anticipation of the tragic fate of her son (whose gaze is also childishly serious). “The Sistine Madonna” is one of Raphael’s most perfect works in terms of language: the figure of Mary and Child, strictly silhouetted against the sky, is united by a common rhythm of movement with the figures of St. The barbarians and Pope Sixtus II, whose gestures are addressed to the Madonna, as are the views of two angels (more like putti, which is so characteristic of the Renaissance), are in the lower part of the composition. The figures are also united by a common golden color, as if personifying the Divine radiance. But the main thing is the type of face of the Madonna, which embodies the synthesis of the ancient ideal of beauty with the spirituality of the Christian ideal, which is so characteristic of the worldview of the High Renaissance.
The Sistine Madonna is a late work by Raphael. Before this, in 1509, Pope Julius II invites young artist to Rome to paint the personal papal rooms (stanzas) in the Vatican Palace. At the beginning of the 16th century. Rome becomes the main cultural center of Italy. The art of the High Renaissance reaches its greatest flowering in this city, where, by the will of the patronizing popes Julius II and Leo X, artists such as Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael simultaneously work. Art develops under the sign of national unity (for the popes dreamed of uniting the country under their rule), feeds on ancient traditions, and expresses the ideology of humanism. The general ideological program for painting papal rooms is to glorify the authority of the Catholic Church and its head, the Pope.
Raphael paints the first two stanzas. In the Stanza della Segnatura (room of signatures, seals), he painted four fresco allegories of the main spheres of human spiritual activity: philosophy, poetry, theology and jurisprudence. It was common for the art of the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance to depict sciences and arts in the form of individual allegorical figures. Raphael solved these themes in the form of multi-figure compositions, sometimes representing real group portraits, interesting both for their individualization and typicality. It was in these portraits that Raphael embodied the humanistic ideal of the perfect intellectual man, according to the Renaissance. The official program for painting the Stanza della Segnatura was a reflection of the idea of reconciling the Christian religion with ancient culture. The artistic implementation of this program by Raphael - the son of his time - resulted in the victory of the secular over the ecclesiastical. In the fresco “The School of Athens,” which personifies philosophy, Raphael presented Plato and Aristotle surrounded by philosophers and scientists from different periods of history. Their gestures (one points to the sky, the other to the earth) characterize the essence of the differences in their teachings. On the right, in the image of Euclid, Raphael depicted his great contemporary, the architect Bramante; Next are famous astronomers and mathematicians; at the very edge of the right group the artist painted himself. On the steps of the stairs he depicted the founder of the Cynic school, Diogenes, in the left group - Socrates, Pythagoras, in the foreground, in a state of deep thought, Heraclitus of Ephesus. According to some researchers, the majestic and beautiful image of Plato was inspired by the extraordinary appearance of Leonardo, and in Heraclitus Raphael captured Michelangelo. But no matter how expressive the individualities depicted by Raphael are, the main thing in the painting remains the general atmosphere of high spirituality, the feeling of strength and power of the human spirit and mind.
Raphael. Madonna in a chair. Florence, Pitti Gallery
Plato and Aristotle, like other ancient sages, were supposed to symbolize the sympathies of the popes of pagan antiquity. Placed freely in space, in a variety of rhythm and movement, the individual groups are united by the figures of Aristotle and Plato. Logic, absolute stability, clarity and simplicity of the composition give the viewer the impression of extraordinary integrity and amazing harmony. In the fresco "Parnassus", personifying poetry, Apollo is depicted surrounded by muses and poets - from Homer and Sappho to Dante. The complexity of the composition was that the fresco “Parnassus” was placed on a wall broken by a window opening. By depicting a female figure leaning on the frame, Raphael skillfully linked the overall composition with the shape of the window. The image of Dante is repeated twice in the frescoes of Raphael: once again he depicted the great poet in an allegory of theology, often incorrectly called the “Disputa,” among the artists and philosophers of the Quattrocento (Fra Angelico, Savonarola, etc.). The fourth fresco of Stanza della Segnatura “Measure, Wisdom and Strength” is dedicated to jurisprudence.
In the second room, called the “Stanza of Eliodorus,” Raphael painted frescoes on historical and legendary subjects glorifying the popes of Rome: “The Expulsion of Eliodorus” - on the Bible plot about how the punishment of the Lord in the form of an angel - a beautiful horseman in golden armor - fell on the Syrian leader Eliodor, who tried to steal gold from the Jerusalem Temple, intended for widows and orphans. It is no coincidence that Raphael, who worked on the order of Julius II, turns to this topic: the French are preparing for a campaign in Italy and the Pope reminds of God’s punishment of all who encroach on Rome. It is not for nothing that Raphael introduced into the composition the image of the Pope himself, who is carried in a chair to
Michelangelo. Pieta. Rome, St. Petra
to a defeated criminal. Other frescoes are also dedicated to the glorification of popes and their miraculous power: “Mass in Bolsena”, “Meeting of Pope Leo I with Attila” - and in the first Pope the features of Julius II are given, and this is one of his most expressive portraits, and in the last - Leo X. In the frescoes of the second stanza, Raphael paid great attention not to linear architectonics, but to the role of color and light. This is especially visible in the fresco “The Deliverance of the Apostle Peter from Prison.” The threefold appearance of an angel in three scenes depicted on the same plane of the wall, in a single composition (which in itself was an archaic technique), is presented in the complex lighting of various light sources: the moon, torches, radiance emanating from the angel, creating a large emotional stress. This is one of the most dramatic and subtle frescoes. The remaining frescoes of the Vatican stanzas were painted by Raphael's students based on his sketches.
The students also helped Raphael in painting the Vatican loggias adjacent to the Pope’s rooms, painted according to his sketches and under his supervision with motifs of ancient ornaments, drawn mainly from newly discovered ancient grottoes (hence the name “grotesques”).
Raphael performed works of various genres. His gift as a decorator, as well as a director and storyteller, was fully manifested in a series of eight cardboards for tapestries for the Sistine Chapel on scenes from the life of the apostles Peter and Paul (“A Miraculous Catch of Fish,” for example). These paintings throughout the 16th-18th centuries. served as a kind of standard for classicists. Raphael's deep understanding of the essence of antiquity is especially visible in the painting of the Roman Villa Farnesina, built according to his design (the fresco "The Triumph of Galatea", scenes from Apuleius' tale of Cupid and Psyche).
Michelangelo. Pieta. Fragment. Rome, St. Petra
Raphael was also the greatest portrait painter of his era, who created a type of image in which the individual is in close unity with the typical, where, in addition to certain specific features, the image of a man of the era appears, which allows us to see historical portraits-types in Raphael’s portraits (“Pope Julius II”, “Lion X”, the artist’s friend the writer Castiglione, the beautiful “Donna Velata”, etc.). And in his portrait images, as a rule, internal balance and harmony prevail.
At the end of his life, Raphael was disproportionately loaded with a variety of works and orders. It’s even hard to imagine that all this could be done by one person. He was a central figure in the artistic life of Rome; after the death of Bramante (1514), he became the chief architect of the Cathedral of St. Peter, was in charge of archaeological excavations in Rome and its environs and the protection of ancient monuments. This inevitably attracted students and large state assistants in the execution of large orders. Raphael died in 1520; his premature death was unexpected for his contemporaries. His ashes are buried in the Pantheon.
The third greatest master of the High Renaissance - Michelangelo - far outlived Leonardo and Raphael. The first half of his creative career occurred during the heyday of the art of the High Renaissance, and the second during the Counter-Reformation and the beginning of the formation of Baroque art. Of the brilliant galaxy of artists of the High Renaissance, Michelangelo surpassed everyone with the richness of his images, civic pathos, and sensitivity to changes in public mood. Hence the creative embodiment of the collapse of Renaissance ideas.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) was born in Caprese, in the family of a podesta (city governor, judge). In 1488, in Florence, where the family moved, he entered the workshop of Ghirlandaio, a year later - into the sculpture workshop at the monastery of San Marco with one of Donatello's students. During these years, he became close to Lorenzo de' Medici, whose death left a deep mark on him. It was in the Medici gardens and in the Medici house that Michelangelo began to carefully study ancient sculpture. His relief “Battle of the Centaurs” is already a work of the High Renaissance in its internal harmony. In 1496, the young artist left for Rome, where he created his first works that brought him fame: “Bacchus” and “Pieta”. Literally captured by the images of antiquity, Michelangelo depicted the ancient god of wine as a naked young man, as if slightly staggering, turning his gaze to a bowl of wine. The naked beautiful body from now on and forever becomes the main subject of art for Michelangelo. The second sculpture - “Pieta” - opens a whole series of works by the master on this subject and puts him forward among the first sculptors of Italy.
Michelangelo. Medici Chapel with Giuliano's tomb in the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence
Michelangelo. The Fall and Expulsion from Paradise. Fresco of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
Michelangelo depicted Christ prostrate on Mary's lap. The young, ideally beautiful face of the Madonna is mournful, but very restrained. To position a large male body on the Madonna's lap, the sculptor multiplies the number of folds of the cloak falling from Mary's knees. The figures form a pyramid in the composition, giving the group stability and completeness. At the same time, even in this early work of Michelangelo there are features that are not characteristic of the art of the Renaissance or, say, unusual for it: in an unusual strong angle, the head of Christ is thrown back, his right shoulder is turned out, the left part of the composition, loaded with more than the right, required a complex asymmetrical design of the pedestal , higher on the right side. All together gave the group an internal tension unusual for Renaissance art. However, the dominant features in this composition are features characteristic of the High Renaissance: integrity heroic image, the classical clarity of monumental artistic language.
Returning to Florence in 1501, Michelangelo, on behalf of the Signoria, undertook to sculpt the figure of David from a block of marble damaged before him by an unlucky sculptor. In 1504, Michelangelo completed the famous statue, which the Florentines called the “Giant” and placed in front of the Palazzo Vecchia, the city hall. The opening of the monument turned into a national celebration. The image of David inspired many Quattrocento artists. But Michelangelo portrays him not as a boy, as in Donatello and Verrocchio, but as a young man in the full bloom of his strength, and not after a battle, with a giant’s head at his feet, but before the battle, at the moment of the highest tension of strength. In the beautiful image of David, in his stern face, the sculptor conveyed the titanic power of passion, unyielding will, civil courage, and the boundless power of a free man. The Florentines saw in David a hero close to them, a citizen of the republic and its defender. The social significance of the sculpture was immediately understood.
In 1504, Michelangelo (as already mentioned in connection with Leonardo) begins to work on the painting of the “Hall of the Five Hundred” in the Palazzo Signoria, but the drawings and cartons for his “Battle of Cascina” have not survived, like Leonardo’s work.
In 1505, Pope Julius II invited Michelangelo to Rome to build his tomb. The sculptor's idea was grandiose: he wanted to create a colossal monument-mausoleum, decorated with forty figures more than life-size. He spent eight months in the mountains of Carrara, supervising the extraction of marble, but when he returned to Rome, he learned that the Pope had abandoned his plan. An angry Michelangelo left for Florence, but, demanded by the Pope, under pressure from the Florentine authorities, who were afraid of complications with Rome, he was forced to return to Rome again, this time for an equally grandiose, but, fortunately, realized plan - painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican palace
Michelangelo worked alone on the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, from 1508 to 1512, painting an area of about 600 square meters. m (48x13 m) at a height of 18 m.
Michelangelo dedicated the central part of the ceiling to scenes of sacred history, starting from the creation of the world. These compositions are framed by the same painted cornice, but creating the illusion of architecture, and are separated, also by picturesque rods. Picturesque rectangles emphasize and enrich the real architecture of the ceiling. Under the picturesque cornice, Michelangelo painted prophets and sibyls (each figure is about three meters), in lunettes (arches above the windows) he depicted episodes from the Bible and the ancestors of Christ as simple people engaged in everyday affairs.
The nine central compositions unfold the events of the first days of creation, the story of Adam and Eve, the global flood, and all these scenes, in fact, are a hymn to man, the forces inherent in him, his power and his beauty. God is, first of all, a creator who knows no barriers on the path to creation, an image close to the humanistic era’s idea of a creator (scene “The Creation of the Sun and Moon”). Adam is ideally beautiful in the scene “The Creation of Adam”; he is still deprived of will, but the touch of the creator’s hand, like an electric spark, pierces him and ignites life in this beautiful body. Even the tragic situation of a flood cannot shake faith in the power of man. Greatness, power and nobility are expressed in the images of the prophets and sibyls: creative inspiration - in the person of Ezekiel, who heard the voice of God; contemplation - in the image of the Erythraean Sibyl; wisdom, philosophical thoughtfulness and detachment from worldly vanity - in the figure of Zechariah; sorrowful reflection - Jeremiah. With a huge number of figures, the painting of the Sistine ceiling is logically clear and easily visible. It does not destroy the plane of the arch, but reveals the tectonic structure. Michelangelo's main means of expression are emphasized plasticity, precision and clarity of line and volume. The plastic principle in Michelangelo’s painting always dominates the pictorial, confirming the artist’s idea that “the best painting will be that which is closest to the relief.”
Soon after the completion of work in Sistine, Julius II died and his heirs returned to the idea of a tombstone. In 1513-1516. Michelangelo performs the figure of Moses and slaves (captives) for this tombstone. According to his design, the sculptor’s students then built a wall tomb, in the lower tier of which the figure of Moses was placed. The image of Moses is one of the most powerful in the work of the mature master. He invested in him the dream of a wise, courageous leader, full of titanic strength, expression, will-qualities, so necessary then for the unification of his homeland. The slave figures were not included in the final version of the tomb. Perhaps they had some kind of allegorical meaning (art in captivity after the death of the Pope? - there is such an interpretation). “The Bound Slave”, “The Dying Slave” convey different states of a person, different stages of the struggle: a powerful impulse in the desire to free himself from fetters, powerlessness (“The Bound Slave”), the last breath, dying life in a beautiful but already numb body (“The Dying Slave” ").
From 1520 to 1534, Michelangelo worked on one of the most significant and most tragic sculptural works - on the tomb of the Medici (Florentine church of San Lorenzo), expressing all the experiences that befell the master himself, his hometown, and the whole the country as a whole. Since the late 20s, Italy was literally torn apart by both external and internal enemies. In 1527, mercenary soldiers defeated Rome, Protestants plundered the Catholic shrines of the eternal city. The Florentine bourgeoisie overthrows the Medici, who ruled again since 1510, after the death of Pietro Soderini, but the Pope marches on Florence. Florence is preparing for defense, Michelangelo is at the head of the construction of military fortifications, experiences a mood of confusion, despair, leaves, literally runs away from Florence, having learned about the impending betrayal of its condottiere, and returns to his hometown again to witness its defeat. In the terrible terror that began, many of Michelangelo’s friends died, and he himself was forced to live as an exile for some time.
In a mood of severe pessimism, in a state of increasing deep religiosity, Michelangelo works on the Medici tomb. He himself built an extension to the Florentine church of San Lorenzo - a small but very high room, covered with a dome, and decorated two walls of the sacristy (its interior) with sculptural tombstones. One wall is decorated with the figure of Lorenzo, the opposite with Giuliano, and below at their feet there are sarcophagi decorated with allegorical sculptural images - symbols of fast-flowing time: “Morning” and “Evening” in Lorenzo’s tombstone, “Night” and “Day” in Giuliano’s tombstone . Both images - Lorenzo and Giuliano - do not have a portrait resemblance, which is why they differ from the traditional solutions of the 15th century. Michelangelo emphasizes the expression of fatigue and melancholy in the face of Giuliano and the heavy thought, bordering on despair, in Lorenzo, considering it not necessary to accurately convey the features in the faces of the models. For him, the philosophical idea of contrasting life and death, expressed in poetic form, is more important. A feeling of uneasiness and anxiety comes from the images of Lorenzo and Giuliano. This is achieved by the composition itself: the figures are planted in the cramped space of the niches, as if squeezed by pilasters. This restless rhythm is further intensified by the poses of allegorical figures of the time of day: tense curved bodies seem to be rolling off the sloping lids of sarcophagi, not finding support, their heads cross the cornices, disturbing the tectonics of the walls. All these dissonant notes, emphasizing the state of brokenness, violate the architectural harmony of the Renaissance and are a harbinger of a new era in art. In the Medici Chapel, architectural forms and plastic images are in indissoluble connection, expressing a single idea.
Even Pope Clement VII, shortly before his death, taking advantage of one of Michelangelo’s visits to Rome, suggested that he paint the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel with the image of the “Last Judgment.” Busy at that time with statues for the Medici Chapel in Florence, the sculptor refused. Paul III, immediately after his election, began to persistently demand that Michelangelo fulfill this plan, and in 1534, interrupting work on the tomb, which he completed only in 1545, Michelangelo left for Rome, where he began his second work in the Sistine Chapel - to the painting "The Last Judgment" (1535-1541) - a grandiose creation that expressed the tragedy of the human race. The features of the new artistic system appeared even more clearly in this work by Michelangelo. The creative judgment, the punishing Christ is placed in the center of the composition, and around him in a rotating circular motion are depicted sinners casting themselves into hell, the righteous ascending to heaven, and the dead rising from their graves to God's judgment. Everything is full of horror, despair, anger, confusion. Even Mary, who stands for the people, is afraid of her formidable son and turns away from his hand, which inexorably separates sinners from the righteous. Complex angles of intertwined, twisted bodies, extreme dynamism, increased expression, creating an expression of anxiety, anxiety, confusion - all these are features that are deeply alien to the High Renaissance, just as the very interpretation of the theme of the “Last Judgment” (instead of the triumph of justice over evil) is also alien to it - catastrophe, collapse of the world).
Painter, sculptor, poet, Michelangelo was also a brilliant architect. He completed the staircase of the Florentine Laurentian Library, designed the Capitol Square in Rome, erected the Pius Gate (Porta Pia), and since 1546 he has been working on the Cathedral of St. Peter, begun by Bramante. Michelangelo owns the drawing and drawing of the dome, which was executed after the master’s death and is still one of the main dominant features in the city’s panorama.
The last two decades of Michelangelo's life coincided with a period when the free-thinking traits of the great humanistic era of the Renaissance were being eradicated in Italy. At the insistence of the Inquisition, which considered such a number of naked bodies in the Last Judgment fresco obscene, Michelangelo's student Daniele de Volterra recorded some of the figures. The last years of Michelangelo's life were years of loss of hope, loss of loved ones and friends, a time of his complete spiritual loneliness. But this is also the time of the creation of the most powerful works in terms of tragedy of the worldview and laconicism of expression, testifying to his undying genius. These are mainly sculptural compositions and drawings (in graphics, Michelangelo was as great a master as Leonardo and Raphael) on the theme of “Lamentation” and “Crucifixion”.
Michelangelo died in Rome at the age of 89. His body was taken at night to Florence and buried in the oldest church in his hometown of Santa Croce. The historical significance of Michelangelo's art, its impact on his contemporaries and on subsequent eras can hardly be overestimated. Some foreign researchers interpret him as the first artist and architect of the Baroque. But most of all he is interesting as a bearer of the great realistic traditions of the Renaissance.
If Michelangelo's work in its second half already bears the features of a new era, then for Venice the entire 16th century still passes under the sign of the Cinquecento. Venice, which managed to maintain its independence, remains faithful to the traditions of the Renaissance longer.
From Gianbellino's workshop came two great artists of the High Venetian Renaissance: Giorgione and Titian.
Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco, nicknamed Giorgione (1477-1510), is a direct follower of his teacher and a typical artist of the High Renaissance. He was the first on Venetian soil to turn to literary themes and mythological subjects. Landscape, nature and the beautiful naked human body became for him a subject of art and an object of worship. With a sense of harmony, perfect proportions, exquisite linear rhythm, soft light painting, spirituality and psychological expressiveness of his images and at the same time logic and rationalism, Giorgione is close to Leonardo, who, undoubtedly, had a direct influence on him when he was passing from Milan in 1500. in Venice. But Giorgione is more emotional than the great Milanese master, and like a typical artist of Venice, he is interested not so much in linear perspective as in airy perspective and mainly in problems of color.
Already in the first known work, “Madonna of Castelfranco” (circa 1505), Giorgione appears as a fully established artist; The image of the Madonna is full of poetry, thoughtful dreaminess, permeated with that mood of sadness that is characteristic of all female images of Giorgione. Over the last five years of his life (Giorgione died of the plague, which was a particularly frequent visitor to Venice), the artist created his best works, executed in oil technique, the main one in the Venetian school in the period when mosaics became a thing of the past along with the entire medieval artistic system, and the fresco turned out to be unstable in the humid Venetian climate. In the 1506 painting “The Thunderstorm,” Giorgione depicts man as a part of nature. A woman nursing a child, a young man with a staff (who can be mistaken for a warrior with a halberd) are not united by any action, but are united in this majestic landscape by a common mood, a common state of mind. Giorgione has a subtle and unusually rich palette. The muted tones of the young man’s orange-red clothes, his greenish-white shirt, echoing the woman’s white cape, seem to be shrouded in that semi-twilight air that is characteristic of pre-storm lighting. The color green has a lot of shades: olive in the trees, almost black in the depths of the water, leaden in the clouds. And all this is united by one luminous tone, conveying the impression of instability, anxiety, anxiety, but also joy, like the very state of a person in anticipation of an approaching thunderstorm.
The same feeling of surprise at the complex spiritual world of man is evoked by the image of Judith, which combines seemingly incompatible features: courageous majesty and subtle poetry. The painting is painted in yellow and red ocher, in a single golden color. The soft black and white modeling of the face and hands is somewhat reminiscent of Leonard’s “sfumato”. The pose of Judith, standing by the balustrade, is absolutely calm, her face is serene and thoughtful: a beautiful woman against the backdrop of beautiful nature. But in her hand a double-edged sword glistens coldly, and her tender foot rests on the dead head of Holofernes. This contrast introduces a feeling of confusion and deliberately breaks the integrity of the idyllic picture.
Giorgione. Country concert. Paris, Louvre
Titian. Venus of Urbino. Florence, Uffvdi Gallery
The image of “Sleeping Venus” (circa 1508-1510) is permeated with spirituality and poetry. Her body is written easily, freely, gracefully, it is not without reason that researchers talk about the “musicality” of Giorgione’s rhythms; it is not without sensual charm. But the face with closed eyes is chaste and stern; in comparison with it, Titian’s Venuses seem like true pagan goddesses. Giorgione did not have time to complete work on “Sleeping Venus”; according to contemporaries, the landscape background in the picture was painted by Titian, as in another late work of the master - “Rural Concert” (1508-1510). This painting, depicting two gentlemen in magnificent clothes and two naked women, one of whom takes water from a well, and the other plays the pipe, is Giorgione’s most cheerful and full-blooded work. But this living, natural feeling of the joy of being is not associated with any specific action, it is full of enchanting contemplation and a dreamy mood. The combination of these features is so characteristic of Giorgione that it is “Rural Concert” that can be considered his most typical work. Giorgione's sensual joy is always poeticized and spiritualized.
Titian. Portrait of Ippolito Riminaldi. Florence, Pitti Gallery
Titian Vecellio (1477?-1576) is the greatest artist of the Venetian Renaissance. He created works on both mythological and Christian subjects, worked in the portrait genre, his coloristic talent is exceptional, his compositional inventiveness is inexhaustible, and his happy longevity allowed him to leave behind a rich creative heritage that had a huge influence on his descendants. Titian was born in Cadore, a small town at the foot of the Alps, into a military family, studied, like Giorgione, with Gianbellino, and his first work (1508) was a joint painting with Giorgione of the barns of the German courtyard in Venice. After Giorgione's death in 1511, Titian painted several rooms in Padua for the scuolo, philanthropic brotherhoods, in which the influence of Giotto, who once worked in Padua, and Masaccio is undoubtedly felt. Life in Padua introduced the artist, of course, to the works of Mantegna and Donatello. Fame comes to Titian early. Already in 1516 he became the first painter of the republic, from the 20s - the most famous artist of Venice, and success did not leave him until the end of his days. Around 1520, the Duke of Ferrara ordered him a series of paintings in which Titian appears as a singer of antiquity, who managed to feel and, most importantly, embody the spirit of paganism (“Bacchanalia”, “Feast of Venus”, “Bacchus and Ariadne”).
Venice of these years is one of the centers of advanced culture and science. Titian becomes the brightest figure in the artistic life of Venice; together with the architect Jacopo Sansovino and the writer Pietro Aretino, he forms a kind of triumvirate, leading the entire intellectual life of the republic. Rich Venetian patricians commissioned Titian to create altarpieces, and he created huge icons: “The Assumption of Mary”, “Madonna of Pesaro” (named after the customers depicted in the foreground) and much more - a certain type of monumental composition on a religious subject, which at the same time plays the role of not only altar image, but also a decorative panel. In The Madonna of Pesaro, Titian developed the principle of decentralizing composition, which was unknown to the Florentine and Roman schools. By shifting the figure of the Madonna to the right, he thus contrasted two centers: a semantic one, personified by the figure of the Madonna, and a spatial one, determined by the vanishing point, placed far to the left, even outside the frame, which created the emotional intensity of the work. The sonorous picturesque range: Mary’s white bedspread, green carpet, blue, carmine, golden clothes of the upcoming ones - does not contradict, but appears in harmonious unity with the bright characters of the models. Brought up on the “ornate” painting of Carpaccio and the exquisite coloring of Gianbellino, Titian during this period loved subjects where he could show a Venetian street, the splendor of its architecture, and a festive, curious crowd. This is how one of his largest compositions, “The Presentation of Mary into the Temple” (circa 1538), is created - the next step after the “Madonna of Pesaro” in the art of depicting a group scene, in which Titian skillfully combines vital naturalness with stately elation. Titian writes a lot on mythological subjects, especially after his trip to Rome in 1545, where the spirit of antiquity was comprehended by him, it seems, with the greatest completeness. It was then that his versions of “Danae” appeared (the early version was 1545; all the others were around 1554), in which he, strictly following the plot of the myth, depicts a princess, longingly awaiting the arrival of Zeus, and a maid, greedily catching Golden Rain. Danae is beautiful in accordance with the ancient ideal of beauty, which the Venetian master follows. In all these variants, Titian's interpretation of the image carries within itself a carnal, earthly beginning, an expression of the simple joy of being. His “Venus” (circa 1538), in which many researchers see a portrait of Duchess Eleanor of Urbino, is close in composition to Giorgionev’s. But the introduction of an everyday scene in the interior instead of a landscape background, the attentive gaze of the model’s wide open eyes, the dog at her feet are details that convey the feeling real life on earth, not on Olympus.
Titian. Pieta. Venice, Academy of Fine Arts Museum
Throughout his life, Titian was engaged in portraiture. His models (especially in portraits of the early and middle periods of creativity) always emphasize the nobility of appearance, the majesty of posture, the restraint of pose and gesture, created by an equally noble color scheme and sparse, strictly selected details (portrait of a young man with a glove, portraits of Ippolito Riminaldi , Pietro Aretino, daughter of Lavinia).
If Titian's portraits are always distinguished by the complexity of their characters and the intensity of their internal state, then in the years of creative maturity he creates especially dramatic images, contradictory characters, presented in opposition and clash, depicted with truly Shakespearean force (a group portrait of Pope Paul III with his nephews Ottavio and Alexander Farnese, 1545-1546). Such a complex group portrait was developed only in the Baroque era of the 17th century, just as an equestrian ceremonial portrait like Titian’s “Charles V at the Battle of Mühlberg” served as the basis for the traditional representative composition of Van Dyck’s portraits.
Towards the end of Titian's life, his work underwent significant changes. He still writes a lot on ancient subjects (“Venus and Adonis”, “The Shepherd and the Nymph”, “Diana and Actaeon”, “Jupiter and Antiope”), but increasingly turns to Christian themes, to scenes of martyrdom in which pagan cheerfulness, ancient harmony is replaced by a tragic attitude (“The Flagellation of Christ”, “Penitent Mary Magdalene”, “St. Sebastian”, “Lamentation”),
The technique of painting also changes: golden light colors and light glazes give way to powerful, stormy, impasto painting. The transfer of the texture of the objective world, its materiality is achieved with broad strokes of a limited palette. "St. Sebastian” is written, in fact, only in ocher and soot. The brushstroke conveys not only the texture of the material, its movement sculpts the form itself, creating the plasticity of the depicted.
The immeasurable depth of grief and the majestic beauty of the human being are conveyed in Titian’s last work, Lamentation, completed after the artist’s death by his student. The Madonna holding her son on her knees is frozen in grief, Magdalene raises her hand in despair, and the old man is in deep, mournful thoughtfulness. The flickering bluish-gray light brings together the contrasting color spots of the heroes’ clothes, the golden hair of Mary Magdalene, the almost sculpturally modeled statues in the niches and at the same time creates the impression of a fading, passing day, the onset of twilight, enhancing the tragic mood.
Titian died at an old age, having lived for almost a century, and is buried in the Venetian church dei Frari, decorated with his altarpieces. He had many students, but none of them were equal to the teacher. The enormous influence of Titian affected the painting of the next century, and was largely experienced by Rubens and Velazquez.
Throughout the 16th century, Venice remained the last stronghold of the country's independence and freedom; as already mentioned, it remained faithful to the traditions of the Renaissance for the longest time. But at the end of the century, the features of an approaching new era in art, a new artistic direction, are already obvious here. This can be seen in the work of two major artists of the second half of this century - Paolo Veronese and Jacopo Tintoretto.
Veronese. Marriage in Cana of Galilee. Fragment. Paris, Louvre
Paolo Cagliari, nicknamed Veronese (he was born in Verona, 1528-1588), was destined to become the last singer of the festive, jubilant Venice of the 16th century. He began by executing paintings for Verona palazzos and images for Verona churches, but fame came to him when in 1553 he began working on paintings for the Venetian Doge's Palace. From now on, Veronese's life is forever connected with Venice. He does murals, but more often he paints large oil paintings on canvas for the Venetian patricians, altar images for Venetian churches on their own order or on the official order of the republic. He wins the competition for the decoration project of St. Brand. Fame accompanies him all his life. But no matter what Veronese wrote: “The Marriage in Cana of Galilee” for the refectory of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore (1562-1563; size 6.6x9.9 m, depicting 138 figures); paintings on allegorical, mythological, secular subjects; whether portraits, genre paintings, landscapes; “The Feast at Simon the Pharisee” (1570) or “The Feast at the House of Levi” (1573), later rewritten at the insistence of the Inquisition, are all huge decorative paintings of festive Venice, where the Venetian crowd dressed in elegant costumes is depicted against the backdrop of a broadly painted perspective of the Venetian architectural landscape, as if the world for the artist was a constant brilliant extravaganza, one endless theatrical action. Behind all this is such an excellent knowledge of nature, everything is executed in such an exquisite single (silver-pearl with blue) color with all the brightness and variegation of rich clothes, so inspired by the talent and temperament of the artist, that the theatrical action acquires life-like convincingness. There is a healthy sense of joie de vivre in Veronese. His powerful architectural backgrounds are not inferior in their harmony to Raphael’s, but complex movement, unexpected angles of figures, increased dynamics and congestion in the composition are features that appear at the end of creativity, a passion for illusionistic images speak of the onset of art with other possibilities and expressiveness.
A tragic attitude was manifested in the work of another artist - Jacopo Robusti, known in art as Tintoretto (1518-1594) (“Tintoretto” is a dyer: the artist’s father was a silk dyer). Tintoretto spent a very short time in Titian’s workshop, however, according to contemporaries, the motto hung on the doors of his workshop: “Drawing by Michelangelo, coloring by Titian.” But Tintoretgo was perhaps a better colorist than his teacher, although, unlike Titian and Veronese, his recognition was never complete. Tintoretto's numerous works, written mainly on subjects of mystical miracles, are full of anxiety, anxiety, and confusion. Already in the first painting that brought him fame, “The Miracle of St. Mark” (1548), he presents the figure of the saint in such a complex perspective, and all people in a state of such pathos and such violent movement, which would have been impossible in the art of the High Renaissance in its classical period. Like Veronese, Tintoretto writes a lot for the Doge's Palace, Venetian churches, but most of all for philanthropic brotherhoods. His two largest cycles were performed for Scuolo di San Rocco and Scuolo di San Marco.
Tintoretto. Miracle of St. Brand. Venice, Academy of Fine Arts Museum
The principle of Tintoretto’s depiction is built, as it were, on contradictions, which probably scared off his contemporaries: his images are clearly of a democratic nature, the action takes place in the simplest setting, but the subjects are mystical, full of exalted feelings, express the ecstatic fantasy of the master, and are executed with manneristic sophistication. He also has subtly romantic images, covered with a lyrical feeling (“The Rescue of Arsinoe”, 1555), but even here the mood of anxiety is conveyed by fluctuating, unsteady light, cold greenish-grayish flashes of color. His composition “Introduction to the Temple” (1555) is unusual, as it violates all accepted classical norms of construction. The fragile figurine of little Mary is placed on the steps of a steeply rising staircase, at the top of which the high priest awaits her. The feeling of the enormity of space, the speed of movement, the strength of a single feeling gives special significance to what is depicted. Terrible elements and flashes of lightning usually accompany the action in Tintoretto’s paintings, enhancing the drama of the event (“The Abduction of the Body of St. Mark”).
Since the 60s, Tintoretto's compositions have become simpler. He no longer uses contrasts of color spots, but builds a color scheme on unusually diverse transitions of strokes, now flashing, now fading, which enhances the drama and psychological depth of what is happening. This is how he wrote the “Last Supper” for the brotherhood of St. Mark (1562-1566).
From 1565 to 1587 Tintoretto worked on the decoration of the Scuolo di San Rocco. The gigantic cycle of these paintings (several dozen canvases and several lampshades), occupying two floors of the room, is imbued with piercing emotionality, deep human feeling, sometimes a caustic feeling of loneliness, human absorption in limitless space, a sense of human insignificance before the greatness of nature. All these sentiments were deeply alien to the humanistic art of the High Renaissance. In one of the last versions of The Last Supper, Tintoretto already presents an almost established system of expressive means of the Baroque. The table placed diagonally, the flickering light refracted in the dishes and snatching figures from the darkness, the sharp chiaroscuro, the multiplicity of figures presented in complex angles - all this creates the impression of some kind of vibrating environment, a feeling of extreme tension. Something ghostly, unreal is felt in his later landscapes for the same Scuolo di San Rocco (“Flight into Egypt”, “St. Mary of Egypt”). In the last period of his creativity, Tintoretto worked for the Doge's Palace (composition "Paradise", after 1588).
Tintoretto did a lot of portrait work. He portrayed the Venetian patricians, withdrawn in their greatness, and the proud Venetian doges. His painting style is noble, restrained and majestic, as is his interpretation of the models. The master depicts himself in his self-portrait full of heavy thoughts, painful anxiety, and mental confusion. But this is a character to which moral suffering has given strength and greatness.
Concluding the review of the Venetian Renaissance, it is impossible not to mention the greatest architect who was born and worked in Vicenza near Venice and who left there excellent examples of his knowledge and rethinking of ancient architecture - Andrea Palladio (1508-1580, Villa Cornaro in Piombino, Villa Rotonda in Vicenza, completed after his death by students of his design, many buildings in Vicenza). The result of his study of antiquity was the books “Roman Antiquities” (1554), “Four Books on Architecture” (1570-1581), but antiquity was a “living organism” for him, according to the fair observation of the researcher. “The laws of architecture live in his soul just as instinctively as the instinctive law of verse lives in Pushkin’s soul. Like Pushkin, he is his own norm” (P. Muratov).
In subsequent centuries, Palladio's influence was enormous, even giving rise to the name "Palladianism." The “Palladian Renaissance” in England began with Inigo Jones, continued throughout the 17th century, and only Bro. Adams began to move away from him; in France, its features are carried by the work of the Blondels St. and Jr.; in Russia, the “Palladians” were (already in the 18th century) N. Lvov, br. Neyolovs, C. Cameron and most of all J. Quarenghi. In Russian estate architecture of the 19th century and even in the Art Nouveau era, the rationality and completeness of Palladio's style manifested itself in the architectural images of neoclassicism.
The northern cities of Europe (northern in relation to Italy) did not have the same independence as the Italian ones; they were more dependent on the power of a major lord, king or emperor, on the entire classically developed system of feudalism. This undoubtedly affected the nature of the culture of Northern Europe during the Renaissance. The art of the Northern Renaissance was more influenced by the medieval worldview. It has more religious feeling, symbolism, it is more conventional in form, more archaic, more connected with Gothic and, naturally, less familiar with antiquity, with which it became close only through Italy at the end of the 15th century. The Northern Renaissance lags behind Italian by a whole century and begins when Italian enters the highest phase of its development.
However, northern cities took part in a complex socio-political struggle, which is characteristic of the entire history of Northern Europe in the 15th-16th centuries. When Italian cities lost their independence, the northern cities, hardened in the constant struggle with the feudal lords, retained their importance at the end of the 16th and 17th centuries. and become centers of progressive movements during the formation of national absolutist states.
Let us also recall that the transition from the Middle Ages to the New Age occurred not only through the Renaissance, which sought to revive ancient culture, but also through the Reformation, which called on the Catholic Church to return to the “apostolic times.”
Both the Renaissance and the Reformation had something in common - they were a reaction to the crisis of the late Middle Ages. But they understood the way out of the crisis differently and therefore, as correctly noted, they were movements in different directions. We are not talking here about the difference in views of Protestants (Lutherans, and even more so Calvinists as the extreme radical branch of Protestantism) and Catholics on the church and faith. But let us not forget that the Reformation was also a reaction to the Renaissance, with its idea of man as the most valuable of truths (“above all truths is man himself”). This incompatibility of the Renaissance and the Reformation was already obvious and clearly expressed in the famous dispute (1524-1525) between the greatest humanist of the 16th century. Erasmus of Rotterdam and the first reformer Martin Luther. “In their person, the Renaissance and the Reformation will oppose themselves to each other and go in different directions” (P. Sapronov).
The art of the Northern Renaissance cannot be understood without taking into account the Reformation movement, the influence of which on it was direct and obvious. In the feeling of the insignificance of man before God, his incommensurability with God, the Reformation rejected art to some extent; in a Protestant church there is no carving, no sculpture, no stained glass, but only bare walls, benches and a cross. And a shepherd, who is not at all the same thing as a priest - a mediator between a layman and God, but only a representative of the community, chosen by it to perform divine services. The Reformation was approaching the Renaissance, but this process, naturally, was not momentary, and the latter managed to manifest itself with great original force in the north of Europe. The influence of the Reformation with its realism and pragmatism affected the art of the Northern Renaissance in its close attention and love for reality, for the accuracy of details, in the interest in depicting the deliberately rough, sometimes even repulsively ugly, ugly (which was absolutely unacceptable for the Italian Renaissance) - this is amazing coexisted with the feeling of the mystical, unreal, with the dynamism and atectonicity of forms, which unites the Northern Renaissance, on the one hand, with Gothic, and on the other, with the future art of Baroque, perhaps even more firmly than Italy. Some researchers generally rejected the Renaissance in Northern Europe, where Gothic only “smoothly” transitioned into Baroque, considering the Northern Renaissance simply “the autumn of the Middle Ages” (J. Huizinga).
It is interesting to note that the first shoots of the new art of the Renaissance in the Netherlands are observed in book miniatures, which would seem to be most associated with medieval traditions.
The Dutch Renaissance in painting begins with the "Ghent Altarpiece" by the brothers Hubert (died 1426) and Jan (c. 1390-1441) van Eyck, completed by Jan van Eyck in 1432. The Ghent Altarpiece (Ghent, Church of St. Bavo) is a two-tiered folding room, on 12 boards of which (when opened) 12 scenes are presented. At the top is Christ enthroned with Mary and John in attendance, angels singing and playing music, and Adam and Eve; below on five boards is the scene of the “Adoration of the Lamb.”
In conveying perspective, in drawing, in knowledge of anatomy, Van Eyck's painting, of course, cannot be compared with what Masaccio was doing almost at the same time. But it contains other features that are no less important for art: the Dutch masters seem to be looking at the world for the first time, which they convey with extraordinary care and detail; Every blade of grass, every piece of fabric represents for them a high piece of art. This reflected the principles of Dutch miniature painting. In the mood of the singing angels there is a lot of true religious feeling, spirituality, and emotional tension. The Van Eycks improved their oil technique: oil made it possible to more comprehensively convey the brilliance, depth, and richness of the objective world, which attracted the attention of Dutch artists, and its colorful sonority.
Of the many Madonnas by Jan van Eyck, the most famous is the “Madonna of Chancellor Rollin” (circa 1435), so named because the donor, Chancellor Rollin, is depicted in front of the Madonna worshiping her. Behind the large three-arched opening there are windows on background Van Eyck painted a delicate cityscape with a river, a bridge, and hills stretching into the distance. The pattern of the clothes, the complex pattern of the floor and stained glass windows were conveyed with extraordinary care and love. Against this background, the calm figures of the Madonna and Child and the kneeling Chancellor are clearly visible. In the “Madonna of Canon van der Paele” (1436) everything becomes more massive. The forms become larger, heavier, and static becomes more pronounced. The gaze of the canon, who is introduced to Mary by St. George is stern, even gloomy. It is significant that the Dutch artist introduces such an everyday detail as glasses taken off in the donor’s hand, a prayer book placed with a finger. But these earthly features further emphasize his state of self-absorption, inner steadfastness, and spiritual firmness. The sonorous spots of red, blue, and white in the vestments also do not so much express real color relationships as convey the spiritual atmosphere of the scene.
Jan van Eyck worked a lot and successfully on portraits, always remaining reliably accurate, creating deeply individual image, but without losing the general characteristics of man as part of the universe behind the details (“Man with a Carnation”; “Man in a Turban”, 1433; portrait of the artist’s wife Margaret van Eyck, 1439). Instead of active action, characteristic of portraits of the Italian Renaissance, van Eyck puts forward contemplation as a quality that determines a person’s place in the world, helping to comprehend the beauty of its endless diversity. In the double portrait of the Arnolfini spouses (1434) - Giovanni Arnolfini, a merchant from Lucca, representative of the interests of the Medici house in Bruges, and his wife - the objects of the room against which the models are depicted are, according to medieval tradition, endowed symbolic meaning(apples on the chest by the window, a candle burning in the chandelier, a dog at your feet - a symbol of marital fidelity). But by placing the young couple in the setting of their home, the artist has the opportunity to convey the beauty of the objective world. He admiringly depicts a convex mirror in a wooden frame, a bronze chandelier, the red canopy of a bed that looks like a house, the shaggy fur of a dog, brown and green, united in a subtle pictorial harmony, the clothes of the models standing in front of the viewer, bulky in the fashion of that time.
Hubert and Jan van Eyck. Ghent Altarpiece. General form. Ghent, St. Church Bavona
The art of the van Eyck brothers, who occupied an exceptional place in contemporary artistic culture, was of great importance for the further development of the Dutch Renaissance. In the 40s of the 15th century. In Dutch art, the pantheistic multicoloredness and harmonic clarity characteristic of Van Eyck are gradually disappearing. But the human soul is revealed deeper in all its secrets. Dutch art owes a lot to Rogier van der Weyden (1400?-1464) in solving such problems. At the end of the 40s, Rogier van der Weyden traveled to Italy. The scientist and philosopher Nikolai Kuzansky called him the greatest artist, and Durer highly valued his work. "The Descent from the Cross" is a typical work of Weiden. The composition is built diagonally. The drawing is rigid, the figures are presented in sharp angles. The clothes either hang limply or are twisted in a whirlwind. Faces are distorted with grief. Everything bears the stamp of cold analytical observation, almost ruthless observation. The same mercilessness, sometimes reaching the point of grotesque sharpness, is characteristic of the portraits of Rogier van der Weyden. They are distinguished from van Eyck's portraits by their timelessness, their exclusion from the environment. Weiden's expressiveness, spiritualism, and sometimes the preservation of golden backgrounds in his altar images allow some researchers to talk about him as a master of the late Middle Ages. But this is incorrect, because his comprehension of the spiritual essence of man was the next step after the art of van Eyck.
R. van der Weyden. Descent from the Cross. Madrid, Prado
In the second half of the 15th century. accounts for the work of a master of exceptional talent, Hugo van der Goes (circa 1435-1482), whose life was spent mainly in Ghent. The central scene of his grandiose in size and monumental in image Portinari altar (named after the customers) is the scene of the adoration of the baby. The artist conveys the emotional shock of the shepherds and angels, whose facial expressions indicate that they seem to predict the true meaning of the event. The mournful and tender appearance of Mary, the almost physically felt emptiness of space around the figure of the baby and the mother bending towards him, further emphasize the mood of the unusualness of what is happening. On the side panels the customers are represented with their patron-saints: on the left is the male half, written more densely, statically, characterized more straightforwardly; on the right is a woman, depicted against the background of naked, transparent trees, in an atmosphere, as if saturated with air. The painting of Hugo van der Goes had a definite influence on the Florentine Quattrocento. Later works Gus is increasingly acquiring the features of disharmony, confusion, mental breakdown, tragedy, disunity with the world, being a reflection of the painful state of the artist himself (“The Death of Mary”).
I. Bosch. Garden of Delights. Fragment of a triptych. Madrid, Prado
The work of Hans Memling (1433-1494), who became famous for his lyrical images of Madonnas, is inextricably linked with the city of Bruges. Memling was a student of Rogier van der Weyden, but his work completely lacks the rigidity of his teacher's writing and the ruthlessness of his characterizations. Memling's compositions are clear and measured, his images poetic and soft. The sublime coexists with the everyday. One of the most characteristic works Memling - the reliquary of St. Ursula (circa 1489), in whose picturesque images the contemplation of the Van Eyck sense coexists with an interest in the vitally natural, which indicates the strengthening of burgher tendencies in Dutch art.
Social life of the Netherlands in the second half of the 15th and early 16th centuries. was full of acute social contradictions and conflicts. In these conditions, the complex art of Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), the creator of dark mystical visions, in which he turns to both medieval allegorism and living concrete reality, was born. In Bosch, demonology coexists with healthy folk humor, a subtle sense of nature with a cold analysis of human vices and with merciless grotesqueness in the depiction of people (“Ship of Fools”). In the altar image, he can give an interpretation to the Dutch proverb, comparing the world to a haystack, from which everyone snatches as much as he can grab. In one of his most grandiose works, “The Garden of Delights,” Bosch creates a graphic image of the sinful life of people. Bosch's fantasy creates creatures from a combination of different animal forms or living forms and objects of the inorganic world, and at the same time, a keen sense of reality is preserved, permeated with the artist's tragic worldview, a premonition of some kind of universal catastrophes. In the works of late Bosch ("St. Anthony") the theme of loneliness is intensified. The work of Bosch ends the first stage of the great art of the Netherlands - the 15th century, “the time of searches, insights, disappointments and brilliant discoveries.” The boundary between the 15th and 16th centuries in the art of the Netherlands is much more noticeable than, say, between the Quattrocento and the High Renaissance in Italy, which was an organic, logical consequence of the art of the previous era. Art of the Netherlands of the 16th century. is increasingly abandoning the use of medieval traditions, on which artists of the past century relied heavily.
The pinnacle of the Dutch Renaissance was, undoubtedly, the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, nicknamed Peasant (1525/30-1569). He studied in Antwerp, which in the 16th century. became not only the commercial and economic, but also the cultural center of the Netherlands, eclipsing Bruges. Bruegel traveled to Italy and was close to the most advanced circles of the Dutch intelligentsia. In Bruegel's early works, the influence of Bosch is noticeable ("Kitchen of the Skinny", "Kitchen of the Fat" - in their caustic irony, keen observation and unequivocal verdict). The name of Bruegel is associated with the final formation of landscape in Dutch painting as an independent genre. His evolution as a landscape artist (both in painting and in graphics) can be traced from a panorama landscape, capturing small details in an effort to show the infinity and grandeur of the world, to a landscape that is more generalized, laconic, and philosophical in understanding. “Winter Landscape” from the cycle “The Seasons” (another name is “Hunters in the Snow”, 1565) earned particular fame among descendants: subtle insight into nature, lyricism and aching sadness emanate from these dark brown silhouettes of trees, figures of hunters and dogs against the backdrop of white snow and hills stretching into the distance, tiny figures of people on the ice and from a flying bird that seems ominous in this tense, almost palpably ringing silence.
P. Bruegel Muzhitsky. Winter (Hunters in the Snow). Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum
In genre painting, Bruegel goes through the same evolution as in landscape painting. In “The Battle of Carnival and Lent” (1559), he expresses the immensity of the world through the multiplicity of people: the square is filled with mummers, revelers, beggars, and merchants. His later works - village festivals, fairs, dances - are built on the strictest selection of the main thing, complete in color. These decorative, cheerful, full-blooded folk-like, infectiously cheerful compositions indicate the birth of the everyday peasant genre (“Peasant Dance”, 1565).
In the early 60s, Bruegel created a number of tragic works that surpassed all Bosch's phantasmagoria in terms of expressive power. In allegorical language, Bruegel expressed the tragedy of modern life in the entire country, in which the excesses of the Spanish oppressors had reached their highest point. He turned to religious subjects, revealing topical events in them. Thus, “The Bethlehem Massacre of the Innocents” (1566) is a picture of a massacre carried out by the Spaniards in a Dutch village. The soldiers are even depicted in Spanish clothing. The religious plot takes on a double meaning and becomes even more tragic. One of Bruegel's last works was the painting "The Blind" (1568). Five terrible cripples doomed by fate, not understanding what is happening to them, fly into the ravine after the leader who has stumbled. Only one of them faces the viewer: empty eye sockets and a terrible grin of the mouth are looking at us. These human masks seem even scarier against the backdrop of a calm, serene landscape with a church, deserted hills and green trees. “Blind” certainly has a symbolic meaning. Nature is eternal, just as the world is eternal, and the path of the blind is life path all people. The steel-gray tone of the painting with lilac shades enhances the state of hopelessness. This is one of those works in which the artist expressed both his own tragic worldview and the spirit of his time. Bruegel died early. But he managed to concentrate in his art the achievements of Dutch painting of the previous era. In the last decades of the 16th century. there was no longer a single artist in it who was in any way equal to this master. The heroic struggle of the Netherlands for their independence, which began during Bruegel’s lifetime, ended only in the next century, when the Netherlands was divided into two parts, and Dutch art - respectively into two schools: Flemish and Dutch.
P. Bruegel Muzhitsky. Blind. Naples, Capodimonte Museum
In the Dutch Renaissance there was also an Italianizing movement, the so-called Romanism. Artists of this movement followed (if possible) the traditions of the Roman school and, above all, Raphael. The works of such masters as J. Gossaert, P. Cook van Aalst, J. Scorell, F. Floris and others surprisingly combined the desire for idealization, for Italian plasticity of forms with a purely Dutch love for detail, narrative and naturalism. As it is rightly said (V. Vlasov), only the genius of Rubens was able to overcome the imitativeness of the Dutch novelists - already in the 17th century.
At the turn of the XIV-XV centuries. Germany was even more fragmented than in previous periods, which contributed to the persistence of feudal foundations in it.
The development of German cities was late even in relation to the Netherlands, and the German Renaissance took shape in comparison with the Italian one a whole century later. Based on the example of the work of many artists of the 15th century. You can trace how the Renaissance took shape in Germany: Konrad Witz, Michael Pacher, then Martin Schongauer. Narrative elements appear in their altar images, the desire to reveal human feelings on a religious plot (the altar of St. Wolfgang M. Pacher in the Church of St. Wolfgang in the town of the same name, 1481). But the understanding of space, the introduction of golden backgrounds, the fragmentation of the drawing, the restless rhythm of breaking lines (“metaphysical wind”, according to the witty remark of one researcher), as well as the scrupulous writing out of the main and the particular - all this indicates a lack of consistency in the artistic worldview of these masters and close connection with medieval tradition. “Deepened religiosity” (G. Wölfflin’s term), which led the Germans to the Reformation, had a huge influence on art. The idea of Divine harmony and grace throughout the world has spread, as it were, to every object, every blade of grass coming out from under the artist’s brush. And even in Dürer, as we will see below, the most “Italian” of all German painters, his desire to create an ideally beautiful image coexists with a penchant for naturalistic details and Gothic expression of forms.
The 16th century for Germany begins with a powerful movement of the peasantry, knighthood and burghers against the princely power and Roman Catholicism. The theses of the future head of the German Reformation, Martin Luther, against the sale of indulgences in 1517 “had a flaming effect like a lightning strike on a barrel of gunpowder.” The movement in Germany was defeated by 1525, but the time of the peasant war was a period of high spiritual growth and the flowering of German humanism, secular sciences, and German culture. The work of the most important artist of the German Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), coincides with this time.
Dürer’s work seemed to merge the searches of many German masters: observations of nature, man, the problem of the relationship of objects in space, the existence of the human figure in the landscape, in the spatial environment. In terms of versatility, the scale of talent, and the breadth of perception of reality, Dürer is a typical artist of the High Renaissance (although such a gradation of periods is rarely applied to the art of the Northern Renaissance). He was a painter, an engraver, a mathematician, an anatomist, a perspectivist, and an engineer. He traveled to Italy twice, once to the Netherlands, and traveled around his native country. His legacy consists of about 80 easel works, more than two hundred engravings, more than 1000 drawings, sculptures, and handwritten materials. Dürer was the greatest humanist of the Renaissance, but his ideal of man is different from the Italian one. Dürer's deeply national images are full of strength, but also of doubts, sometimes heavy thoughts; they lack the clear harmony of Raphael or Leonardo. The artistic language is complicated and allegorical.
Dürer was born in Nuremberg into the family of a goldsmith, who was his first teacher. Then, with the artist Wolgemut, he went through successively all the stages of craft and artistic education characteristic of the late Middle Ages. Dürer did not have a creative environment like the one that Masaccio, Donatello, Piero della Francesca or Ghirlandaio had. He grew up in an artistic atmosphere where medieval traditions were alive, and art was characterized by naive naturalism, detailed processing of form and bright colors. Already in 1490, Dürer left Wolgemut and began an independent creative life. He travels a lot around Germany and Switzerland, does a lot of engraving both on wood and on copper and soon becomes one of the largest engraving masters in Europe. The theme of death is a frequent theme in his graphic sheets. Dürer is a philosopher, but his philosophy is devoid of the immediate cheerfulness and cheerful optimism of the Italian Renaissance. In the mid-90s, Dürer traveled to Italy for the first time, to Venice, and studied ancient monuments. Of the contemporary artists, Mantegna makes the greatest impression on him with his clear drawing, precise proportions, and his tragic worldview. At the end of the 90s, Dürer produced a series of woodcuts on the themes of the Apocalypse, in which medieval images are intertwined with events inspired by modern times; a little later he creates Small and Large (according to the size of the boards) “The Passion of Christ” and several picturesque self-portraits. Dürer was the first in Germany to fruitfully develop problems of perspective, anatomy, and proportions.
A. Durer. Self-portrait. Munich, Alte Pinakothek
In Dürer's self-portraits one can see how from fixing the narrowly specific (portrait of 1493) he goes to create an image that is more integral, full-blooded, clearly influenced by Italian impressions (1498), and comes to an image full of philosophical thoughts, high intelligence, inner restlessness, so characteristic of the thinking people of Germany during that tragic period of history (1500).
In 1505, Dürer again traveled to Venice, where he admired the color of the Venetians: Gianbellino, Titian, Giorgione. “And what I liked 11 years ago, I don’t like now at all,” he writes in his diary.
A. Durer. St. Jerome in his cell. Copper engraving
M. Grunewald. Calvary. Fragment of the central part of the Isenheim Altar. Colmar, museum
In the painting “Feast of the Rosary” (another name is “Madonna with the Rosary”, 1506), although the multi-figure composition was somewhat overloaded, the coloring was fully influenced by the Venetians.
Upon returning home, Dürer, undoubtedly under the influence of Italian art, wrote “Adam” and “Eve” (1507), in which he expresses his national understanding of the beauty and harmony of the human body. But direct adherence to the classical canon is not Durer's way. He is characterized by more highly individual, dramatic images.
The three most famous engravings of Durer date back to the mid-10s: “Horseman, Death and the Devil,” 1513; "St. Jerome" and "Melancholy", 1514 (cutter, copper engravings). The first of them depicts a horseman moving steadily forward, despite the fact that death and the devil tempt and frighten him; in the second - sitting in a cell at a table and busy with work St. Jerome. In the foreground there is a lion, more similar to a good old dog lying right there. Volumes of research have been written about these engravings. They were given different interpretations: they were seen as an attempt to reflect the position of knighthood, clergy, burghers, and in the image of St. Jerome was seen as a humanist writer, a scientist of the new Renaissance era. The third engraving is “Melancholy”. A winged woman surrounded by the attributes of medieval science and alchemy: an hourglass, craft tools, scales, a bell, a “magic square”, a bat, etc. - full of gloomy anxiety, tragedy, depression, disbelief in the triumph of reason and the power of knowledge, covered in mystical moods , undoubtedly reflecting the general moods characteristic of the entire atmosphere in which the artist’s homeland lived on the eve of the Reformation and peasant wars.
In the 20s, Dürer traveled around the Netherlands, was under the spell of the paintings of Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, but followed his own path, developing only his own style. During this period, he painted his best portraits of the representatives of the German intelligentsia closest to him in spirit: the artist van Orley, graphic portrait Erasmus of Rotterdam - the images are psychologically expressive and minted and laconic in form. In Dürer's visual language, all fragmentation, colorful variegation, and linear rigidity disappear. The portraits are integral in composition and plastic in form. High spirituality and genuine strength of spirit distinguishes every face. This is how the artist combines the ideal with the concrete and individual.
In 1526, he created his last painting, “The Four Apostles,” easel in form and purpose, but truly monumental in the majesty of the images. Some researchers saw in it an image of four characters, four temperaments. Dürer gave deeply individual characteristics to the canonical types of apostles, without depriving them of syntheticity and generalization, which was always one of the tasks of the High Renaissance. The work is written on two boards; on the left, Durer brought to the foreground Peter, who is not particularly revered by the Catholic Church, but John, the apostle-philosopher who is closest to the worldview of Durer himself. In the apostles, in their different characters, he assessed all humanity, proclaimed human wisdom, the height of spirit and morality. In this work, Dürer expressed the hope that the future belongs to the best representatives of humanity, humanists who are capable of leading people.
As a true representative of the Renaissance era, like many Italian artists, Dürer left behind significant theoretical works: a treatise on proportion and perspective “Guide to Measurement”, “The Doctrine of the Proportions of the Human Body”, “On the Strengthening and Defense of Cities”.
Dürer was undoubtedly the most profound and significant master of the German Renaissance. The closest to him in terms of tasks and direction is Hans Baldung Green, the most distant, directly opposite is Matthias Grunewald (1457?-1530?), author of the famous “Isenheim Altarpiece”, executed around 1516. for one of the churches of the city of Colmar, a work in which mysticism and exaltation are surprisingly combined with keenly observed realistic details. The nervousness and expressiveness of Grunewald's work is due primarily to its amazing coloring, unusually bold, in comparison with which Dürer's color schemes seem harsh, cold and rational. In “Calvary” - the central part of the altar - the artist almost naturalistically depicts the cramped arms and legs of the Savior, bleeding wounds, and the death throes on his face. The suffering of Mary, John, Magdalene was driven to frenzy. The color, which in its brilliance is reminiscent of Gothic stained glass, molds the stains of clothing, the blood flowing over the body of Christ, creates an unreal, mysterious light, dematerializing all the figures, exacerbating the mystical mood.
Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543) was less involved in religious painting at all; he was less associated with the medieval tradition than other German painters. The strongest part of Holbein's work are portraits, always painted from life, sharply truthful, sometimes merciless in their characterization, coldly sober, but refined in color scheme. In the early period, the portraits were more “situational”, ceremonial (portrait of Burgomaster Mayer, portrait of the wife of Burgomaster Mayer, 1516), in the later period they were simpler in composition. The face, filling almost the entire image plane, is characterized with analytical coldness. Holbein spent the last years of his life in England at the court of Henry VIII, where he was a court painter and where he painted his best portraits (portrait of Thomas More, 1527; portrait of Sir Morett de Saulier, 1534-1535; portrait of Henry VIII, 1536; portrait of Jane Seymour, 1536, etc.). Holbein's portraits, executed in watercolor, charcoal, and pencil, are brilliant in their craftsmanship. Largest chart era, he worked a lot in engraving. His series of woodcuts “The Triumph of Death” (“Dance of Death”) is especially famous. Holbein's work is important not only for Germany, it played a very important role in the formation of the English school of portrait painting.
The continuator of the best Dürer traditions in the field of landscape was the artist of the so-called Danube school Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538), an unusually subtle and lyrical master, in whose work landscape emerged as an independent genre. The last artist of the German Renaissance, Lucas Cranach (1472-1553), is close to Altdorfer with his sense of nature, which is always present in his religious paintings. Cranach early gained wide popularity, was invited to the court of the Elector of Saxony, had an extensive workshop and many students, which is why in the small museums of Saxony and Thuringia, in castles-palaces (Gotha, Eisenach, etc.) to this day there are many works of Cranach’s circle, from which it is not always possible to single out the works of the artist himself. Lucas Cranach wrote mainly on religious subjects; his style is characterized by softness and lyricism; his Madonnas reflect the desire to embody the Renaissance dream of an ideally beautiful person. But in the fracture of the elongated figures, in their emphasized fragility, in the special elegant manner of writing, the features of mannerism are already visible, indicating the end of the German Renaissance.
Even during the Hundred Years' War, the process of the formation of the French nation and the emergence of the French national state began. The political unification of the country was completed mainly under Louis XI. By the middle of the 15th century. This also includes the beginning of the French Renaissance, which in its early stages was still closely associated with Gothic art. The campaigns of the French kings in Italy introduced French artists to Italian art, and from the end of the 15th century. a decisive break with the Gothic tradition begins, Italian art is rethought in connection with its own national tasks. The French Renaissance had the character of court culture. (The folk character was most manifested in French Renaissance literature, primarily in the work of François Rabelais, with his full-blooded imagery, typical Gallic wit and cheerfulness.)
As in Dutch art, realistic tendencies are observed primarily in miniature of both theological and secular books. The first major artist of the French Renaissance was Jean Fouquet (c. 1420-1481), court painter of Charles VII and Louis XI. Both in portraits (portrait of Charles VII, circa 1445) and in religious compositions (diptych from Melun), careful writing is combined with monumentality in the interpretation of the image. This monumentality is created by the chasing of forms, the closedness and integrity of the silhouette, the static nature of the pose, and the laconicism of color. In fact, the Madonna of the Melun diptych was painted in just two colors - bright red and blue (the model for her was the beloved of Charles VII - a fact impossible in medieval art). The same compositional clarity and precision of drawing, sonority of color are characteristic of numerous miniatures by Fouquet (Boccaccio. “The Life of J. Fouquet. Portrait of Charles VII. Fragment, famous men and women”, Paris, Louvre around 1458). The margins of the manuscripts are filled with images of Fouquet's contemporary crowd and landscapes of his native Touraine.
J. Fouquet. Portrait of Charles VII. Fragment. Paris, Louvre
The first stages of Renaissance plastic art are also associated with Fouquet’s homeland, the city of Tours. Antique and Renaissance motifs appear in the reliefs of Michel Colombe (1430/31-1512). His tombstones are distinguished by a wise acceptance of death, in tune with the mood of archaic and classical ancient steles (the tomb of Duke Francis II of Brittany and his wife Marguerite de Foix, 1502-1507, Nantes, cathedral).
Since the beginning of the 16th century, France has been the largest absolutist state in Western Europe. The courtyard becomes the center of culture, especially under Francis I, a connoisseur of the arts and patron of Leonardo. Invited by the king's sister Margaret of Navarre, the Italian mannerists Rosso and Primaticcio became the founders of the Fontainebleau school (“Fontainebleau is the new Rome,” Vasari would write). The castle in Fontainebleau, numerous castles along the Loire and Cher rivers (Blois, Chambord, Chenonceau), the reconstruction of the old Louvre palace (architect Pierre Lescaut and sculptor Jean Goujon) are the first evidence of liberation from the Gothic tradition and the use of Renaissance forms in architecture (first used in the Louvre ancient order system). And although the castles on the Loire are still externally similar to medieval ones in their details (ditches, donjons, drawbridges), their interior decor is Renaissance, even rather manneristic. The castle of Fontainebleau with its paintings, ornamental modeling, and round sculpture is evidence of the victory of a culture that was Italian in form, ancient in subject and purely Gallic in spirit.
J. Clouet. Portrait of Francis I. Paris, Louvre
The 16th century was the time of the brilliant heyday of French portraiture, both painting and pencil (Italian pencil, sanguine, watercolor). The painter Jean Clouet (circa 1485/88-1541), the court artist of Francis I, whose entourage, as well as the king himself, he immortalized in his portrait gallery, became especially famous in this genre. Small in size, carefully painted, Clouet's portraits nevertheless give the impression of being multifaceted in characteristics and ceremonial in form. In the ability to notice the most important thing in a model, without impoverishing it and preserving its complexity, his son François Clouet (circa 1516-1572), the most important artist of France in the 16th century, went even further. Clouet's colors are reminiscent of precious enamels in their intensity and purity (portrait of Elizabeth of Austria, circa 1571). In his exceptional mastery of pencil, sanguine, and watercolor portraits, Clouet captured the entire French court of the mid-16th century. (portrait of Henry II, Mary Stuart, etc.).
The victory of the Renaissance worldview in French sculpture is associated with the name of Jean Goujon (circa 1510-1566/68), whose most famous work is the reliefs of the Fountain of the Innocents in Paris (architectural part - Pierre Lescaut; 1547-1549). Light, slender figures, the folds of whose clothes are echoed by streams of water from jugs, are interpreted with amazing musicality, imbued with poetry, minted and polished and laconic and restrained in form. A sense of proportion, grace, harmony, and subtlety of taste will henceforth invariably be associated with French art.
In the work of Goujon's younger contemporary Germain Pilon (1535-1590), instead of ideally beautiful, harmoniously clear images, concrete life-like, dramatic, darkly exalted images appear (see his tombstones). The richness of his plastic language serves a cold analysis, reaching the point of mercilessness in characterization, in which its analogue can only be found in Holbein. The expressiveness of Pilon's dramatic art is typical of the late Renaissance and indicates the impending end of the Renaissance era in France.
J. Goujon. Nymphs. Relief of the Fountain of the Innocents in Paris. Stone
The features of the crisis of the artistic ideals of the Renaissance were especially clearly manifested in mannerism, which emerged at the end of the Renaissance (from maniera - technique, or, more correctly, manierismo - pretentiousness, mannerism), - obvious imitation, as if secondary style with all the virtuosity of technology and sophistication of forms, aestheticization image, exaggeration of individual details, sometimes even expressed in the title of the work, such as in Parmigianino’s “Madonna with a Long Neck,” exaggeration of feelings, violation of the harmony of proportions, balance of forms - disharmony, deformation, which in itself is alien to the nature of the art of the Italian Renaissance.
Mannerism is usually divided into early and mature. Early mannerism - centered in Florence. This is the work of such masters as J. Pontormo, D. Rosso, A. de Volterra, G. Romano. The latter's paintings in the Palazzo del Te in Mantua are full of unexpected, almost frightening effects, the composition is overloaded, the balance is disturbed, the movements are exaggerated and convulsive - but everything is theatrically superficial, coldly pathetic and does not touch the heart (see the fresco "The Death of Giants", for example ).
Mature mannerism is more graceful, sophisticated and aristocratic. Its centers are Parma and Bologna (Primaticcio, from 1531 he was the head of the Fontainebleau school in France), Rome and Florence (Bronzino, a student of Pontormo; D. Vasari; sculptor and jeweler B. Cellini), as well as Parma (the already mentioned Parmigianino, his Madonnas are always depicted with elongated bodies and small heads, with fragile, thin fingers, with mannered, pretentious movements, always cold in color and cold in image).
Mannerism was limited to Italy, it spread to Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, France, influencing their painting and especially applied art, in which the unbridled imagination of the mannerists found favorable soil and a wide field of activity.
