Italian Renaissance art

“ The Italian Renaissance, supreme in the arts which require a subtle and strong perception of the excellence of mere lines and colours and lights and shadows, which demand unflinching judgment of material qualities; was condemned to inferiority in the art which requires subtle and strong perception of the excellence of human emotion and action; in the art which demands unflinching judgment of moral motives. ”

“ All assisted to mould that grand complexity which we call the Italian Renaissance The leaders of public opinion in all these centres, men and women alike, were continually moving about. Artists were invited now to one court now to another; scholars and poets were welcomed at Siena and Ferrara as they were at Milan and Florence. Hence that all-embracing experience of men and things, which must lie at the foundation of every art which is not only to grow, but to live and bear fruit.
But it is one thing to realize the presence of a number of factors favourable to a great art. ”

“ Of the merits of the best Italian art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries there can be no question, but the belief that this art is altogether superior to that of the Middle Ages will not bear examination in the light of impartial comparison.
The Fine Arts are always an expression of the historical antecedents, the intellectual, moral, and material conditions, and the religious beliefs of the peoples and epochs to which they belong. ”

“ In most histories of Italian art we are conscious of a vast hiatus of several centuries, between the ancient classic art of Rome—which was in its decadence when the Western Empire ceased in the fifth century after Christ—and that early rise of art in the twelfth century which led to the Renaissance. ”

“ The negation of chivalry, mysticism, asceticism, is accomplished. After traversing the cycle of comedy, romance, satire, burlesque poetry, the plastic arts, and invading every province of human thought, the Italian reaction against the middle ages assumes a final shape of hitherto unapprehended loveliness in the Aminta and the Pastor Fido. They complete and close the Renaissance, bequeathing in a new species of art its form and pressure to succeeding generations. ”

“ So far, as a study of the impossible, the speculation respecting the fate of Renaissance art had it not been influenced by the antique would be childishly useless. But lest we forget that this antique influence did exist, lest, grown ungrateful and blind, we refuse it its immense share in producing Michael Angelo, Raphael, and Titian, we may do well to turn to an art born and bred like Italian art, in the Middle Ages; like it, full of strength and power of self- development, but which, unlike Italian art, was not influenced by the antique. ”

“ Such was the doctrine which Venice practised, in the interest of a glorious and beneficent government, and which two illustrious writers, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, made the law of modern societies.
The one thing common to the whole Italian Renaissance was the worship of beauty. It was the aesthetic against the ascetic. In this exclusive study, that is, in art, the Italians speedily attained the highest perfection that has been reached by man. And it was reached almost simultaneously in many parts of Italy, Rome, Florence, Milan, and Venice. ”

“ The discovery of man since Dante and Giotto, the discovery of Nature by the naturalism of Florence, the revival of classical studies, and the reawakening of the antique in Art and Literature are its component parts; but its essence can only be grasped if we regard the Renaissance as the blossoming and unfolding of the mind of the Italian people. The early Renaissance was indeed the Vita Nuova of the nation. It is an error to believe that it was in opposition to the Church. Art and the artists of the thirteenth century recognised no such opposition. ”

“ Willard, Modern Italian Art.
THE DECLINE: An art movement in history seems like a wave that rises to a height, then breaks, falls, and parts of it are caught up from beneath to help form the strength of a new advance. In Italy Christianity was the propelling force of the wave. In the Early Renaissance, the antique, and the study of nature came in as additions. At Venice in the High Renaissance the art-for-art's-sake motive made the crest of light and color. ”

“ In pursuing this plan I shall endeavour to show how the successive stages in the evolution of Italian painting corresponded to similar stages in the history of the Renaissance. Beginning as the handmaid of the Church, and stimulated by the enthusiasm of the two great popular monastic orders, painting was at first devoted to embodying the thoughts of mediæval Christianity. In proportion as the painters fortified themselves by study of the natural world, their art became more secular. Mysticism gave way to realism. ”

“ The interest in Italy at the beginning of the nineteenth century was mainly for the sake of its second-hand version of Greek art, and for the architecture and painting of the Renaissance. On the contrary, now the objects from Greece itself have far eclipsed the Italian copies, and the interest lies in the early Italian civilization and its purely Roman derivatives; while modern taste values the mediæval art of Italy far from the bastard products of the florid age which followed. ”

“ This being in general the task assigned to art in the Renaissance, we may next inquire what constituted the specific quality of modern as distinguished from antique feeling, and why painting could not fail to take the first place among modern arts. In other words, how was it that, while sculpture was the characteristic fine art of antiquity, painting became the distinguishing fine art of the modern era? No true form of figurative art intervened between Greek sculpture and Italian painting. ”

“ Every Italian was, in a way, an art critic, because every church in Italy was an art school. The artists may have led the people, but the people spurred on the artists, and so the Italian mind went on developing and unfolding until at last it produced the great art of the Renaissance. ”

“ The energies of the Italian Renaissance had been concentrated on the literature and art of ancient Greece and Rome. The Italian mind had a native and intimate sympathy with classical antiquity. For Italy, the whole movement of the Renaissance is virtually identical with the restoration of classical learning. It is otherwise when we follow that movement into northern Europe. Humanism is still, indeed, the principal organ through which the new spirit works; but the operations of the spirit itself become larger and more varied. ”

“ It was against Italian sensuousness that the finer spiritual perceptions of the Teutonic-515- races rose in revolt; and the Italians, who had transmitted their own religious forms to Europe, could not understand the point at issue. Feeble or insufficient as we may judge this realism in the regions of pure thought or pious feeling, it was supremely powerful in art. It enabled the Italians so to apprehend the mysteries of the faith, and so to assimilate the classic myths, as to find for both a form of beauty in sculpture and in painting. ”

“ This way of attributing all that is good in art to Italy was formerly very common. Even in our own time all branches of French art were looked upon by our fathers as frivolous and trivial. Italian Renaissance was trivial enough, but French Renaissance utterly meretricious. To the insane worshippers of the "Gothic style," it alone was pure. The sumptuous grandiosities of Louis XIV. were tolerable, because they aimed at being Classic. The portico of the Panthéon or the colonnade of the Louvre were considered fine ”

“ Ideas came to them for centuries through form and color, until at last the Italian mind took on a plastic and pictorial character. It saw things in symbolic figures, and when the Renaissance came and art took the lead as one of its strongest expressions, painting was but the color-thought and form-language of the people.
FIG. 26.—FRA FILIPPO. MADONNA. UFFIZI. Please click here for a modern color image
And these people, by reason of their peculiar education, were an exacting people, knowing what was good and demanding it from the artists. ”

“ I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and comely way of life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new forms of art, new intellectual and imaginative enjoyments: and I call it our romantic movement because it is our most recent expression of beauty. ”

“ Succeeding generations adopting their depreciative term have turned it into one of glory so that Gothic art is now in highest honor.
Fortunately in recent years there has come, as we have said, a growing recognition of the fact that the real beginning of modern art lies much farther back in history, and that the real {255} father of the Italian Renaissance is a man whom very few people in the last three centuries have appreciated at his true worth. Undoubtedly the leader in that great return to nature, which constitutes the true basis of modern poetic and artistic ideas of all kinds, was St. ”

“ Humanism, the taste for the literature and history of the ancients, awakened the interest of Italian artists in the monuments of their forgotten past, and led them to seek, in the surviving remains of Roman architecture and in the scanty examples of ancient sculpture and painting that chance had brought to light, the secret of beauty.
The attitude of the Early Renaissance toward the antique differed from that of the Late Renaissance. ”

“ The most splendid period of the art revival covered the latter part of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth. The characteristic art of the Renaissance in Italy was painting, although the æsthetic genius of the Italians also expressed itself both in architecture and sculpture. ”

“ As before remarked, the Italian genius appears to have been primarily a genius for painting, and in this field the conditions all conspired to produce results that were without precedent for excellence, and that still remain unrivalled. Yet here, too, we shall need to discriminate. Italian painting of the sixteenth century presents a variety of phases that are by no means of equal merit, and the noblest forms of it show the least of the essentially Renaissance spirit. ”

“ But there has been no true restoration of Italian art. The painting of Italy in our time has been largely a commercial enterprise rather than an outcome from artistic genius or impulse, and the few works which are exceptions to this rule are not sufficient to encourage the hope that this nation can again attain to her former rank or regain the fame of her past in the history of modern art. ”

“ Merging Poliziano and Bembo in Ariosto, retaining Machiavelli and Pietro Aretino, we obtain the three prominent phases of Renaissance culture in Italy—firstly, serene, self-satisfied, triumphant art, glorying in the beauty of form for form's sake, and aiming at perfection in style of sunny and delightful loveliness ”

“ But the perfect plastic art of Italy, the pure art of the Cinque Cento, the painting of Raphael, Da Vinci, Titian and Correggio, the sculpture of Donatello, Michelangelo and Sansovino, the architecture of Bramante, Omodeo and the Venetian Lombardi, however much imbued with the spirit of the classical revival, takes rank beside the poetry of Ariosto as a free intelligent product of the Renaissance. That is to say, it is not so much an outcome of studies in antiquity as an exhibition of emancipated modern genius fired and illuminated by the masterpieces of the past. ”

“ Among the many influences that were stirring the artistic minds of the Renaissance there were two of chief importance, the Neo-pagan revival, and the true intellectual life of the people which was independent of the retrospective movement, and had been growing up through the Middle Ages. The most sterling qualities of the artistic products of the period are due to this intellectual life, and Florentine and Venetian painting, the two most admirable phases of the supreme art of Italy, are the finest expression of this. ”

“ But the imagination born of the love of beautiful and suggestive detail soars higher; become what I would call the lyric art of the Renaissance, the art which not merely gives us beauty, but stirs up in ourselves as much beauty again of stored-up impression, reaches its greatest height in certain Venetian pictures of the early sixteenth century. Pictures of vague or enigmatic subject, or no subject at all, like Giorgione's Fête Champêtre and Soldier and Gipsy, Titian's Sacred and Profane Love, The Three Ages of Man, and various smaller pictures by Bonifazio, Palma, Basaiti ”

“ But it is in Italy, in the fifteenth century, that the interest of the Renaissance mainly lies,—in that solemn fifteenth century which can hardly be studied too much, not merely for its positive results in the things of the intellect and the imagination, its concrete works of art, its special and prominent personalities, with their profound aesthetic charm, but for its general spirit and character, for the ethical qualities of which it is a consummate type. ”

“ In Italy there was intellectual light, enabling men to see and judge all around them, enabling them to act wittingly and deliberately. In this lies the immense greatness of the Renaissance; to this are due all its achievements in literature and science, and, above all, in art: that, for the first time since the dissolution of antique civilization, men were free agents, both in thought and in deed ”