ARTISTS

Prehistoric Painting
Ancient Painting
Medieval Painting
Renaissance
17th & 18th Century
Romanticism & Classicism
Realism
Impressionism
Post-Impressionism
Expressionism & Cubism
Surrealism
Chinese Painting
Japanese Painting
Indian Painting
Persian Painting

The Renaissance is divided into 5 sections:

Early Renaissance
High Renaissance
Venice
Baroque
Northern Renaissance

The evolution of painting in the 15th century in Italy witnesses the Giottesque conception of significant form extended and amplified by enthusiastic and intelligent investigation into many aspects of the world of visual experience. Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), famed as an architect although he had been trained as a painter, was the perfector about 1420 of a mathematically constructed system of perspective that came into general use very rapidly and allowed a relatively facile organization of forms in convincing relationship to one another in pictorial space. Many artists tended to specialize in one branch or another of the science of painting, perspective, anatomy, movement, and the effect of light; and in the increasingly more materialistic thought of the time that developed as the basically religious philosophy of the Middle Ages faded in retrospect, it was easy to regard painting as having its proper end in nothing more lofty in aim than a picturesque record of the immediate facts of existence. Such appears to have been the attitude of Fra Filippo Lippi (1406?-1469), whose paintings are an accurate and often charming reflection of life in 15th century Florence, whatever their ostensible Biblical subjects happen to be. Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-1498) and Domenico Ghirlandajo (14491498) are two other Florentine painters among many who worked in this vein. In the ranks of the specialists who chose to emphasize certain specific interests in their painting are Paolo Uccello (1397-1475), whose gifts as a decorator are often overshadowed in the complicated perspectives he was so fond of developing, Andrea del Castagno (1423-1457), Antonio Pollaiuolo (Pollajuolo) (1429-1498), and Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488), all of whom were primarily interested in problems of anatomical construction and rendering. These they investigated more intently than even the scientists of the time, and they may be rightly considered as pioneers in the field of inquiry into the form and organization of the human body.

Also among the specialists in the 15th century Early Renaissance should be included Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), the greater part of whose productive career was spent in the north Italian city of Mantua. Here in the birthplace of the great Roman poet Virgil, Mantegna developed a pictorial style in which can be discerned more clearly than in any other of the time the interest of the Renaissance period in the culture of classic antiquity. Although it is clear that the one-time conception of the Renaissance as a rebirth of the ways of thinking of ancient times is by no means a complete explanation of it as a cultural phenomenon, it is equally clear that there was great admiration for antique forms at that time. These Mantegna makes abundant use of in his paintings, rendering the details of costumes and architecture with an exactitude that is archaeological in spirit and in a style that is almost a pictorial rendering of sculpture in its preciseness of contour and metallic surfaces. But Mantegna was also one of the great masters of perspective. In the painted ceiling of the Camera degli Sposi in the palace of the Gonzaga family in Mantua, he created a type of illusionistic architectural decoration that many subsequent generations of painters in the 16th and 17th centuries were to continue using in baroque and rococo churches and palaces.

In every great expressive artistic tradition, there are a few notable personalities to whom it is given to achieve with comprehensive completeness the aims toward which their lesser contemporaries strive. Such was Giotto in the Florentine tradition of the 14th century, and such was Masaccio (1401-1428) in the early years of the 15th. Although only a few paintings by him are known, notably those of episodes in the life of St. Peter in the Brancacci Chapel in the Church of the Carmine in Florence (1423-1425; 1427), they contain and sum up the technical achievement and the expressive purpose of the age and supply a model to which the great painters of several subsequent generations, notably Raphael and Michelangelo, were to come for instruction and inspiration. Perspective, both linear and aerial, the rendering of the human form both nude and draped, the visual effect of light are all handled with fluent and expressive ease by Masaccio. If one of his contributions to the technique of realistic representation should be singled out for notice, it might well be his development of chiaroscuro, a systematic organization of light and dark values in which a pictorial effect of illuminated three-dimensional form is created. In adding this way of modeling to Giotto's system of linear contours, Masaccio expanded immeasurably the artist's capacity to construct form and established a method that was to be the basis of all representative painting until the advent of Impressionism in the late 19th century. Masaccio's greatness is even more apparent when the expressive character of the forms thus created is observed. Whereas the content of much work contemporary with his is often overshadowed or even obscured by the obvious efforts of the creator to satisfy technical demands, Masaccio's painting is that of a man concerned with ideas and concepts rather than problems of rendering. The Tribute Money in the Brancacci Chapel is in subject matter a treatment of the New Testament episode of a Roman tax-collector asking tribute of Christ and the disciples. A relatively minor incident in the Biblical account, it becomes at Masaccio's hands a monumental statement of the innate dignity of man, pervaded with that quality called ethos by the Greeks, the essential element of a lofty and ennobled conception of humanity.

With the exception of Mantegna, the 15th century artists discussed up to this point were Florentines. In the region called Umbria, which lies to the east and south of Florence, Piero della Francesca (1420?-1492) was a painter of caliber and distinction comparable to Masaccio. Even more than the Florentine was he concerned with the methods of technical procedure. The author of one of the first treatises on perspective and a student of light and atmospheric effects, he was termed by one of his contemporaries, and has been recognized by later ages as being, "the monarch of his times in the science of painting." In a series of frescoes dealing with the Story of the True Cross (c.1465) in San Francesco at Arezzo, the figures move with the same severe gravity that characterizes Masaccio's but in landscapes illuminated by a calm and even light and in colors that in their reticence contribute as well to the sense of episodes in which the protagonists are of more than human character.

High Renaissance

The Early Renaissance of the 15th century was the period in which the eyes of man were opened to the beauties of this world. These were regarded with such naive delight and uncritical admiration that the interpretive treatment of experience tended to become very often little more than an enumeration of episodes or an indiscriminate recording of facts. Toward the close of the 15th century Sandro Botticelli (1444?-1510) and Perugino (1446 1523) attempted to attain more selective and constructive levels, the former in a wistful and nostalgic manner seen in the Primavera and the Birth of Venus, both painted in 1478; the latter in simplified compositional schemes of figures disposed in landscapes of distant hills and limpid skies like those of his native Umbria-as in the Crucifixion (1495) in the Florentine church of Santa Maddalena dei Pazzi. But it remained for Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael of Urbino, and Michelangelo to raise most effectively the materialism of Renaissance thought to the level of significant interpretive form in that period of the early 16th century known as the High Renaissance.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was as much scientist as artist, a fact attested by his own enumeration of the skills he possessed and by the pages of many notebooks crowded with the data of his observations. It was in the medium of painting, however, that the considered results of his scientific notations are most coherently presented; and it is in his few works still extant that we find the evidence for ranking him among the greatest minds of all time. In nothing is he more characteristic of his age than in his emphasis upon psychological values. We see it in those trenchant comments upon human nature that are the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper (c.1496-1498). Technically he is notable in having carried still farther the chiaroscuro of Masaccio to make it an expressive as well as a structural factor of primary importance. In the scope of his interests and the comprehensiveness of his aims, Leonardo, perhaps our most typical man of the Renaissance, might nevertheless be called the last of the great medieval minds bent upon an encyclopedic understanding of the entire universe. In the completely secular and worldly values by which he judged the results of his study of nature, he anticipates the agnosticism of the 19th century scientist.

Upon Raphael (1483-1520) fell the lot of being the embodiment of all that was courtly, suave, and intelligent in the Renaissance scheme of things, qualities that are defined in the book Il Cortegiano by his friend Baldassare Castiglione, whose portrait by Raphael (c.1515) is one of the painter's most genial accomplishments. An Umbrian and trained in the manner of Peru gino, with whom he worked for a time, the frescoes by him in the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican (1508-1511), the many variations upon the Madonna and Child theme of which the Sistine Madonna (c.1515) is the best known, as well as numerous mythological paintings and portraits, are uniformly consistent and decorative in their simple but logical compositional schemes, the intelligent gravity of the figures, and the unfailing tact of the characterizations. In their refinement and orderliness are qualities that have ever appealed to the intellect. It is significant tribute to these elements in Raphael's paintings that they have been models for academic instruction almost since the time of their execution.

Michelangelo (1475-1564) was, like Leonardo, a genius of such creative breadth that his activities in but one of the many fields in which he worked would have sufficed to assure him a place among the great minds of all time. Engineer, poet, architect, painter, and sculptor, it was the last of these fields to which he was most inclined by temperament, and it has been rightly remarked that there is hardly a figure in any of his paintings that could not be executed in stonei without changing it in any important degree. Easel or panel painting was too limited for a temperament of such forcefulness as his. It is rather in the frescoes of the ceiling (1508-1512) and the altar wall (1534-1541) of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Palace at Rome that his creative genius found adequate pictorial outlet. On the former he spread in a series of nine panels the story of the world from its creation through the great flood of Noah, flanking these central episodes by a host of other figures, the prophets of the Old Testament and the sibyls of pagan antiquity, and corroborating their symbolic message with still further incidents in the Old Testament. The whole is a monumental interpretation of the theme of the salvation of mankind through the death of Christ. On the altar wall is The Last Judgment, a bitter and impassioned condemnation of a humanity which had failed to heed the message embodied in the ceiling paintings above. Of restrained yet forceful color, the main expressive function is performed by the powerful figures from which nothing in the way of environmental detail or picturesque anecdote is allowed to detract. The interpretive idiom is thus allied in kind to that of the great art of classic antiquity, but the content which renders it significant grows out of the materialistic humanism of the Renaissance.

Venice

The Florentine-Roman tradition of Renaissance thought reached its pictorial climax in the works of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo, and their successors in the later 16th century were of such appreciably lesser stature that they are to be compared with the three titans only in most superficial ways. Elsewhere in Italy there is more creative strength. In the north Italian city of Parma, Correggio (1494 - 1534) continued the experiments in pictorial space initiated by Mantegna, and in such paintings as The Nativity and a series of mythological subjects executed in the years around 1525 established a style of lyric and sensual colorism destined for great popularity. It was in Venice, however, that the most vital developments occurred in the 16th century Italian painting. Toward the end of the 15th century, the Bellini brothers, Gentile (1429?-1507) and Giovanni (1430?-1516), had evolved from a belated Byzantinism a pictorial idiom of glowing color that is the immediate point of departure for the great Venetian painters of the early 16th century, Giorgione and Titian. Varied influences had a part in the development of the Gentiles-for instance, the work of Mantegna and that of Antonello da Messina (1430?-1479), who is thought to have done much to establish the practice of using oil-medium pigments in northern Italy.

Giorgione (c.1478-1511) obtained his training as a helper in Giovanni Bellini's studio and developed even further his master's experiments in expressive color. Sensuous in content and lyric in feeling, his Sleeping Venus (c.1510) is one of the great interpretations of a theme that has engaged the interest of artists since the Renaissance, the reclining feminine nude figure. Where Masaccio three quarters of a century earlier had resolved the habits of visual experience into patterns of light and dark that define mass in atmospheric space, Giorgione does it by color and emphasizes in the contrasted textures of flesh and textile, stone and grass the noble form of the reclining figure. Titian (1477-1576) was his associate in the Bellini atelier and in his early work is almost indistinguishable from Giorgione, but quite early he develops in the same coloristic vocabulary an assertive and masculine materialism that is as complete a statement as any to be found of the calculating and worldly Venetian temperament. His Assumption of the Virgin (1516-1518) is even less religious in feeling than Raphael's Sistine Madonna, with which it is directly comparable in composition, but its fullblooded and splendid pageantry is a direct and forthright embodiment of a point of view which found its ultimate realities in the fullest realization of sensual experience. Many and varied are the individual phases through which Titian's style passed during his life of 99 years, and manifold is its subject matter-religious themes, mythologies, allegories, portraits-but throughout as a unifying trait is color which glows and pulses, and the evidence of a temperament which found in the language of color an expressive medium entirely adequate to the embodiment of a vigorous, if mundane, philosophy of experience.

"The drawing of Michelangelo and the coloring of Titan" was the motto on the studio wall of Tintoretto (1518-1594), the third in the Venetian triumvirate of 16th century painters. To this working ideal might be added the use of space as a primary expressive factor in the pictorial scheme, for although the provision of an adequate third dimension in which figures could exist had been a constant concern of painters since the beginning of the 15th century, and Mantegna and Correggio had created in their illusionistic ceil-. ing and dome paintings a pictorial space of intriguing vitality, Tintoretto makes space a factor by which the figures are conditioned. In the Miracle of the Slave (1548) it is a foreshortened figure plunging away from the spectator into the picture space that is the key to the denouement of the spectacle. The figures of his Last Supper (1594) are grouped behind a table that, unlike the one in Leonardo's, which parallels the picture plane, shoots off at an angle, leading the eye back into a room where flickering lights in a gloomy and mysterious space invest the scene with drama and mystery.

Baroque

The turn of the 16th to the 17th century in Italy finds the geographic center of painting once more in Rome, where the principal trends are represented by, first, the eclecticism of the Carracci, who sought by combination of the salient stylistic qualities of the great masters of the earlier 16th century to achieve a manner that would eclipse the painters of their own era; and second, by the naturalism of Caravaggio (1573?1610) who, in his tempermental impatience with the idealism of the High Renaissance masters, strove to state in the most unequivocal terms the primary importance of the physical act of seeing as the only basis of painting as an art. His most effective technical device was a sensational and theatric chiaroscuro that defines form with the harshness of a spotlight. The forms themselves are self-consciously commonplace, even brutal. Conspicuous in the paintings he executed are numerous studies of lowlife and scenes of vice that find their justification in providing evidence of a preternaturally sharp eye and a keen sense of character.

Rembrandt in Holland and Velasquez in Spain were to learn much from the technical accomplishments of Caravaggio. From the eclecticism of the Carracci, on the other hand, it was only natural that a style of primarily decorative character should evolve. Such is the quality of the technically facile but expressively limited art of such painters as Guido Reni (1575-1642), whose Aurora has enjoyed more than two centuries of popular admiration for its somewhat obvious and mannered lyricism. In the service of the church, this style is found in the vault and ceiling decorations of countless baroque structures of the 17th and 18th centuries, in which flow of line and brassy resonances of color contribute with un erring calculation to the sensory stimuli by which a Counter Reformation sought to enlist the emotions as well as the intellect in affirming the significance of religious experience. Giovanni Tiepolo (1696-1770) is one of the last painters in this manner. A native of Venice and an inheritor of the Venetian tradition of effective colorism, the ceiling paintings which he executed in his own country, in Austria, and in Spain are at the same time splendid decoration in the grand manner and the last significant examples of the Italian Renaissance tradition.

Northern Renaissance

Outside Italy, the concept of classical humanism that was the Renaissance hardly made its appearance before the early years of the 16th century. As late as around 1510, Matthias Grunewald (fl. 1500-1530) could paint in the Isenheim altarpiece the embodiment of a conception of experience that is still almost entirely medieval in its emotional intensity and mysticism. But his contemporary in Germany, Albrecht Diirer (1471-1528), was even then engaged in finding a way in which the formal beauty of Italian Renaissance ideas could find expression in northern hands. Strongly influenced by the classicism of Mantegna and the theories of Leonardo, he created with seemingly inexhaustible energy the host of woodcuts and metal engravings that constitute with his paintings one of the most significant monuments of Renaissance thought. His products in the graphic media are in many ways more important than his paintings; Raphael was to use the compositional scheme of one of his woodcuts in a painted altarpiece, and lesser artists availed themselves of his ideas in increasingly greater numbers during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Where Durer sought to create equivalents of the expressive content and formal beauty of the Italian Renaissance masterpieces, Hans Holbein, the Younger (1497?-1543) developed a decoratively accomplished portrait style that has recorded for posterity not only the personalities of the great in his own country, such as Erasmus the humanist, but also those of the English court of Henry VIII, for whom he was royal painter in the latter years of his life. The tradition of fine draughtsmanship, clear and vivid colors, and sensitive composition which he established dominated "English painting for a century or more after his death. Another figure of paramount importance in the 16th century painting of northern Europe was the Fleming Pieter Brueghel, the Elder (1525-1569). It is, perhaps, as the humanized expression of the medieval Gothic feeling for space that the landscapes he painted (Summer, in the Metropolitan Museum of New York is an example) can most readily be understood-not as the symbol of an all-pervading Deity, to be sure, but as the factor which condition, controls, and relates the multifarious human activities carried on within it.