What is it?
Renaissance (Fr., or Ital. Rinascimento, rebirth) Usually defined as the 'revivial of art and
letters under the influence of classical models in the 14th-16th
century' (OED). As early as 1550 Vasari used the word rinascita
to describe
this rebirth, which he believed to have culminated in his own days, but it
probably received the wide currency it now has from Jacob Burckhardt's
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, first published in 1860. In the visual arts
the term is now used with some care, if any degree of precision is desired. It
is obvious that the influence of classical models is not easy to distinguish in
Italy, where the classical tradition is virtually unbroken, and a term which can
be made to cover Giotto at one end and Tintoretto at the other is too vague
to be useful in any discussion of style (the case was once even worse in English
architectural history, where 'Renaissance' used to be made to cover Elizabethan
buildings, Wren and the Adam brothers). It is generally agreed that Giotto may
be said to have begun the Renaissance in the other sense, that of according a
new dignity to man and his works, but that the classical ideals hardly came into
play before the first years of the i5th century, when the humanist ideals of
Alberti were indistinguishable from those of Masaccio, Brunelleschi and
Donatello, and, to a lesser extent, Ghiberti. The period from c.1420 to 1500
is therefore now generally called the Early Renaissance and the term High
Renaissance is reserved for the tiny span of time when a pure, classical, balanced
harmony was attained, and when artists of the first rank were in absolute control
of their techniques, able to render anything they wanted with the maximum
of fidelity to nature. It is this mastery of technique which, with the elimination
of superfluous detail, is one of the distinguishing marks between Early and
High Renaissance. The High Renaissance lasted from c.1500 to about 1527,
the date of the Sack of Rome, and it includes the earlier works of Michelangelo,
all the Roman works of Raphael, and most of Leonardo's work. The
later
work of Michelangelo is dedicated to different ideals, and the style of the period
1530/1600 is now generally known as Mannerism, while the style of the 17th
century, in accordance with yet other ideals, is Baroque. All these have a
passion for classical models as a distinguishing mark, so that the Renaissance
style must also have the classical qualities of serenity and harmony alities
which were lost sight of in the period of the Counter-Reformation, or the
Thirty Years War.
Source: The Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists (Penguin Reference Books)
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