Transition and the Sublime
The evolution of art & culture in the early Renaissance
Perspective and early abstraction

Lecture by  Johnes Ruta, independent curator & art theorist
Art Director New Haven Free Public Library
azothgallery@comcast.net

© Copyright 2010, Johnes Ruta. All Rights Reserved.

 
 
Web page in progress
  
 
All Photo Credits: "Art Across Time" Third Edition - by Laurie Schneider Adams
(McGraw-Hill, 2007, ISBN: 0072965258)
  I.    After the Fall of Rome    

In the late Roman Empire, the system of education was devised by Martanius Capella in the fifth century, based on study of the the Seven Liberal Arts which consisted of two categories of study – the Trivium of three subjects (Grammar, Dialectic [intellectual debate], and Rhetoric)  and the Quadrivium of four subjects (Arithmetic, Geometry, Musical Harmony, & Astronomy). The philosopher Boethius also promoted this system.  

  
 
 
(Photo: Art Across Time 7.13)
 
  In the late 500s AD, the western Roman Empire collapsed as the Italian provinces were invaded by Germanic tribes, the Ostrogoths and the Lombards, who took over the cities and countryside.   

In the cities and towns, the Roman plebian populations were reduced to further servitude, forced to work the fields and tend the livestock, with no protection from marauders raiding their labors and homes.  Outside of the towns, those  who travelled the highways and transported goods became the prey of marauders. With the roads totally unsafe, manufacturing supplies could not move, products could not be distributed.   Markets and businesses totally collapsed.   Formal education was largely abandoned, and general literacy quickly evaporated against the hardships of this environment.   Learning now was handed down from generation to generation by crafts people and trades people.

The Dark Ages were a period of hardship and danger.

The only system of education to continue was now based in the fortified monasteries, where scribes were trained to copy surviving Greek and Roman texts in order to preserve them for posterity. 		 
   
 
II.    The Court of  Charlemagne, AD 742-814   

In what is now France, the Frankish Empire had been founded by Charles Martel “Charles the Hammer” and his son Pippin, with the incorporation of the provinces of  Aquitaine, Gascogne,  and Provence, and the defeat of the Saracen invasion from iberian Spain in 768. Charles Martel’s grandson became Charles the Great, who led his cavalry armies east into Italy to push out the Germanic Lombards.  Italy was incorporated into the Frankish Empire.  Thus, as an ally of the Pope, Charles the Great’s coronation as Emperor of the Frankish Empire took place on Christmas Day the year 800.  Under the reign of Charlemagne, there was a restoration of order and the reminiscence of the grandeur and consciousness of the Roman Empire, and thus a period of renewal of the arts, and a style of splendor in the royal court.    


III.   Illuminated Manuscript production      


IV.  Cathedral building



V. Education systems in the Middle Ages    

The first higher education institution in medieval Europe was the University of Constantinople, followed by the University of Salerno (9th century), the Preslav Literary School and Ohrid Literary School in the Bulgarian Empire (9th century). The first degree-granting universities in Europe were the University of Bologna (1088), the University of Paris (c. 1150, later associated with the Sorbonne), the University of Oxford (1167), the University of Cambridge (1209), the University of Salamanca (1218), the University of Montpellier (1220), the University of Padua (1222), the University of Naples Federico II (1224), the University of Toulouse (1229).[12][13] Some scholars argue that these medieval universities were influenced in many ways by the medieval Madrasah institutions in Islamic Spain, the Emirate of Sicily, and the Middle East (during the Crusades).The earliest universities in Western Europe were developed under the aegis of the Catholic Church, usually as cathedral schools or by papal bull as studia generali (n.b. The development of cathedral schools into universities actually appears to be quite rare, with the University of Paris being an exception — see Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities), later they were also founded by Kings (Charles University in Prague, Jagiellonian University in Krakow) or municipal administrations (University of Cologne, University of Erfurt). In the early medieval period, most new universities were founded from pre-existing schools, usually when these schools were deemed to have become primarily sites of higher education. Many historians state that universities and cathedral schools were a continuation of the interest in learning promoted by monasteries.In Europe, young men proceeded to university when they had completed their study of the trivium–the preparatory arts of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic or logic–and the quadrivium: arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.  
 
   
  VI.  Scholastic Philosophy

By the 11th century, there arose a constellation of universities in the cities of Europe:  The term “schola”  derives from ancient Greek for "leisure”   -- as it was recognized since antiquity that one must possess leisure time in order to contemplate the ultimate nature of  things – leisure is an essential condition.  In the middle ages, no clear distinction was made between philosophy and theology – Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) suggested that philosophy operated on premises supplied by nature, and theology operated on premises supplied by revelation. Aquinas succeeded in re-establishing the acceptability of Aristotle’s philosophy, which at that time was under suspicion by more conservative Church theologians as pagan. The surviving texts came through the Muslim world and were translations from Arabic sources and commentaries.  Aquinas’ system of metaphysics perceived that matter in the universe was manifested in two ways: first as esse naturale, that is, the Form from Nature that makes a piece of matter the thing that it is;  second,  esse intelligible, is that which arises as an idea in a person’s mind.

Thomas Aquinas:  “Beautiful things are those which please when seen, because they are felt to be rays from God’s mind.” The Byzantine Empire was the eastern remnant of the Roman Empire which had also divided the Church in the Great Schism. In addition to the growing weariness with old forms, the social desire for bright new objects, silks and spices from the East, there was a weariness with Byzantine drabness and the Byzantine political influence  and presence in many parts of Italy. These new social trends  were also factors that opened the door to allow artistic innovation in the 13th century.  

VII. Arabic innovation

I.       Al-chemia : Transformative Power.  

II.     Perfection in the hypnotic repetition of the interlocking Geometric motif.

 
   
 
The History of OPTICS
  
   
  Glossary
* extromissive vision :  sight occurs by the emission of light out of the eye, illuminating the objects seen.  Light is believed to originate from the eye.             

* intromissive vision :  sight occurs by the entry of light rays into the eye.  Light is believed to originate from the external world. 		 
   
  ANCIENT GREECE  

 The Atomists -- Leucippus (fl. 450-420 BC) & Democritus (c.460 BC-370BC) 

In optics, the Atomists promoted the Extromissive principle of sight that objects are constantly peeling off  particles from their surfaces which enter the eye to show the object.         

Euclid (fl. 300 BC) – (extromissive principle of sight)  In time of Euclid the prevailing theory of sight was already that light is emitted from the eye by which we illuminate what we see.   From this principle, Euclid applied his mathematical geometry, that light enters the eye in the shape of a cone.   The geometric angles of objects on the aspects of this cone thus give the sense of visual perspective.

Aristotle (384-322 BC) --  (intromissive principle) “Objects modify the intervening media." 		  
   
  HELLENIC ALEXANDRIA         

Claudius Ptolemy  (90 – 168 C.E.)  (extromissive vision)   Sight believed to be rays of light emitted from the eyes.   



Al-Hazan   (965-1040 C.E.)  Intromissive principle of Optics.   

Al Hazan's most important work, Optics, consisted of seven volumes of experiments, mathematics, and inductive reasoning, without reliance on previous authorities. Euclid, Ptolemy, and other ancient scientists had believed that vision resulted from light rays emitted by the eye. Al Hazan originated the theory that vision was the result of illuminated rays reaching the eye. He believed that light rays emanated in straight lines, in a spherical direction, from every point of a luminous object. He studied the properties of various types of lenses, mirrors, and magnifying glasses and conducted major studies on refraction, the angle at which light is bent when passing from one medium to another. Latin translations of Optics influenced European scientists, such as Roger Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Pierre de Fermat, and René Descartes, from the end of the twelfth century into the seventeenth century. Al Hazan addressed the "moon illusion," the ancient question of why the sun and moon appear larger near the horizon. He suggested that objects on the horizon influence our optical perception of the moon. Although the illusion holds even at sea where there are no objects on the horizon, he was correct in considering it to be a problem of visual perception, wherein the brain is unable to accurately interpret optical information about size and distance. Al Hazan wrote at least 92 works on mathematics, physics, and metaphysics, as well as treatises on logic, politics, religion, ethics, poetry, and music. He wrote summaries of the works of Aristotle, the Roman physician Galen, Ptolemy, and Euclid. About 20 of Al Hazan's mathematical works are extant. One of these became known as "Al Hazan's problem." This is the mathematical problem of finding the point, on a surface of a given shape, that will reflect the light from a point opposite the surface to a second point opposite the surface. At least 20 of Al Hazan's surviving works deal with astronomy and he authored an important commentary on the Ptolemy’s astronomical text The Almagest, written in Alexandria in the second century. Al Hazan's most famous astronomical work, On the Configuration of the World, was translated into Spanish in the thirteenth century, and from Spanish into Latin. It also was translated into Hebrew and then into Latin and influenced the astronomers of the early Renaissance.            

http://www.bookrags.com/biography/ibn-al-haitham-al-hazan-wop/   

 
Documents regarding Al Hazan:

The sun's rays proceed from the sun along straight lines and are reflected from every polished object at equal angles, i.e. the reflected ray subtends, together with the line tangential to the polished object which is in the plane of the reflected ray, two equal angles. Hence it follows that the ray reflected from the spherical surface, together with the circumference of the circle which is in the plane of the ray, subtends two equal angles. From this it also follows that the reflected ray, together with the diameter of the circle, subtends two equal angles. And every ray which is reflected from a polished object to a point produces a certain heating at that point, so that if numerous rays are collected at one point, the heating at that point is multiplied: and if the number of rays increases, the effect of the heat increases accordingly. — Alhazan In H. J. J. Winter, 'A Discourse of the Concave Spherical Mirror by Ibn Al-Haitham', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1950, 16, 2.     


Opticae Thesaurus  

Translated into Latin in 1270, Opticae Thesaurus was the first real contribution to the science of optics in the first millennium and had a great influence on both Bacon and Kepler. Of particular note the six volume work contains the first serious study of lenses, a disproof of Ptolemy's law of refraction, research into reflections from spherical and parabolic mirrors and the first accurate description of the anatomy of the human eye.  He also studied the phenomena of eclipses, shadows, and rainbows and the role of the dispersion light in the determination of colours.

Many experiments were conducted in a dark room lit through a solitary hole.  Outside the room, adjacent to the wall with the hole, Alhazen hung five lamps. He observed that these produced five 'lights' on the wall inside his dark room and that by placing an obstruction between one of the lanterns and the hole one of the 'lights' on the wall disappears. His observation that the lantern, the obstruction and the hole were in a straight line demonstrated that light travels in straight lines. The fact that there were five 'lights' on the wall inside the room revealed that, despite there being five light sources simultaneously traveling through the hole, they were not mixed up. From this Alhazen deduced that vision was the product of light being reflected into the eye rather than rays from the eye scanning objects. This overturned a thousand years of Aristotelian scientific thought. Alhazen's experiment was the first scientific description of the 'camera obscura' (dark room), the principle behind the pinhole camera.The IET Archives  holds a copy of Opticae Thesaurus dated 1572, the first year in which it was published. This edition is of particular note as, prior to being owned by IEE past president, Silvanus P Thompson, it was also in the possession of the celebrated Andre Marie Ampere.His book, Mizan al-Hikmah, examines the density of the atmosphere, atmospheric refraction, and why twilight begins or ends only when the sun is 19 degrees below the horizon.  Ultimately, his desire was to use all of these aspects to determine the height of the atmosphere.             


ABU ALI HASAN IBN AL-HAITHAM (ALHAZEN)  (965 - 1040 AD)

Al-Haitham, known in the West as Alhazen, is considered as the father of modern optics. Ibn al-Haitham was born in 965 C.E. in Basrah (present Iraq), and received his education in Basrah and Baghdad. He traveled to Egypt and Spain. He spent most of his life in Spain, where conducted research in optics, mathematics, physics, medicine and development of scientific methods. Al-Haitham conducted experiments on the propagation of light and colors, optic illusions and reflections. He examined the refraction of light rays through transparent medium (air, water) and documented the laws of refraction. He also carried out the first experiments on the dispersion of light into colors. In detailing his experiment with spherical segments (glass vessels filled with water), he came very close to discovering the theory of magnifying lenses which was developed in Italy three centuries later. It took another three centuries before the law of sines was proposed by Snell and Descartes. His book Kitab-al-Manazir was translated into Latin in the Middle Ages, as also his book dealing with the colors of sunset. He dealt at length with the theory of various physical phenomena such as the rainbow, shadows, eclipses, and speculated on the physical nature of light. Roger Bacon (thirteenth century), Pole Witelo (Vitellio) and all Medieval Western writers on Optics base their optical work primarily on Al-Haitham's 'Opticae Thesaurus.' His work also influenced Leonardo da Vinci and Johann Kepler. His approach to optics generated fresh ideas and resulted in great progress in experimental methods. Al-Haitham was the first to describe accurately the various parts of the eye and gave a scientific explanation of the process of vision. He contradicted Euclid’s and Ptolemy's Extromissive theories of vision that the eye sends out visual rays to the object; according to him the rays originate in the object of vision and not in the eye.   Al-Haitham also attempted to explain binocular vision, and gave a correct explanation of the apparent increase in size of the sun and the moon when near the horizon. He is known for the earliest use of the Camera Obscura. In Al-Haitham's writings, one finds a clear explanation of the development of scientific method, the systematic observation of physical phenomena and their relationship to theory. His research in optics focused on spherical and parabolic mirrors and spherical aberration. He made the important observation that the ratio between the angle of incidence and refraction does not remain constant and investigated the magnifying power of a lens. His catoptrics contains the important problem known as Alhazen's problem. It comprises drawing lines from two points in the plane of a circle meeting at a point on the circumference and making equal angles with the normal at that point. This leads to an equation of the fourth degree. He also solved the shape of an aplantic surface for reflection. In his book Mizan al-Hikmah, Al-Haitham has discussed the density of the atmosphere and developed a relation between it and the height. He also studied atmospheric refraction. He discovered that the twilight only ceases or begins when the sun is 19o below the horizon and attempted to measure the height of the atmosphere on that basis. He deduced the height of homogeneous atmosphere to be 55 miles. In mathematics, he developed analytical geometry by establishing linkage between algebra and geometry. Al-Haitham wrote more than two hundred books, very few of which have survived. His monumental treatise on optics has survived through its Latin translation. During the Middle Ages his books on cosmology were translated into Latin, Hebrew and other European languages. by Dr. A. Zahoor

 (source: http://home.att.net/~mleary/alhazen.htm)  		  
     
   
  Early Renaissance in Italy

In the medieval centuries between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the beginning of universities in the 12th and 13th centuries, Europe had very few schools and illiteracy was  wide-spread. Similar to modern “Liberal Theology” in Latin America, the medieval Church was the only real force standing between the aristocracy and the peasantry -- against the excesses of feudalism and the ill treatments of serfdom.   In this situation, painting was considered a means to visually illustrate religious themes, and thereby to provide Hope to the people of a better world to come.

Nicola Pisano (c.1220/5-1284)  and his son Giovanni Pisano (c.1245/50-after 1318) 
Created the Pulpit – Baptistry at Pisa (Nicola 1260). Used antique art as a model for his art, attempted to create a Christian art style with the realism and dignity of Late Roman art.  The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (d. 1250) was engaged in a deliberate revival of Roman grandeur. Against the pure Byzantine style (flat gilded backgrounds) there is the beginning of landscape backgrounds, possibly influenced by the French Gothic style, where the artists might have visited. 		 
   
  DUCCIO di Buoninsegna  (c.1255-c1319)         
The first great Sienese painter, he worked in the austere Byzantine style in use for centuries in Italy in which the backgrounds gilded and 2-dimensional.      Considered a profound innovator in his Solidity of  forms. Used varied and elegant outlines as the surface patterns and to describe forms.  Use of  rich and subtle color. These elements enabled him to portray the emotional depth of figures.   Retained and summarized the Byzantine style.   		  
 
 
 
Duccio di Buoninsegna  “Kiss of Judas”  1308 (Photo: Art Across Time12.18)
 
   
  GIOTTO di Bondone   (c.1266/7 – 1337)  
Adaptation of Perspective from Arabic principles of  sight.   Influenced by sculpture style of Giovanni Pisano.    
Both born in Florence, Giotto in 1266 and the poet Dante in 1265 (d.1321) were close friends. Both lived more than a millennium after the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy had defined the world order as a system of nine heavens composed of Moon, Sun, the five known planets,  the fixed constellations, and the Crystalline Heaven, all with their center at the core of  the Earth, itself turning around a fixed axis.  By the basis of this Aristotelian world view,  the Neo-Platonists,  such as Plotinus and Proclus,  had later elaborated the system of  the all-encompassing universe as a series of vertical chains: the Visible Cosmos, consisting of Matter,  the  Earth,  the Seven Planets, and the Fixed Stars;  and, above,  the Invisible Cosmos, consisting of  the World Soul, the Divine Mind of God (or Forms as Platonic  ideas), and the One(ness).  

To Dante’s intuition,  expressed through philosophy, understanding,  and creative allusion,  the vertical correspondences  of these concentric realms were echoes of the parallel forces of a triune reality of universal Mind, Body, and Spirit. Dionysius, the 5th century Church father who had also realigned the calendar and (inaccurately) set the Year One as that of Christ's birth,  restated this scenario as mankind's own situation in his Doctrine of  Celestial Hierarchy, rising from deeper to higher levels from that inner core of the Earth, outward through all the evenly harmonized spheres of moral reason where are found, respectively: the demonic, the human,  and the angelic orders. 8  

“In the  Ptolemaic  world-picture,” says Titus Burkhardt, “the wider the heavenly sphere in which a star moves,  the purer it is,  the less conditioned, and the nearer the divine origin is the degree of existence and the level of consciousness to which it corresponds.”  9  

When Giotto’s family accompany the painter out of  Florence during work on any long commission, Dante is invited to stay with them as well.  From the artistic and theological conversations between them, both painter and poet would retain the visual and verbal images and figures of religious revelations. 28   

On the walls of the Arena chapel in Padua, Giotto's great fresco The Last Judgment, consecrated in 1305, would manifest the incipient use of the principle of perspective in the con-vergence into a vortex at the bottom, the implied lines aligned to the edges of galleries of saints on either side of the throne of God overlooking  the panorama of the Kingdom of Heaven.  Thus the placement of background forms would be employed to construct the optical illusion of  a 3-dimensional field.  Lining the side walls of the Arena chapel, Giotto's smaller narrative series of paintings  The Life of Mary,  The Life of Christ, and The Passion of Christ display a more developed notion of perspective in the structures of cornices and buildings employing the clearly deliberate techniques of alignment and delineation into 3-dimensional spaces that also are described in Dante's explanation of the wedge-shaped boundaries of the walls extending down into the vortex-like depth of the Inferno, to its pit at the core of the Earth. Dante sees in Giotto's paintings the visual interpretation of their discussions:  the souls of all those held there are the total body of the medieval world itself, in the details of its corruption. Into this lower center of concentric circles all divergent lines converge inward into the abyss. 

                 
Upon the utmost verge of a high bank, 
By craggy rocks environ'd round, we came.
Where woes beneath, more cruel yet, we stow'd.   
And here, to shun the horrible excess   
Of fetid exhalation upward cast  
From the profound abyss...  

  (Inferno,  Canto XI, 1-6) 

With Dante’s literary description and Giotto’s examples of  implied convergence lines depicting recessive ceilings,  Giotto’s artistic successors such as Taddeo Gaddi, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzettis,  combined with principles found in the reappearance of the text of Euclid's Optics would eventually bring a recognition of convergence  into the conscious principle of the “vanishing point” in the Perspective drawings of such Renaissance architects as Brunelleschi and Alberti in the early 15th century, thus disseminating the concept to their students Masaccio, Donatello, Paolo Uccello, and Piero della Francesca.  		  
 
 
 
Giotto di Bondone “Kiss of Judas”  1305 (Photo: Art Across Time 12.19)
 
   
 
 
 
Giotto di Bondone “The Last Judgement”  fresco, Arena Chapel, Padua 1305 (Photo: Art Across Time12.10)
  
 
  Ambroglio LORENZETTI  (active 1320-1345)  

Sienese painters Lorenzo and Pietro Lorenzetti extended the style of Duccio’s concepts rendering solidity of form and emotional depth.

 
 
 
 
Ambroglio Lorenzetti “The Effects of Good Government in the City”  (Photo: Art Across Time 12.20) 
  
 
 

Northern Humanist writers and artists   

Meister Eckhart (Germany, 1260-1327)   

Religious visionary painters  

panoramic landscape


The Burgundian Court, AD 1300-1450
 
   
  Jan van Eyck    (1399-1440) 
After working for Count John of Holland from 1422-1424 at The Hague, he was appointed Court Painterand “varlet de chambre” by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. On the Duke’s business, he made several secret journeys to Spain in 1427 and Portugal in 1428, and bought a house in Bruges in 1430.  For centuries, he was credited with the invention of oil painting, but while this really dates back to ancient Greece, van Eyck did invent many great improvements to the use of ground minerals, such as  lapis lazuli, malachite, azurite, ochre, manganese, lead-oxides, cinnabar, verdigris (copper treated with acetic acid from vinegar) orpiment, etc-- mixed with linseed oil.

Artworks:
1.10     “Virgin in a Church” 
13.62   “Ghent Altarpiece”    completed 1432
13.63   detail of Ghent Altarpiece
13.67   “The Arnolfi Portrait”   1434 		 
     
     
   
 

Robert Campin  (1378-1444)

Artworks: 13.60   “Mercade Altarpiece”   1425-30  tempera & oil on wood (Cloisters, NYC)		  
     
     
   
 

ROGIER van der Weyden   (1399-1464)
 Rogier was a student of Robert Campin in Tournai, 1427-1432, and developed from Campin’s
direct, realistic, plebian style into more imbued with more emotion, warmth, and sensitiveness. Attains the same luminosity and observation of situation as Jan van Eyck, but created a style more involved with religious feeling and human sympathy.  His use of color is cooler and based on emotion. He has a strong affinity with Italian painters, especially Fra Angelico. All of these strong qualities gave Rogier a strong influence on his successors among the Flemish painters.   Rogier invented a type of diptych which had a Madonna and Child on one wing, and a praying portrait on the opposite wing.

 
 
 
 
Rogier van der Weyden  “St. Luke Depicting the Virgin”  (Photo: Art Across Time 13.70) 
  
   
  Hieronymus Bosch  (c.1450-1516)    

Artworks: 16.3     “The Garden of Earthly Delights” El Prado, Madrid		  
     
   
  Albrecht Durer  
     
     
   
  Matthias Grunewald  (1470-1528)    

Artworks: 16.15   “Annunciation  Virgin and Child”    The Isenheim Altarpeice 		  
   


Pieter Bruegel the Elder  (1525/30-1569)     Artworks:
16.6     “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”      


Italian Renaissance, AD 1400-1550  

 Fra Angelico (c.1387-1455)   
Fra Giovanni da Fiesole was a Dominican friar, also a friend of Saint Antoninus and knew the popes Eugenius IV and Nicholas V.  He was a member of the Order of Preachers and used his art for didactic purposes, rather than a mystical purpose, starting to paint around the age of 28. His style is simple and direct, and used a largeness of form previously used by Giotto and Masaccio, and a Gothic style of representation which runs counter to the trend of Florentine painting.

 Artworks: 13.47   “Annunciation”  1440   (perspective:  curved archway)        

Paolo Uccello   1396/7-1475  
Paolo Uccello loved to paint birds and other animals, and in his studio had a greatmany studies of birds, so that he was eventually dubbed “Paolo of the Birds”  as in Italian “uccello” means birds.  Paolo Uccello was criticized by Georgio Vasari in his  Lives of the Artists for paying attention only to his study of the problems of perspective and not to the development of figure representation  in his art work.  14… --  Created the fresco in Santa Maria Maggiore,  “The Annunciation” which is considered an original achievement in grace and proportion, and lines are made to recede to the vanishing-point for the first time in painting.   Columns are foreshortened in perspective to break the upward and outward (salient) projection in the angle of vaulting.   14…  -- Fresco in Cloister of  San Miniato (outside Florence)  -- “Lives of the Fathers of the Church” – ignored rule of color consistency =  fields are blue,  cities  - red, buildings – various colors.  Stone colored with another tint.   At this project the abbot fed Uccello meals of  only cheese. After a while of this, Uccello stopped going to work, sick of cheese. Being absent from his commission, Uccello tried to avoid being forced to return, but one day, walking on the street, two friars of the abbey saw him. Uccello ran but they caught up to him and began to reprimand him.  He told them he was sick of cheese and wouldn’t work under this diet. They laughed and then persuaded the abbot to feed him properly,
and the project was then completed.   

Artworks: 13.40   “Sir John Hawkwood”      


Lorenzo Ghiberti  (1378-1455)  
Ghiberti was the most talented and respected sculptor in Florence. He was selected to make two of the three bronze doors for the Baptistery in Florence in 1404. The Baptistery construction was begun in 1059, and the building completed in 1128, built in the Romanesque architectural style.

The first door had been created by Andrea Pisano (1290-1348) from 1330 to 1336. (?? relation to Nicola & Giovanni ??)  Pisano had been a later student of Giotto, and was also influential in freeing art from the established Byzantine flat, gilded style.   The competition for the Baptistery Doors was announced in 1401, and against other entrants such as Brunelleschi and Donatello.  Ghiberti and Brunelleschi were the final contestants for the commission, and aware of Ghiberti’s designs, Brunelleschi left Florence to study in Rome, and Ghiberti was selected.  Work began in 1404, including Ghiberti’s father and Donatello as his assistants. The two new doors were completed in 1436, each weighing up to 40 tons, the North Doors with 20 scenes from the life of Christ, and “The Gates of Paradise” – with 10 scenes from the Old Testament  beginning “Adam and Eve,” and “The Sacrifice of Isaac,”  through “Solomon and the Queen of Sheeba.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Baptistery  

Artworks: 13.10   “The Meeting of Solomon and Sheba”   1450-52  (perspective)        


Gentile da Fabriano  (c.1370-1427)  
Gentile was the exponent of the International Gothic Style in Italy. He developed a non-linear style, in the sense that edges are softened, profiles are not used.   Edges are softly brushed, and fade gently into the movement of the surface…. LINE is felt only as a directional flow within the tissue of Matter and Space : observe the flow of great processions in the background, the flows around, and down, and up, the flow of silks, velvets, and brocades.  Natural objects are presented with scrupulous delicacy and extreme psychological realism…..  

Artworks: 13.27   “Adoration of the Magi”   altarpiece  1423           


Masaccio    (1401-1427/8)  
Masaccio was the first great painter of the Italian Renaissance, whose innovations in the use of  scientific perspective inaugurated the modern era in painting. Masaccio, originally named Tommaso Cassai, was born in San Giovanni Valdarno, near Florence, on December 21, 1401. He joined the painters guild in Florence in 1422. His remarkably individual style owed little to other painters, except possibly the great 14th-century master Giotto. He was more strongly influenced by the architect Brunelleschi and the sculptor Donatello, both of whom were his contemporaries in Florence. From Brunelleschi he acquired a knowledge of mathematical proportion that was crucial to his revival of the principles of scientific perspective. From Donatello he imbibed a knowledge of classical art that led him away from the prevailing Gothic style. He inaugurated a new naturalistic approach to painting that was concerned less with details and ornamentation than with simplicity and unity, less with flat surfaces than with the illusion of three dimensionality. Together with Brunelleschi and Donatello, he was a founder of the Renaissance.Only four unquestionably attributable works of Masaccio survive, although various other paintings have been attributed in whole or in part to him. All of his works are religious in nature—altarpieces or church frescoes. The earliest, a panel, the Madonna with St. Anne (circa 1423, Uffizi, Florence), shows the influence of Donatello in its realistic flesh textures and solidly rounded forms. The fresco Trinity (c. 1425, Santa Maria Novella, Florence) used full perspective for the first time in Western art. His altarpiece for Santa Maria del Carmine, Pisa (1426), with its central panel of the Adoration of the Magi (now in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin), was a simple, unadorned version of a theme that was treated by other painters in a more decorative, ornamental manner. The fresco series for the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence (about 1427) illustrates another of his great innovations, the use of light to define the human body and its draperies. In these frescoes, rather than bathing his scenes in flat uniform light, he painted them as if they were illuminated from a single source of light (the actual chapel window), thus creating a play of light and shadow (chiaroscuro) that gave them a natural, realistic quality unknown in the art of his day. Of these six fresco scenes, Tribute Money and the Expulsion from Paradise are considered his masterpieces.Masaccio's work exerted a strong influence on the course of later Florentine art and particularly on the work of Michelangelo. He died in Rome in 1427 or 1428.

Artworks:
13.24   “The Expulsion from Eden”   


Piero della Francesca  (1410/20-1492)
Piero della Francesca was the most popular painter of the 1400s, due to the mathematical perfection of his forms, and his  superb sense of interval.  These forms give a serene and timeless quality to his paintings – increased by his soft and pale colors.   To modern viewers, there is a sense of Cubism in his forms, and a strong development of symmetry.   

Artworks:
13.13   “Flagellation”   (perspective example)
13.45   “Battista Sforza / Federico de Montefeltro”  portraits
13.52   “The Dream of Constantine” 


Sandro Botticelli  (1445-1510)
Botticelli was the most individual and possibly the most influential painter in Florence at the end of the 15th century. He was a student of Fra Filippo Lippi, and became known as early as 1470, with the painting “Fortitute.”   The chronology of his work ranges from the vigorous realism of his early work, such as “Fortitude” 1470, and “Mars and Venus” 1475, to the langorous and anti-naturalistic ecstasy of his last dated painting “Mystical Nativity” 1500.  His style appeared deliberately archaic, and steeped in deep mythological allegory, especially as opposed to the new ideas of Leonardo da Vinci.  

Artworks:
13.56   “Mars and Venus”      1475
13.57   “The Birth of Venus”   1480
13.59   “Mystical Nativity”        1500   


Leonardo da Vinci  (1452-1529)    

Artworks: 14.15   “Madonna and Child with St. Anne”    (abstract background of mountains)   



Giorgine da Castelfranco  (1476/78-1510)
A Venetian painter, a pupil of Giovanni Bellinni, who along with Leonardo was one of the founders of modern painting.   He was the first exponent of the small picture in oils. Many of his contemporaries were unable to interpret the subject of Giorgione’s painting “The Tempest,”
and analysts today are still mystified.   This painting appears to be the first “landscape of mood,” expressing the heat and tension of an approaching thunderstorm.    

Artworks: 14.46   “The Tempest”