Renaissance
1400 - 1530.
Centered in Italy, the
Renaissance was a period of
great creative and intellectual activity, during which artists broke
away from the restrictions of medieval art. Throughout the 15th
century, artists studied the natural world in order to perfect their
understanding of such subjects as anatomy and perspective. Among the
many great artists of this period were Giotto, Masaccio, Sandro
Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, and Piero della Francesca. The Early
Renaissance was succeeded by the mature High Renaissance period, which
began circa 1500. The High Renaissance was the culmination of the
artistic developments of the Early Renaissance, and one of the great
explosions of creative genius in history of arts. It is notable for
three of the greatest artists in history: Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. Also active at that time were such masters as
Giorgione, Titian and Giovanni Bellini.
Artists and Articles
Leonardo da Vinci Art
Leonardo da Vinci, Italian High Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist and
inventor. Leonardo da Vinci was an amazing painter. His paintings
contained incredible detail, which made them seem almost real. This
detail included things like various shadow effects and textures which
gave the works lifelike appearances. Although Leonardo produced a
relatively small number of paintings, many of which remained
unfinished, he was nevertheless an extraordinarily innovative
and influential artist. As a scientist Leonardo towered above all his
contemporaries - Leonardo actually anticipated many discoveries of
modern times. In anatomy he studied the circulation of the blood and
the action of the eye. He made discoveries in meteorology and geology,
learned the effect of the moon on the tides, foreshadowed modern
conceptions of continent formation, and surmised the nature of fossil
shells. He was among the originators of the science of hydraulics. He
invented a large number of ingenious machines, many potentially
useful.
- Leonardo da Vinci Art, $25
(80 pictures)
- Leonardo da Vinci. Life and biography.
- Leonardo da Vinci. Evaluation of art.
Michelangelo Art
Michelangelo was considered the greatest living
artist in his lifetime, and ever since then he has been held to be one
of the greatest artists of all times. A number of his works in
painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in
existence. Michelangelo is one of the greatest artists of all time, a
man whose name has become synonymous with the word "masterpiece". As
an artist he was unmatched, the creator of works of sublime beauty
that express the full breadth of the human condition. Giorgio Vasari
proposed that Michelangelo was the pinnacle of all artistic
achievement since the beginning of the Renaissance, a viewpoint that
continued to be influential in art history for centuries. In his
lifetime he was also often called Il Divino (the divine one),
an appropriate name given his intense spirituality. One of the
qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his sense of
awe-inspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists
to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that
resulted in the next major movement in Western art after the High
Renaissance, Mannerism.
- Michelangelo Art, $29
(180 pictures)
- Michelangelo. Art, life and biography.
- Michelangelo. Michelangelo's David.
- Michelangelo. Michelangelo's Pieta.
- Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. High Renaissance Masterpiece.
- Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. Book of Genesis.
- Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. The Ignudi.
- Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. Seven Prophets.
- Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. Five Sibyls.
- Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. Lunettes.
- Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. Pendentives.
- Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. The Ancestors of Christ.
- Michelangelo. Sistine Chapel. The Last Judgement.
Raphael Art
Raphael or Raffaello Sanzio is an Italian High
Renaissance painter and architect of the Florentine
school, celebrated for the perfection and grace of his
art, his mastery of dynamic composition and movement. Raphael, like
Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, is one of the most famous artists of Italy's
High Renaissance and one of the greatest influences in the history of
Western art. Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and for his large
figure compositions in the Vatican in Rome. By his artistic means
Raphael has achieved constant movement throughout his
paintings, without letting it become restless or unbalanced. Raphael
was seen to have accomplished what the older generation had striven so
hard to achieve: the perfect and harmonious composition of freely
moving figures.
- Raphael Art, $25
(125 pictures)
- Raphael. Art, life and biography.
- Raphael. Frescoes in rooms of Vatican.
- Raphael. Religious paintings.
- Raphael. Madonnas.
- Raphael. Portraits.
Titian Art
Tiziano Vecellio, better known as Titian, the
leader of the 16th-century Venetian school of the Italian High/Late
Renaissance, and the greatest Venetian artist of the
16th century, the shaper of the Venetian coloristic and painterly
tradition. Titian contributed to all of the major areas of Renaissance
art, painting altarpieces, portraits, mythologies, and pastoral
landscapes. He is one of the key figures in the history of Western
art. His work, which permanently affected the course of European
painting, provided an alternative, of equal power and attractiveness,
to the linear and sculptural Florentine tradition championed by
Michelangelo and Raphael; this
alternative, eagerly taken up by Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velazquez, Rembrandt van Rijn, Eugene Delacroix, and the Impressionists, is
still vital today. In its own right Titian's work often attains the
very highest reach of human achievement in the visual arts.
- Titian Art, $25
(125 pictures)
- Titian. Art and life.
- Titian. Commentary on art, paintings, and works.
More
Movements
Art Encyclopedia A world history of art in articles.
Renaissance
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