Renaissance

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Movements

Art Encyclopedia A world history of art in articles.
      Renaissance
      Baroque
      Romanticism
      Academism
      Impressionism
      Postimpressionism
      Modernism
      Postmodernism

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