Background

There are many highly interesting periods of history to learn about, but one of the most fascinating is that which covers the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy.  The level of artistic and architectural production during this time is astounding, so much so that centuries later works produced during the Renaissance continue to capture the public’s imagination.  Generally speaking, there are many reasons why the Renaissance is an important area of study.  Not only is the period highly engaging, but it also offers us several lessons by which we can approach the world today.  Here are a few reasons why the Renaissance is worth studying.

The Renaissance teaches us the power of looking to the past for insights and inspiration

Have you ever looked back to history with admiration, excitement, or nostalgia?  Many people do, which is probably why history-themed TV shows and books continue to attract people’s attention in the world today.  We might think that those who came before us lived in more interesting times, or maybe that they lived in cultures which were superior to our modern culture.  During the Renaissance, people also looked to their past with a sense of admiration and in search of guidance.  They did not look to the previous century, but instead to the ancient Greeks and Romans, whose civilizations existed more than a thousand years earlier.  Patrons, scholars, artists, and engineers of the Renaissance looked back to their ancient ancestors in order to help them craft their world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  It is really not surprising that this started in Italy, since many of the old ruins still standing in the Renaissance period would still have been considered engineering marvels – the products of some advanced people who once occupied the land.

While the challenges that each generation faces differ from those faced by previous generations, many of the same basic issues persist.  How do we approach issues that we face today, whether they be political, economic, or social?  Do we think that coming up with some new and “enlightened” solution to problems is always the best, or do we stop and consider how similar problems were addressed at different times in history?  The Renaissance teaches us the power of looking to the past for insights and inspiration in dealing with today’s issues.  By looking to the past for guidance today, not only can we find potential sources of answers, but also ways to address current challenges that previous societies have faced.

It shows us the importance of continual innovation

While the Renaissance is mostly considered in light of the historical thinking that went on in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, leaders of that time could be very forward-thinking in their approaches.  The Scientific Revolution was still centuries away, but we can still find in the Renaissance a push towards using new means to address problems.  In the world of art, principles of perspective were explored which allowed for the creation of more and more realistic illusions in painted and sculpted images.

In the world of engineering, we find challenges being overcome through the use of forward-looking innovation.  One of the most famous examples of this is when Filippo Brunelleschi designed and executed the dome which covered the transept of the Florence cathedral.  When the church was built in the fourteenth century, a large hole was left in the ceiling because no one knew how to cover it with a dome.  It was not until Brunelleschi used an original approach in the early 1400s that the problem was solved.  In the late sixteenth century, we find another remarkable example of engineering innovation in Domenico Fontana’s transport and installation of a large obelisk in front of St. Peter’s Basilica.  In painting, we see a tremendous change in the realism of portrayed figures and spaces thanks to new developments in perspective and painterly technique.

Innovation is something that we have a lot of today, but much of it rests on the shoulders of previous generations that engaged in much trial and error.  We can better appreciate what we have today by recognizing the groundwork that was laid in the past.  This holds true not only for the technology itself, but also for the willingness to try experimental means of overcoming challenges.  In the Renaissance, there was a prevailing humanist belief in the ability of the human person to rise to challenges of the day, and this belief gives us a model for courage in doing what no one has done before.

The Renaissance thrived by connecting the past, present, and future

In historical retrospect, the Renaissance is arguably the best example of a civilization with its feet in worlds of the past and the future.  While all ages are guided by visions of what came before and what lies ahead to a certain degree, the way that those living in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (particularly in Italy) straddled ancient and modern is particularly impressive.  Historians today consider the period preceding the Renaissance to be the Middle Ages, which effectively began with the fall of Rome in the fifth century and lasted for some eight or nine centuries.  Although the Middle Ages cannot be thought of as an entirely homogenous entity, we might say that the rate of change during that time was relatively less when compared to history during and after the Renaissance.

Following the Renaissance, the world started changing in several significant ways.  The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the Scientific Revolution gradually developed on the heels of the thinking that had emerged in the decades and centuries before.  The Renaissance was thus the “gateway” to the modern world.  At least in some circles, it is called the “Early Modern” period – even if we might not ordinarily think of anything in the fifteenth century as being “modern” at all!

After looking back through the history of Western Civilization, one can reasonably point to the Renaissance as the one period that best ties everything in its past with everything in its future.  In Renaissance art and architecture, the results were amazing; people still flock from around the world to see the works of Renaissance masters, and these works continue to dominate our visual vocabulary.  Today, we can learn a lesson or two from the Renaissance example.  We need to look to our past and also to our future while we live in the present, and we should be more conscious of our place in history.  It may be easy to forget the larger picture, but we could very well regret such blindness.

A good understanding of how the Renaissance unfolded in Italy must take into account the geography and diversity within the large Italian peninsula.  The Italy as we know it today is a relatively modern creation, and for much of its history the peninsula was controlled by various city-states which warred with one another and exchanged control over regions from time to time.  Some of the major cities or regions in Italy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance included Naples in the south, Rome, Florence, Siena, Pisa, and Umbria in the central region, and Milan, Genoa, and Venice in the north.

While Rome occupied an unsurpassed role in the ancient world, the early years of the Renaissance were squarely centered around the city of Florence.  It was there that a concentration of brilliant artists and architects brought their ideas to life, although for at least some of them it only came after they had made trips to Rome to see the ruins and old works from the imperial age.

Eventually, the ideas of the Renaissance spread beyond Florence as humanist scholars throughout the peninsula became more attracted to the notion of emulating antiquity.  Some of these ideas would be spread through written texts, such as the great work on architecture by Leon Battista Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria.  Moveable type was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the middle of the 1500s, and this made it easier to share both ancient texts and contemporary Renaissance ideas to more and more people.

The center of Renaissance patronage would eventually make its way to Rome, where one of the most powerful of all art patrons lived – the Pope.  By the beginning of the sixteenth century, papal patronage would draw some of the greatest artists to the Eternal City, such as Raphael and Michelangelo.  Rome, however, would be sacked in 1527, causing people to flee from the city.  The result of this was that artists and architects who had training in Rome brought their talents and knowledge of Roman design to other cities in Italy, increasing the range of places where ideas of the Roman Renaissance would become manifest.  Cities such as Venice, which became the new home of the great sixteenth century architects Sansovino, Sanmicheli, and Serlio, greatly benefited from this.

Local Italian painters, aided in part by the popularization of oil-on-canvas as an artistic medium, created works not merely for national clients, but also for international patrons, which thereby introduced Renaissance ideas to a wider audience.  For example, Leonardo da Vinci painted for Italians while in Italy before he left for France to paint for King Francis I.  The painter Titian painted for leaders in his hometown of Venice, for regional leaders in Italy, such as Alfonso d’Este and Federico Gonzaga, and eventually for international figures, such as monarchs Charles and Philip II of Spain, and Mary of Hungary.  The transmission of aesthetic ideals and humanist ideas was therefore able to spread well beyond the Italian peninsula and influence a large number of artists and thinkers throughout Europe.

Further Reading

The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples, by David Gilmour

 

The names of artists and architects of many medieval works have frequently been forgotten by history.  During the Middle Ages, the creators of art were not as important as the art itself; today, medieval works are often times listed as anonymous creations rather than creations of specific people.  This started changing around the time of the Renaissance, when the identity of the artist or architect became a more important component of the work itself.  We start to see more and more works given attribution by scholars and historians during the Renaissance, and we are also told more stories about the lives of the artists.  In effect, the status of the Renaissance artist rose to a level which was far greater than anything he had enjoyed in the Middle Ages.  One of the reasons for this was undoubtedly the general humanist belief in the capacity of the individual to achieve great things.  If an individual’s talent in sculpting marble, or his genius in constructing a building, meant that he rose above his contemporaries, why shouldn’t that be praised and commended during his lifetime?  This elevation of the status of artist or architect, rather than just that of what he created, is one of the significant shifts that separates the Renaissance from the Middle Ages.

The list of Renaissance figures below is an overview of the major figures in Italian art and life.  It is not an exhaustive list, but covers the most important figures who shaped the Renaissance.

Note – some dates are approximate

Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455)

Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446): a sculptor and architect who played a part in some of the most important events in Quattrocento Florence.  Giving up sculpture after losing the competition to create the bronze door panels for the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence (1401-1402), Brunelleschi went on to design the single most important architectural feature of Florence – the dome covering the cathedral (1420-1436).  Further, his work on one-point linear perspective would have a profound impact on the course of painters of the Renaissance.

Donatello (c. 1386-1466): worked with a variety of materials, such as marble, bronze, wood, stucco reliefs, and glass.  Donatello and Brunelleschi went to Rome together at one point, where the former saw the ancient sculpture and architecture which would have an impact on his subsequent work.  He brought classical influences into his sculpture but did not copy exactly from ancient sources, and he is noted for bringing different classical and perspectival devices to Renaissance art.

Fra Angelico

Michelozzo di Bartolomeo Michelozzi (1396-1472)

Masaccio (1401-1428)

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)

Fra Filippo Lippi

Pietro Perugino

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510): known for painting for the powerful Medici family, Botticelli produced some of the most recognizable humanist-inspired paintings of the Quattrocento.

Donato Bramante (1444-1514)

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

Raphael Sanzio

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)

Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516)

Giorgione (1477-1510)

Titian (c. 1488-1576): the most important painter of Venice during the sixteenth century, Titian’s career spanned eight centuries.  He painted a variety of subject matters, from devotional images to large altarpieces, to portraits to mythological scenes, almost always using oil on canvas.  He worked for some of the most powerful figures in Europe at the time, such as the Duke of Mantua (Alfonso d’Este), Pope Paul III and his nephew Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, and the rulers of Spain, Charles V and his son Philip II.  Although he was the most famous painter in all of Europe at the time of his death, he worked primarily from his studio in Venice.

Jacopo da Pontormo (1494-1557)

Andrea Palladio (1508-1580): He was the most important architect in Venice in the second half of the sixteenth century.  He was an important designer of villas in the Veneto region before turning to Venice itself, where he combined classically-derived principles with innovation in religious architecture.  His approach to architecture would spawn an entire architectural movement in eighteenth-century England, known as “Palladianism” (or the “Palladian Revival”), which would drive the design of some of the largest mansions of the period.

Tintoretto (1518-1594)

Giambologna (1529-1608)

What was the Renaissance?

The Renaissance was a period in which people started looking to the classical world (ancient Greece and Rome) with much admiration.  When they looked at history, they considered the classical world to have been a time of greatness, and that the fall of the Roman Empire (c. 476 A.D.) led Europe into a period of decline which they called the “Dark Ages”.  Beginning in the fifteenth century, many Italians thought that by reviving the ideas, art, and architecture from antiquity, they could bring about a “rebirth” of greatness in their own cities.  The result was the Renaissance, which is a word which means “rebirth”.

What was Renaissance humanism?

Humanism was a way of thinking that was popular in the fifteenth century and influenced much of Italian culture.  Humanists considered the individual to have great potential, and they thought that individuals reached their greatest achievement in ancient Greece and Rome.  Because of this, humanists wanted to recapture the greatness of antiquity and so they were at the forefront of trying to emulate the activities, art, and engineering of the classical world.  Many artists and architects, who may have been influenced by humanism or were hired by humanist patrons, borrowed ideas from ancient texts, from unearthed statues, or from old Roman buildings when they created new works.

What are the dates of the Renaissance?

Generally speaking, the Renaissance period in Italy dates from about 1400 to 1600. The beginning dates to 1401 with the competition for the bronze doors of the Florence baptistery. The fifteenth century is referred to as the “Early Renaissance”, and the years of about 1495 to 1520 are called the “High Renaissance”. The period from about 1520 to 1600 is called the “Late Renaissance”, but it is also called the “Mannerist” period. These dates are not set in stone, however, and you may see slightly different dates for these elsewhere. Also, Renaissance thinking and artistic practices did not influence all areas of Italy at the same time, so while Florence may have been fully in “Renaissance mode” by 1450, it would take a longer time before cities such as Venice adopted Renaissance ideas.

What came before the Renaissance in Italy?

The period from about 1200-1400 is sometimes called “Italian Gothic” or “Proto-Renaissance”.  Many great works of art and architecture were created during this time, such as Giotto’s Arena Chapel fresco cycle and the construction of the Florence Cathedral.  These works really start the push toward the Renaissance, though this push would be hindered by the catastrophic Black Death (c. 1347) which swept through Europe, killing millions of people.  Nevertheless, fourteenth-century Italy is an important time in the development of art and culture which would make later developments possible in the fifteenth century.