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The Italian Renaissance made way for a countless number of revolutions across disciplines to take place. For example the huge peak of knowledge, thanks to the printing press which was a result of books being more available to the poor, roman-greek traditions being rediscovered and reapplied, texts being translated to find out new things, etc. However one of the biggest evolutions happened in the field of art. New techniques were discovered, man started to portray themselves in paintings, artworks began having an emotional aspect to them, etc. In this paper I wanted to explore more in depth about what the famous artists Donatello, Brunelleschi and Botticelli brought to the table of discoveries and where we would be today if it weren’t for them.
The statue of St. George along with the basso rilievo St.George and the Dragon, reflected a huge shift in traditional artwork. Before the Renaissance, statues and paintings were completely lifeless and flat looking, furthermore they lacked anatomical precision seeing as the medical field wasn’t very advanced. During the renaissance period however, slowly but surely, artists started to change their way of thinking and began to incorporate maths and anatomy into their own works. This led to a new humankind where artists, sculptors, etc would embrace humanism, therefore they were led to the desire of making artworks that showed emotion and that were as anatomically precise as they could get them to be. They would combine idealised beauty and naturalism which helped them excel in sculpture, portraiture etc. One of the earliest examples of this is St. George and St.George and the Dragon. The reason why I am combining both of these works is because they are actually part of the same artwork, however they were commissioned and therefore completed at 2 different times. With St. George, Donatello embraced the opportunity to show a bright, young champion, placing skin-tight leather across his chest and giving him a long, sinuous neck and an expressively furrowed brow. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the work would be considered the most lovely of all Florentine marbles, the model that future painters and sculptors should follow if they wanted to idealise the men they portrayed (Campbell & Cole, 92-93). The face comes as a surprise to some seeing as the face isn’t one of an ideal hero but of a real hero, a man who knows what fear is, not a favoured individual impervious to the notion of danger. The history of
human crises is studded with people who never did a brave thing until an emergency called forth a spurt of brilliant action (Hartt, 137). This contributed to the transformation of society during this period because seeing as St. George wasn’t portrayed as an ideal hero, other painters and sculptors understood that they could characterise people and portray them as they liked, leading to a variety of different interpretations to be made on different subjects.
The most innovative and modern aspect of the St.George composition in Orsanmichele is the little marble relief representing the young hero's conquest of the dragon, also known as St.George and the Dragon. It's found at the very bottom of the niche. Here Donatello incorporated pictorial techniques into sculpture and the results were groundbreaking. He proved that the illusion of depth and three-dimensionality could be achieved even on a relatively flat surface such as stone. As if to further prove his theory, he cut his relief as shallowly as possible while still
allowing it to allude to three dimensionality. Eventually this technique was called ‘relievo stiacciato’ which literally would translate to “mashed” or “squashed” relief (Campbell & Cole, 92). Not even his former teacher, Ghiberti, would have ever taken this approach because of how odd it would have been for him. Furthermore this was one of the first times when a story
was actually shown on a single panel. This contributed to the transformation of society during this period because Donatello showed that certain techniques could be applied to various materials. He also created a different technique and method which allowed other artists to apply it to their own work and create other masterpieces.
Between the statue of St.George and the relief St.George and the dragon, aesthetic wise I prefer the statue, however the amount of genius that was put in the ‘rilievo stiacciato’ is astonishing as well.
The Cupola made by Brunelleschi allowed for new symbolic forms to be created, which made way for a shift in traditional artwork. During the Early Italian Renaissance, perspective started to become more and more used; this had a huge impact on the accuracy of artworks. The development of perspective was greatly influenced by mathematics, more specifically they would apply mathematical principles to drawings, paintings and what not. The application of maths in art allowed a significant shift in how artists showed depth and included three dimensions in their works. This morphing of art and mathematics marked a significant shift in how artists depicted space and depth in their works. An example of this could be The Cupola, more specifically, specific parts leading to its construction
Around 1413 (around 23 years before The Cupola was concluded), Brunelleschi had prepared two painted panels, one showing the Piazza della Signoria, viewed from the north-west, and the other depicting the baptistery. Into each image Brunelleschi had cut a hole, so that a person could look through the back of the panel and into a mirror, seeing the painting in reflection. This simple operation had two significant effects: it eliminated the user’s bifocal vision, forcing him to see with one eye only, and it established that what the viewer saw was not the thing itself but the appearance that thing had shed onto another surface. At every point, the image in the mirror intersected the lines of sight between the view-point and the actual thing being seen. By doing this he had pretty much figured out the basics of linear perspective. Later on writers on optics understood vision to result from straight linear rays that came from an object and converged in the eye of the person looking. The rays meeting at a single point made it possible to render vision in a diagram as a cone or pyramid, with the eye at the apex. The crucial step from this theory to the construction of a painting in perspective was the reconception of the surface of the picture as a slice through the pyramid of rays. If things in a picture that followed this scheme were higher or lower than one another,
to one another’s left or right, that was because they looked to be so positioned from a particular point of view. And if one painted thing was larger or smaller than another, that was at least in some cases registering the impression that that thing was closer to or more distant from the observer. “Perspective” literally means “seeing through”; the very word evokes the idea that the painting is a metaphorical win- dow through which we see a scene. But the mechanism that Brunelleschi introduced, with its fixed point of view, its controlled separation of observer and image, and its implication that the size of an object on the surface provides information about that object’s distance beyond the surface, was really a system of commensuration, a way of representing things such that the dimensions of any one thing were coordinated with the dimensions of every other (Campbell & Cole, 107-109). Without Brunelleschi’s intervention, we wouldn’t have techniques like the Linear Perspective, the Atmospheric Perspective, the Foreshortening and the Chiaroscuro to incorporate into drawings and paintings to make them look more realistic. Hence the world of art would be very behind on its knowledge and who knows what sorts of paintings we would be making today.
I believe that Brunelleschi’s discovery was one of the most important discoveries from the Renaissance. As someone who has always taken art in a variety of schools, one of the few things that you must always know how to do is draw a landscape with at least one focal point using a linear perspective. That is to help you understand how important it is. Moreover they teach it to students at the ages of around 8-10, this is because the basics of perspective aren’t actually that difficult to grasp, however their usage is inevitable.
The beautiful and astonishing painting The birth of Venus, made by Botticelli, had a massive impact in the painting world. Renaissance art rejected the superficiality of portraiture, aiming for deeper meaning. Which is why it was exactly during this period that feelings and emotions started to become a main theme in sculptures and paintings. Artists greatly disliked
"useless traits" to be portrayed, hence they infused portraits with an emotional aspect as well as an intellectual aspect, portraying subjects as multifaceted individuals rather than empty and lifeless shells. Botticelli hugely agreed with this as well, seeing as the painting could possibly portray an allegory of “the Renaissance” itself, for they showed the return of an old, lost knowledge as nothing other than a rebirth. He enjoyed incorporating sophisticated symbolism into his works, making sure that only the most intellectual viewers could fully comprehend the true meaning behind his work.
The foam of the sea brings Venus into being; wind divinities help her to shore, where a nymph receives her.
The Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder had recorded a celebrated work by the ancient Greek painter Apelles showing Venus arising from the sea; Botticelli thus had the opportunity to re-create a lost masterpiece. His approach, nevertheless, shows little attempt to surpass him. We can tell because although the fluttering hair and draperies recall relief images of dancing nymphs, the figures’ proportions are distinctly unclassical (Campbell & Cole, 268). During the Renaissance, while the Italians tried so passionately to recapture the former glory of Rome, classical myths become popular among educated laymen. To these men, the mythology of the admired Greeks and Romans represented something more than happy and pretty fairy-tales. They were so convinced of the superior wisdom of the ancients that they believed these classical legends must contain some profound and mysterious truth.The patron who commissioned the painting to Botticelli was a member of the rich and powerful family of the Medici (Gombrich, 199). Boticelli took a huge gamble with this painting, this was the very first time that nudity was painted without having any connections to a scene in the bible or anything else to do with christianity, which means that there was a very high chance that his painting would have been rejected and considered a scandal. Thankfully however quite the opposite happened. Although Botticelli was and still is a renowned artist, there were some limitations to his abilities, for example the way Venus is standing on the shell is awkward, she is shown to be standing on the tip of the shell rather than in the centre of it. Moreover the waves that Botticelli included are not near realistic, they are simple squiggly lines. There are also a couple of anatomical imperfections with the wind god and his mistress. Nevertheless, this painting was still a masterpiece for its time and obviously today as well.
In conclusion all of these artists made a very important contribution to our modern understanding and knowledge of painting, sculpture and architecture. There were other artists like Michelangelo who sculpted David and painted the Sistine Chapel, or Da Vinci who invented numerous objects (like the napkin for example) and painted The Last Supper using an ancient egyptian technique, however Donatello, Brunelleschi and Botticelli were the three that inspired me the most. Without them we would be significantly behind in the field of sculpture, painting and architecture.
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