Larousse Encyclopedia of Renaissance and Baroque Art [antikvár]

introduction The four hundred years spanned by this volume beg.n and end w. h a return to classical ideák. In Italy the idea of a reb.rth of letten and the a ts return to the class.cal based on the rejection of the Mtddle Ages, had been gaining ground since the time of Giotto. It was in Florence with its economic power and stability, that the break with the International Gothic came in the first decades of the 15th centnry with Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio. The result was not a rebirth of antiquity but the birth of modem man and a search for the conquest of the visible world, with the a.d of perspective and anatomy. Outside Florence the most important pioneers were Albert! at Rimini and Mantua, Piero della Francesca at Urbino and Arezzo, Mantegna at Padua and Giovanni Bellim at Venice. In Florence in the 1480s the neo-Platonic ideals of Lorenzo de' Medici and his humanist circle were poignantly evoked in Botticelli's mythologies. In the north, where classical antiquity was not part of the national inheritance, architecture in the 15th century retained a Gothic form (Flamboyant, Perpendicular). The new realistic vision first appeared in Burgundy in the sculpture of Sluter and the paintings of Róbert Campin and Jan van Eyck. The illusion of reality was achieved empirically, through heightened observation of the particular. The perfection of the oil médium contributed to the achievement of space through luminosity. The most influential artist was Rogier van der Weyden, whose realism was tempered by emotion and pathos. It was transmuted into expressive intensity by Hugó van der Goes in the Portinari Altarpiece. In Germany and Bohemia the International Gothic style lingered, but there was an influential development of woodcuts and line engravings by Master E. S. and Martin Schongauer. Soon after 1500 the centre of patronage in Italy shifted from Florence to Romé and the High Renaissance developed there under Popes Julius II (1503-1513) and Leo X (1513-1521). The new ideals included a humanist belief in the potential dignity of man and in beauty as the harmony of all parts. First embodied in Leonardo's Last Supper at Milán, these ideals crystallised in Bramante's designs for the new St Peter's, Raphael's frescoes in the Vatican Stanze and Michelangelo's ceiling in the Sisdne chapel. This short-lived harmony and serenity was shattered in 1527 by the sack of Romé; only Venice retained its prosperous independence and with Titian and Veronese achieved its own ideals of mood and colour. The High Renaissance in the north was equally short-lived and accompanied by the spiritual upheaval of the Reformation. Germany saw the sudden flowering in a single generation of Dürer, Grünewald, Holbein, Altdorfer and Cranach. With his deep religious beliefs, his serious humanism, his wide curiosity, Dürer is the key to the whole era in his attempt to reconcile northern introspection and Mediterranean formai ideas. His greatest influence was through his woodcuts and engravings, the main channel through which Renaissance ideals were introduced into the north. Holbein, driven from Basle to England by the Reformation, was one of the most penetratingly reálist portraitists the north ever produced; Grünewald, in his Isenheim Altarpiece, one of its greatest expressionists. In the second half of the 16th century the Reformation in the north and Counter Reformation in Italy, coupled with a revolt against the rationalism and harmony of the High Renaissance, produced the intemational, subjective style of Mannerism, anticlassical in its use of space, antihumanist in its view of mankind. Represented in Italy by late Michelangelo, Pontormo, Pannigianino, Romano, Tintoretto and Vignola, in Francé by the school of Fontainebleau, its opposite extremes of spirituality and realism are embodied in El Greco and Bruegel. The 17th century found Europe a less integrated entity, with the universal faith superseded by a new philosophy based on experimentál science. The beginning of the century saw an upsurge of spiritual confidence, coupled