North Italian Fifteenth Century Paintings [antikvár]

T ü .he Italian Renaissance extended over more than a hundred and fifty years and is usually classified as Early Renaissance and High Renaissance. In this volume we are concerned only with Italian art of the fifteenth century which is now to be found in Hungary. The history as well as the art of the fifteenth century is indeed complex: in the art of the period we even find quite opposing trends. This is partly due to the political disunity of Italy, but even more to the transitional character of the era. According to the late nineteenth-century theories about the Renaissance-which still affect our attitudes today-the fifteenth century was a period of stabilization, following the emergence of an essentially homogeneous society, independent of the Middle Ages. But if we want to draw a sharp demarcation line in the field of social development, we would do better to make it at the beginning of the fourteenth and the end of the sixteenth centuries, between the hopeful rise of a bourgeoisie in Italy and its equally tragic ending: this was the historic moment when world politics as well as the compulsion of internál development caused Italy to retreat into the outdated conditions of life in the Middle Ages. This was indeed a tragedy, since from the fourteenth century onwards, the Italian Peninsula had been the most progressive area in Europe, the one where bourgeois attitudes had been most markedly developed. But this advance was halted at the very time when, in the western territories of Europe, the bourgeoisie was becoming an increasingly significant class, though not an autocratic one. It is to the credit of Italy that the way in which society developed there in the fifteenth century was an example to the bourgeoisie of Europe in times to come- not only in matters of generál organization but in their outlook, and especially in their attitűdé to art. The link with nature was an important element in fifteenth-century art. It was not an entirely new phenomenon, for similar trends had made themselves felt already in the Middle Ages; and through St. Thomas Aquinas' theories about the mechanical aspect of nature even the Church exerted a similar influence. Art in fifteenth-century Italy was progressive in that it consistently asserted these principles, by consciously turning to the art of Antiquity for inspiration and by its rationalism-at first