Gardner's Art through the Ages: The Western Perspective, Volume II: The Western Perspective, Volume II (with CourseMate Printed Access Card)

by Fred S. Kleiner

Martini was instrumental in creating the so-called International style. This new style swept Europe during the late 14th and early 15th centuries because it appealed to the aristocratic taste for brilliant colors, lavish costumes, intricate ornamentation, and themes involving splendid processions.

features elegant shapes and radiant color, fluttering line, and weightless figures in a spaceless setting—all hallmarks of the artist’s style.

Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, Annunciation altarpiece, from Siena Cathedral, 1333 (frame reconstructed in the 19th century). Tempera and gold leaf on wood, center panel 10′ 1″...

A pupil of Duccio’s, Martini was instrumental in the creation of the International style. Its hallmarks are elegant shapes, radiant color, flowing line, and weigh...

the scene subordinates drama to court ritual, and structural experimentation to surface splendor.

Another of Duccio’s students, Pietro Lorenzetti (active 1320–1348), contributed significantly to the general experiments in pictorial realism taking place in 14th-century Italy.

That one of the vertical members cuts across a figure, blocking part of it from view, strengthens the illusion.

This kind of pictorial illusionism characterized ancient Roman mural painting (figs. 7-18 and 7-19,right) but had not been pract...

She is the center of an episode occurring in an upper-class Italian ...

Lorenzetti’s altarpiece is noteworthy both for the painter’s innovations in spatial illusionism and for his careful inspection and recordi...

Not all Sienese painting of the early 14th century was religious in character. One of the most important fresco cycles of the period (figs. 14-16 and 14-17) was a civic commission for Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico (“public palace” or city hall)...

Pietro Lorenzetti, Birth of the Virgin, from the altar of Saint Savinus, Siena Cathedral, Siena, Italy, 1342. Tempera on wood, 6′ 1″× 5′11″. Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena. In this triptych, Pietro Lorenzetti revived the pictorial illusion - ism of ancient Roman murals and painted the architectural ...

and the city hall was just the place to display these allegorical paintings.

Dancers were regular features of festive springtime rituals.

rapidly growing knowledge of perspective.

Peaceful Country represents one of the first appearances of land­ scape in West...

But Siena could not protect its citizens from the plague sweeping through Europe in the mid-14th century. The Black Death (see page 406) killed thousands of Sienese and ma...

The tower served as a lookout over the city and the countryside around it and as a bell tower (campanile) for ringing signals of all kinds to the populace. Siena, as other Italian city-states, had to defend itself agai...

Class struggle, feuds among rich and powerful families, and even uprisings of the whole populace against the city governors were ...

fresco program in the Palazzo Pubblico was Pietro Lorenzetti’s brother...

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Peaceful City, detail from Effects of Good Government in the City and in the Country, east wall, Sala della Pace, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy, 1338–1339. Fresco. In the Hall of Peace (fig. 14-16A) of Siena’s city hall (fig. 14-15), Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted an illusionistic panorama of the bustling ...

FLorence cathedraL Florentines translated their pride in their predominance into such landmark buildings as Santa Maria del Fiore

Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Peaceful Country, detail from Effects of Good Government in the City and in the Country, east wall, Sala della Pace (fig. 14-16A), Palazzo Pubblico (fig. 14-15), Siena, Italy, 1338–1339. Fresco. This sweeping view of the countryside is one of the first instances of landscape painting in Western art since antiquity. The winged figure of Security promises safety to all who live under Sienese law.

The facade of Florence Cathedral was not completed until the 19th century, and then in a form much altered from its original design.

Duomo to hold the city’s entire population, and although its capacity is only about 30,000 (Florence’s population at the time was slightly less than 100,000), the building seemed so large even the noted architect Leon Battista Alberti (see Chapter 16) commented it seemed to cover “all of Tuscany with its shade.”

Gothic architects’ emphatic stress on the vertical produced an aweinspiring upward rush of unmatched vigor and intensity.

Florence Cathedral, in contrast, clings to the ground and has no aspirations to flight. All emphasis is on the horizontal elements of the design, and the buildi...

The Florentine campanile is entirely different. Neatly subdivided into cubic sections,

This compartmentalization is reminiscent of the Romanesque style, but it also forecasts the ideals of Renaissance architecture. Artists hoped to express structure in the clear, logical relationships of the component parts and to produce self-sufficient works that could exist in complete independence. Compared with northern European towers, Giotto’s campanile has a cool and rational quality more appealing to the intellect than to the emotions.

As prosperous as Pisa was as a major shipping power, however, it was not immune from the disruption the Black Death wreaked across all of Italy and Europe in the late 1340s. Concern with death, a significant theme in art even before the onset of the plague, became more prominent in the years after midcentury.

Campin depicted his patrons, Peter Inghelbrecht and Margarete Scrynmakers, as kneeling witnesses to the announcement of the Virgin’s miraculous pregnancy.

France—lay patrons far outnumbered the clergy in the commissioning of religious artworks.

Perhaps the most striking feature of these private devotional images is the integration of religious and secular concerns.

biblical scenes as taking place in a ...

closed garden is symbolic of Mary’s purity, and the flowers Campin included relate to Mary’s virtues, especially humility.

has constructed two mousetraps, symbols of the theo logical concept that Christ is bait set in the trap of the world to catch the Devil.

As the 15th century opened, Rome and Avignon were still the official seats of two competing popes (see “The Great Schism,” Chapter 14, page 404), and the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) between France and England still raged.

Nonetheless, despite widespread conflict and unrest, a new economic system emerged—the early stage of European capitalism.

Flemish entrepreneurs established the first international commercial stoc...

The Retable de Champmol also foreshadowed another significant development in 15th-century art—the widespread adoption of oil paints (see “Tempera and Oil Painting,” page 427). Oil paints facilitated the exactitude in rendering details so characteristic of northern European painting.

With the oil medium, artists could create richer colors than previously possible, giving their paintings an intense tonality, the illusion of glowing light, and enamel-like surfaces.

The first Netherlandish painter to achieve international fa...

The cast-aside clogs indicate this event is taking place on holy ground. The little dog symbolizes fidelity (the common canine name Fido originated from the Latin fidere, “to trust”). Behind the pair, the curtains of the marriage bed have been opened.

Emerging capitalism led to an urban prosperity that fueled the growing bourgeois market for art objects, particularly in Bruges, Antwerp, and, later, Amsterdam. This prosperity contributed to a growing interest in secular art in addition to religious artworks.

For various reasons, great patrons embraced the opportunity to have their likenesses painted.

Portraits also served to represent state officials at events they could not attend. Sometimes, royalty, nobility, and the very rich would send artists to paint the likeness of a prospective bride or groom. For example, when young King Charles VI of France sought a bride, he dispatched a painter to three different royal courts to make portraits of the candidates.

This is the first known Western painted portrait in a thousand years whe...

roles—the woman stands near the bed and well into the room, whereas the man stands near the open window, ...

Jan van Eyck, Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife, 1434. Oil on wood, 2′ 9″× 1′10 1 –2″. National Gallery, London.

Although a definitive identification of the sitter has yet to be made, most scholars consider Man in a Red Turban a self-portrait, which van Eyck painted by looking at his image in a mirror (as