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

Leonardo da Vinci used atmospheric perspective to great effect in works such as Madonna of the Rocks (fig. 17-2) and Mona Lisa

Ghiberti retained the medieval narrative method of presenting several episodes within a single frame. In Isaac and His Sons, the women in the left foreground attend the birth of Esau and Jacob in the left background. In the central foreground, Isaac sends Esau and his dogs to hunt game. In the right foreground, Isaac blesses the kneeling Jacob as Rebecca looks

Another was the revival of the freestanding nude statue. The first Renaissance sculptor to portray the nude male figure in statuary was Donatello.

Donatello, David, ca. 1440–1460. Bronze, 5′ 2 1 –4″high. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.

Donatello’s David possesses both the relaxed contrapposto and the sensuous beauty of nude Greek gods (fig. 5-63). The revival of classical statuary style appealed to the sculptor’s patrons, the Medici.

Verrocchio directed a flourishing bottega (studio-shop) in Florence that attracted many students, among them Leonardo da Vinci.

how clearly he knew the psychology of brash young men.

Andrea del Verrocchio, David, ca. 1465–1470. Bronze, 4′ 1 1 –2″high. Museo Nazionale...

Verrocchio’s David, also made for the Medici, displays a brash confidence. The statue’s narrative realism contrasts strongly with the quiet ...

Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Hercules and Antaeus, ca. 1470–1475. Bronze, 1′ 6″high with base. Museo Nazion...

Bernardo Rossellino, tomb of Leonardo Bruni, Santa Croce, Florence, Italy, ca. 1444–1450. Marble, 23′ 3 1 –2″high.

Rossellino’s tomb in honor of the humanist scholar and Florentine chancellor Leonardo Bruni combines ancient Roman and Christian motifs. It established the pattern for Renaissance wall tombs.

Gentile da Fabriano, Adoration of the Magi, altarpiece from the Strozzi chapel, Santa Trinità, Florence, Italy, 1423. Tempera on wood, 9′11″× 9′ 3″. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

Gentile was the leading Florentine painter working in the International style. He successfully blended naturalistic details with Late Gothic splendor in color, costume, and framing ornamentation.

Masaccio, Tribute Money, Brancacci chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence,

Masaccio’s figures recall Giotto’s in their simple grandeur, but they convey a greater psychological and physical credibility. He modeled his figures with light coming from a source outside the picture.

Masaccio, Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, Brancacci chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, Italy, ca. 1424–1427.

Masaccio, Holy Trinity, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Italy, ca. 1424–1427. Fresco, 21′10 5 –8″× 10′ 4 3

Masaccio’s pioneering Holy Trinity is the premier early-15th-century example of the application of mathematics to the depiction of space according ...

for many Quattrocento Italian artists, humanist concerns were not a primary consideration.

The Dominicans (see “Mendicant Orders,” Chapter 14, page 404) of San Marco had dedicated themselves to lives of prayer and work, and the religious compound was mostly spare and austere to encourage the monks to immerse themselves in their devotional lives.

Fra Angelico, Annunciation, San Marco, Florence, Italy, ca. 14...

The two figures appear in a plain loggia resemblin...

Like most of Fra Angelico’s paintings, Annunciation, with its simplicity and directness, still has an almost universal appeal and fully reflects ...

An orphan, Fra Filippo spent his youth in a monastery adjacent to the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, and when he was still in his teens, he must have met Masaccio there and witnessed the decoration of the Brancacci chapel.

The Carmelite brother interpreted his subject in a surprisingly worldly manner.

is a beautiful young mother, albeit with a transparent halo, in an elegantly furnished Florentine home, and neither she nor the Christ Child, whom two angels hold up, has a solemn expression.

Significantly, all figures reflect the use of live models

this work shows how far artists had carried the humanization of th...

sensuous beauty of this world. Piero della...

Botticelli, Birth of Venus, ca. 1484–1486. Tempera on canvas, 5′ 9″× 9′ 2″. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

The theme was the subject of a poem by Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494), a leading humanist of the day.

In this painting, unlike in Primavera, Botticelli depicted Venus as nude. As noted earlier, the nude, especially the female nude, was exceedingly rare during the Middle Ages.

Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), for example, made the case in his treatise On Love (1469) that those who embrace the contemplative life of reason—including, of course, the humanists in the Medici circle—will immediately contemplate spiri...

Indeed, Botticelli’s elegant and beautiful linear style (he was a pupil of Fra Filippo Lippi, fig. 16-24) seems removed from all the scientific knowledge 15th-century artists had ...

osPedale degli innocenti At the end of the second decade of the 15th century, Brunelleschi received two important architectural commissions in Florence—to construct a dome (fig. 16-30a) for the city’s late medieval cathedral (fig. 14-18), and to design the Ospedale degli Innocenti (Hospital of the Innocents, fig. 16-31), a home for Florentine orphans and foundlings.

Most scholars regard Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti as the first building to embody the new Renaissance architectural style.

Both plan and elevation conform to a module that embodies the rationality of ...

Santo Spirito fully expresses the new Renaissance spirit that placed its faith in reason rather than in the emotions.

In this modular scheme, as in the loggia of the Ospedale degli Innocenti (fig. 16-31), a mathematical unit served to determine the dimensions of every aspect of the church.

This facade also introduced a feature of great historical consequence— the scrolls that simultaneously unite the broad lower and narrow upper levels and screen the sloping roofs over the aisles. With variations, similar spirals appeared in literally hundreds of church facades throughout the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

It's fun to trace design elements back to their beginning.

The height of Santa Maria Novella (to the pediment tip) equals its width. Consequently, the entire facade can be inscribed in a square.

They believed in the eternal and universal validity of numerical ratios as the source of beauty. In this respect, Alberti and Brunelleschi revived the true spirit of the High Classical age of ancient Greece, as epitomized by the architect Iktinos and the sculptor Polykleitos,

Leon Battista Alberti, west facade of Santa Maria Novella, Florence, Italy, 1456–1470. Alberti’s design for the facade of this Gothic church features a pediment-capped temple front and pilasterframed arcades. Numerical ratios are the basis of the proportions of all parts of the facade.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, the popes became the major patrons of art and architecture in Italy

but a new style, called Mannerism, challenged Renaissance naturalism almost as soon as Raphael had been laid to rest

Indeed, the modern notion of the “fine arts” and the exaltation of the artist-genius originated in Renaissance Italy.

Among the many projects the ambitious new pope sponsored were a design for a modern Saint Peter’s (figs. 17-22 and 17-23) to replace the timber-roofed fourth-century basilica

Raphael adopted Leonardo’s pyramidal composition and modeling of faces and figures in subtle chiaroscuro.

Although Raphael experimented with Leonardo’s dusky modeling, he tended to return to Perugino’s lighter tonalities and blue skies. Raphael preferred clarity to obscurity, not fascinated, as Leonardo was, with mystery.