The Many Ways to View the Renaissance

When people think of Renaissance art, the first thing that often comes to mind is Michelangelo’s “David,” da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” or Raphael’s “The School of Athens.” However, all of these works were created during a relatively short time period in the scope of Renaissance art, namely the High Renaissance, which spanned from roughly 1500-1525 C.E. While the High Renaissance is integral to the course of art history, especially given that some of the most acclaimed and eminent works of humanity’s heritage date to the period, the history of the greater Renaissance itself includes other important styles and movements, including the Early Renaissance and Mannerism.

Art historians generally locate the start of Renaissance art in Florence in the year 1401 with the Competition Panels. In 1401, the Arte del Calimala, a wool merchant’s guild, held a competition between seven artists to determine which artist would be selected to create the bronze doors for the Baptistery of Saint John in Florence. Each of the artists was to make a sculptural relief panel depicting the “Sacrifice of Isaac,” and the guild would then select the artist who was most skilled to create the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery. The competition finalists eventually came down to Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, whose depictions of the “Sacrifice of Isaac,” which became known as the Competition Panels, were vastly different in style. Brunelleschi’s “Sacrifice of Isaac” delivers an incredibly emotionally poignant scene with Abraham holding up Isaac’s throat in his hand and pressing the knife just against his neck. The angel grabs Abraham’s arm to prevent him from ending the life of his son. However, in Ghiberti’s “Sacrifice of Isaac,” the angel is much more reserved and distant from the central scene: Abraham’s knife is still far away from Isaac, and Abraham is simply positioning himself in preparation to mortally wound his son. However, unlike Brunelleschi’s, Ghiberti’s work experiments with capturing a naturalistic representation of the human body, which can be seen in how Isaac’s torso curves to the side, revealing the subtle musculature of his abdomen. Ultimately, the Arte Del Calimala chose Ghiberti’s beauty and naturalism over Brunelleschi’s emotion and drama (Footnote 1). The guild’s selection of naturalism was the pivotal moment that sparked the turning point in the gradual movement away from the intense spirituality and emotional intimacy of medieval art towards the Early Renaissance’s exploration of perspective, naturalism, and exploration of art from antiquity. The Early Renaissance spanned from about 1401 to 1500, moving from Brunelleschi’s discovery of linear perspective in 1415 and Alberti’s documentation of linear perspective in 1435 to Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” in the 1480s, which was the first life-sized female nude of a goddess since antiquity.

Pioneered in the Early Renaissance, Four Canonical Modes, which were distinct artistic techniques, achieved their apotheosis during the High Renaissance. For example, da Vinci introduced a technique known as sfumato, where he used multiple translucent glazes of pigment to create a hazy quality to his paintings and eliminate strong outlines. Similarly, Michelangelo popularized and perfected a technique known as cangiante, where an artist seeks to attain a very dark or light version of a particular color by using a different, analogous color. For instance, when painting the orange-colored cloak of the Prophet Jeremiah in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Michelangelo uses a light orange color to depict the effects of sunlight on the cloak and uses a deep red color to show the effects of shadow on the orange cloak. Additionally, Raphael helped pioneer the technique of unione, which builds on the idea of chiaroscuro, the shading and modeling of figures. While chiaroscuro used lighting and shading to create sharp outlines around figures, Raphael used much softer and subtle shading around his figures. The use of unione can especially be seen in Raphael’s many paintings of the Madonna and Child, such as “The Alba Madonna,” where Raphael imbues the Madonna with a sense of soft sweetness and gentleness through the soft outlines of her face. The High Renaissance began in about 1500 and came to an abrupt halt during the 1527 Sack of Rome, when the city of Rome was ravaged and thousands were killed by the Imperial Army of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The sack finally ended when Pope Clement VII and Emperor Charles V settled on a treaty in Barcelona in 1529.

Given that the idealistic style of the High Renaissance had already achieved near perfect naturalism, a new Renaissance style known as Mannerism emerged in the 1520s to offer new insight into the idea of naturalism and challenge the concept of anatomical accuracy. The word “mannerism” comes from the Italian word maniera, which means “style.” The term originated as a slight jab at Mannerist artists who were thought to paint in the style of High Renaissance artists but lacked the sophistication and grace of said masters. There are numerous different places we could look to for the genesis of Mannerist art, but it would help to define the general sentiment of the early 1520s prior to pinpointing an origin for Mannerism. By the 1520s, Catholic clergy in Europe and Catholicism itself were facing serious threats. In 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany (Footnote 2). And, in 1527, Rome was sacked by the Holy Roman Empire, which left a deep wound on the city of Rome and a broader feeling of High Renaissance optimism in Italy.

While the temporal beginning of the Mannerist movement has been set at 1525, art historians have long debated the ideological genesis of the Mannerist style. There are some historians who view Mannerism as a departure from the High Renaissance’s elegance and naturalism, while other scholars view Mannerism as an extension of the High Renaissance. Regardless, the Mannerist style’s origin mainly revolves around art created by a young man from the Italian city of Parma named Parmigianino, roughly meaning “the little one from Parma.” One of Parmigiano’s earliest works is his 1524 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, made at just 21 years old. The work depicts Parmigianino looking into a mirror, painting the distorted image of himself reflected in the mirror. High Renaissance artworks are often characterized by their ability to represent the natural world like an image out of a mirror, which Parmigianino literalizes. However, Parmigianino challenges the anatomical accuracy of the High Renaissance by using a convex mirror to intentionally distort his perspective and self in the mirror. Parmigiano’s work exemplifies the traits that make up the Mannerist style: virtuoso technique, an ostentatious flaunting of artistic skill, distorted figural representation, and an otherworldliness to the subject, which can be seen by how Parmigiano’s is centered and focused in the center while the rest of the architectural place is semi-abstracted and undulating in a fluid manner behind him. Like Parmigianino complicating the idea of anatomical accuracy from his distorted mirror, Mannerist art continually pushed the boundaries of the field of art with daring and complex techniques, subject matter, and compositions. 

There are two potential dates when Mannerism comes to an end: the end of the Council of Trent in 1563 or at the start of Baroque art in 1600. The latter of the two claims is the more widely accepted view. By around 1600, Catholic leaders, who often financed works of Renaissance art, were faced with an issue – the rise of Protestantism. Certain Protestant sects, namely those who adhered to the religious principles established by John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, began to destroy works of religious art during the Calvinist Iconoclasm because of the perceived violation of the Second Commandment and the idea that religious art could cause a person to worship the work itself as opposed to the actual religious entity (Footnote 3). In fact, according to the University of Cambridge, up to 97 percent of English religious art was destroyed in the lead up to and aftermath of the Reformation. In response, Catholic clergy launched the Counter-Reformation, a theological effort intended to put an end to the perceived corruption within the Church and stop the perceived heretical movements outside of it. One of the tenets of the Counter-Reformation was to spur faith and zeal in Catholicism once again through the use of religious art much more fervent, zealous, and dramatic in nature, which became known as Baroque art. No longer did the mysterious and slightly confusing subject matter of Mannerism permeate through art; instead, Baroque art stressed clearly understandable compositions, a sense of dynamism, movement, and techniques, such as trompe-l’oeil, the use of optical tricks to create the sense of a three-dimensional object or area within a two-dimensional space, to connect the spiritual world with the perceptible world, and an effort to create morally appropriate subject matter unlike the salacious scenes often found in Mannerist art. The onset of Baroque art concluded the era known as the Renaissance, as the stylistic changes in art and ideology became far too significant to call the Baroque a continuation of the Renaissance.

Overall, from the Early Renaissance’s incipient attempts to create naturalistic representations to the High Renaissance’s mastery of former art techniques and advancement of new ones to the braggadocio and convoluted subject matter exhibited in Mannerist art, the Renaissance saw numerous different styles of art with many different “rebirths” of style and idea. The one strand that seems to connect the entire period from 1400 to 1600 was likely the desire to more fully embrace the styles of antiquity. The anatomical naturalism of Brunelleschi’s Isaac in the Competition Panels reflects the beauty seen in the classical statue of the Apollo Belvedere, and even Parmigiano's distorted perspective of himself in his portrait from a concave mirror parallels the twisted bodies and contortion of the human body seen in the Hellenistic statuary of Laocoön and His Sons. Thus, the renewed interest in antiquity helped unite philosophical humanism with artistic naturalism and give a rebirth, a Renaissance, to a style not fully seen and embraced for over a thousand years.

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Footnote 1: Ghiberti reported in his commentaries that he had won the competition, but Brunelleschi argued the competition ended in a tie. In Brunelleschi’s account, the Arte del Calimala sought to break the tie by having Ghiberti and Brunelleschi work together on the commission. However, Brunelleschi refused to create the bronze doors unless the work was entirely his own.

Footnote 2: There has been some scholarship doubting whether Martin Luther even actually nailed his 95 Theses onto the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, but the consensus among historians remains that the Reformation began in 1517.

Footnote 3: The Second Commandment states, “Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters under the earth” (Douay-Rheims, Exod., 20.4). During the Reformation, some Protestants viewed religious figural representation as a violation of the proscription against creating “graven” or engraved images of things in the “heaven[s].”

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(Cover Image: Parmigianino, Madonna and Child with Angels (Madonna with the Long Neck), 1534-1540, oil on panel, The Uffizi, via https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/parmigianino-madonna-long-neck)