Discovering the humanities 3rd by henry m sayre 2016 chapter 07

Discovering the Humanities
THIRD EDITION

CHAPTER

7

The Renaissance:
Florence, Rome, and
Venice

Discovering the Humanities, Third Edition
Henry M. Sayre

Copyright © 2016, 2013, 2010
by Pearson Education, Inc. or its affiliates
All Rights Reserved


Learning Objectives
1. Discuss the influence of the Medici
family on Florentine art and the
development of humanist thought.
2. Describe how other Italian courts
followed the lead of the humanist court
in Florence.
3. Examine the impact of papal
patronage on the art of the High
Renaissance in Rome.

Learning Objectives
4. Compare the social fabric and artistic
style of Renaissance Venice to that of
both Florence and Rome.
5. Outline the place of women in
Renaissance Italy.


Florence, Italy.
Folco Quilici © Fratelli Alinari. [Fig. 7.1]


The Renaissance
• Florence, Italy, was the center of a
more than 150-year-long cultural revival
in Europe that we have come to call the
Renaissance.
• The word Renaissance comes from the
Italian rinascita or "rebirth."
• It indicates that the beliefs and values
of the medieval world were transformed
in Italy.


The Renaissance
• The Middle Ages had been an age of
faith, in which the salvation of the soul
was an individual's chief preoccupation.
• The Renaissance was an age of
intellectual exploration, in which the

humanist strove to understand in ever
more precise and scientific terms the
nature of humanity and its relationship
to the natural world.


The State as a Work of Art:
Florence and the Medici
• The 1401 competition for Florence's
new Baptistery doors on the north side
exemplified the Renaissance spirit in
sculptural decoration.
• The baptistery was a building standing
in front of the cathedral and used for
the Christian rite of baptism.


Major Italian city-states during the Renaissance.
[Fig. Map 7.1]


The State as a Work of Art:
Florence and the Medici
• The competition was not merely about
artistic talent, but also about civic pride
and patriotism, and about appeasing an
evidently wrathful God who had sent
repeated outbreaks of the Plague.

Closer Look: Florence
Baptistery competition
reliefs

Filippo Brunelleschi. Sacrifice of Isaac, competition relief
commissioned for the doors of the Baptistery. 1401–02.
Parcel-gilt bronze. 21" × 17-1/2".
Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. © Arte & Immagini
srl/CORBIS. [Fig. 7.2]


Lorenzo Ghiberti. Sacrifice of Isaac, competition relief commissioned for the doors of the
Baptistery. 1401–02.
Parcel-gilt bronze. 21" × 17-1/2".
Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence. Image © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
[Fig. 7.3]


The State as a Work of Art:
Florence and the Medici
• Lorenzo Ghiberti's winning design stood
out due to its figurative naturalism, to
his inventive use of foreshortening, and
his creation of an overall more vivid
sense of real space.
• Both finalists, Ghiberti as well as Filippo
Brunelleschi, valued the artistic models
of antiquity and looked to Classical
sculpture for inspiration.

The State as a Work of Art:
Florence and The Medici
• Both artists created artworks that
captured human beings in the midst of
a crisis of faith.
• The technique of foreshortening
suggests that forms are sharply
receding and can be seen better in
Ghiberti's.


The Gates of Paradise
• Ghiberti worked on the north-side doors
for 22 years, designing 28 panels in
four vertical rows illustrating the New
Testament.
 The second set of doors for the east side
took another 27 years to complete.

• Each of the panels in the east doors
depicts one or more events from the
same story.


Lorenzo Ghiberti. Gates of Paradise, east doors of the Baptistery, Florence. ca. 1425–52.
Gilt bronze. Height 15'.
East doors of the Baptistery, Florence. Canali Photobank, Milan, Italy. [Fig. 7.4]

Lorenzo Ghiberti. Self-portrait from the Gates of Paradise, east doors of the Baptistery,
Florence. ca. 1445–48.
Gilt bronze.
Erich Lessing/akg-images. [Fig. 7.5]


Lorenzo Ghiberti. The Story of Adam and Eve from the Gates of Paradise, east doors of
the Baptistery, Florence. ca. 1425–52.
Gilt bronze. 31-1/4" × 31-1/4".
© Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence/Photo Scala, Florence. [Fig. 7.6]


Lorenzo Ghiberti. Meeting of Solomon and Sheba from the Gates of Paradise, east doors
of the Baptistery, Florence. ca. 1425–52.
Gilt bronze. 31-1/4" × 31-1/4".
© Photo Scala, Florence. [Fig. 7.7]


Florence Cathedral
• The cathedral known as the Duomo was
planned as the most beautiful and
grandest in all of Tuscany.
• Over the years, its design and
construction became a group activity as
an ever-changing panel of architects
prepared model after model of the
church.


Brunelleschi's Dome

• Brunelleschi's design for the dome
eliminated the need for wooden
scaffolding through its skeleton with
eight large ribs on the outside, and
eight pairs of thinner ribs on the inside
of the roof.
• In yet another competition, he then
designed a lantern, a windowed turret
at the top of a dome.


Diagram of ribs and horizontal bands within Brunelleschi's dome.
[Fig. 7.8]


"Songs of Angels": Music for
Church and State
• A motet composed especially for the
consecration of the Florence Cathedral
was Nuper rosasum flores by French
composer Guillaume Dufay.
• The cantus firmus—or "fixed
melody"—on which the composition
Nuper rosarum flores is based is stated
in not one but two voices, both moving
at different speeds.


Cantus firmus melody from Dufay's Nuper rosarum flores.
[Fig. 7-MN.1]

Scientific Perspective and
Naturalistic Representation
• No aspect of the Renaissance better
embodies the spirit of invention than
scientific, or linear perspective.
• Linear perspective allowed artists to
translate three-dimensional space onto
a two-dimensional surface, thereby
satisfying the age's increasing taste for
naturalistic representations of the
physical world.


Brunelleschi, Alberti, and the
Invention of Scientific Perspective
• The architect Leon Battista Alberti
(1404–1474) codified Brunelleschi's
findings about the one-point
perspective, providing instructions for
artists and a diagram in his treatise On
Painting.
• All parallel lines in a visual field appear
to converge at a single vanishing
point on the horizon.