The Renaissance
In the Renaissance the artist became a learned figure and art a form of knowledge. Through perspective, the theory of proportion and rediscovered ancient texts, painters and architects pursued a beauty that was both mathematically correct and divinely inspired.
In early 15th-century Florence a circle of artists and scholars began to look at antiquity in a new way. The ruins of Rome were measured, Latin and Greek texts were collected and studied, and the idea spread that art, after centuries of decline, had been brought back to life. The word renaissance, rebirth, is a later label, but the idea itself was present in the writers of the time. It carried a claim: that art was not merely a craft but could stand comparison with the liberal arts, with poetry and philosophy. The aesthetics of the whole period can be read as an attempt to prove it. Behind the movement lay a wealthy mercantile city with bankers, guilds and churches competing for the best artists. The Medici family, which dominated the city’s politics from 1434, became the best-known patrons, but commissions came from many quarters.
The clearest proof was perspective. Around 1420 the architect Filippo Brunelleschi showed, with a painted panel and a mirror, how the Baptistery in Florence could be depicted so that the image matched reality exactly as seen from a fixed point. Leon Battista Alberti gave the method a theory in On Painting (De pictura), written in Latin in 1435 and the following year in Italian with a dedication to Brunelleschi. The picture, he wrote, is like an open window through which the story is viewed. The visual rays from the eye form a pyramid, and the painting is a section through it. Lines running straight into the space meet at a single point level with the viewer’s eye. The discovery had swift consequences: Masaccio’s fresco The Holy Trinity in Santa Maria Novella, painted around 1427, shows a vaulted chamber so convincingly that the church wall seems to open up.
Perspective turned painting into applied geometry, and thus into a science that could be taught and debated with scholars. But Alberti wanted more than correct rendering of space. The painter’s greatest work was the istoria, the narrative: a picture in which figures of different ages and with different movements express emotions that move the viewer. Here Horace and ancient rhetoric live on – the painting, like an oration, should instruct, delight and move. He also recommends restraint: a picture with too many figures becomes a tumult, and nine or ten figures are usually enough.
In his great treatise on architecture, On the Art of Building (De re aedificatoria), completed around 1452 and printed in 1485, Alberti took up Vitruvius but reworked him. He defined beauty as a harmony among all the parts, such that nothing can be added, taken away or altered without making the whole worse. He called it concinnitas. Ornament was something else: a kind of added lustre and a complement to beauty. He also argued that the same numbers that make musical consonances pleasing to the ear make proportions pleasing to the eye. Pythagoras’ idea had returned to architecture, and Alberti demonstrated it in the façade of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, which is built up of squares and simple ratios. He wanted the buildings of cities to express order and dignity, and he regarded the temple, the church, as the city’s most beautiful building, ideally planned on nature’s most perfect form, the circle.
Alongside the mathematical strand there was a Platonic one. Marsilio Ficino, who worked under the patronage of the Medici, translated the complete works of Plato and then Plotinus into Latin and made Neoplatonism a living philosophy in Florence. In his commentary on the Symposium, On Love (De amore), written in 1469, he describes beauty as a radiance from the divine that awakens love and draws the soul upwards. Beauty lies, as in Plotinus, not in proportions as such but in the grace and life that shine through them. It can be perceived only by reason, sight and hearing, not by the lower senses. Around him were poets and philosophers such as Angelo Poliziano and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and the ideas reached artists through conversation and patrons rather than through textbooks.
Ficino’s ideas have often been used to interpret the art of the period, especially Botticelli’s mythological pictures. The Birth of Venus has been read as an image of the heavenly Venus, the spiritual love that Plato distinguishes from earthly love. The interpretation is possible but disputed: no contemporary documents show that Botticelli or his patron thought in these terms. What is certain is that Neoplatonism made it possible to take pagan gods seriously as images of spiritual truths, and that The Birth of Venus became one of the first great nudes in painting since antiquity. A more secure literary model is Poliziano’s poem on a giostra, a tournament, which describes a relief showing the birth of Venus – itself based on an ancient hymn.
Leonardo da Vinci united the two strands and went further. In his notes, compiled after his death by his pupil Francesco Melzi into a book on painting, he explains painting as a science founded on observation and mathematics. He compares it with poetry, music and sculpture – the so-called paragone, the contest between the arts – and lets painting win, since the eye is the noblest sense and the picture shows everything at once. He was not content with linear perspective but studied how colours fade and turn blue with distance and how contours dissolve in shadow. The Mona Lisa, with its soft transitions and hazy landscape, is the result of a lifetime’s research into light and vision. He warned against painters who give all their figures their own appearance and wanted every figure to reveal its inner life through movement and facial expression.
Albrecht Dürer carried the Italian ideas north of the Alps. He travelled twice to Venice and experienced there the standing an artist could enjoy; from his second journey he wrote that he was a gentleman there but a parasite at home. He devoted his life to seeking the right proportion for the human body and published both a textbook of geometry and perspective, Instruction in Measurement (Underweysung der Messung), in 1525, and Four Books on Human Proportion in 1528. But the search ended in humility. There is not one beauty but many, and no one can say what ultimate beauty is. Art lies hidden in nature, and whoever can draw it out possesses it. At the same time he wrote, with a reference to Plato, that a good painter is inwardly full of figures and, could he live for ever, would always have something new to pour forth from his inner ideas. His 1514 engraving Melencolia I has often been interpreted as an image of the brooding creator who reaches the limit of what measurement and geometry can give.
Giorgio Vasari gave the period its history. In the Lives of the Artists (Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori), published in 1550 and in an expanded edition in 1568, he describes how art is reborn with Cimabue and Giotto, matures in the 15th century with Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio, and reaches perfection with Leonardo, Raphael and above all Michelangelo. He dismissed the Gothic style as barbarous and attributed it to the Goths – hence the word Gothic, which long remained a term of abuse. Vasari brought the three arts together under the concept of disegno, drawing and the underlying idea, and he helped found the academy of the arts of drawing in Florence in 1563, one of the first art academies. His stories – of the young Giotto drawing a sheep on a stone, or of the perfect circle he drew freehand as a test for the pope – gave the artist a new kind of fame, built on talent rather than birth.
Renaissance architectural theory found its most influential form in Andrea Palladio. He drew the illustrations for a new edition of Vitruvius in 1556 and in 1570 published his own Four Books of Architecture (I quattro libri dell'architettura), in which he presented his buildings in drawings and their proportions in figures. Beauty, according to Palladio, follows from the whole corresponding to the parts, the parts to one another and to the whole, so that the building becomes like a complete body. The villas around Vicenza and the churches in Venice, with temple fronts and rooms in simple numerical ratios, became models for all classical architecture in England and North America. The villas were not merely country retreats for pleasure but the centres of agricultural estates, and Palladio united the farm buildings with the main house in a single ordered composition. In his work Vitruvian utility and beauty became one.
Around 1600 the certainties of the Renaissance began to crack. Artists known as Mannerists had since the 1520s elongated their figures and played with the rules, and theorists began to speak of an inner idea in the artist’s mind that mattered more than nature’s measurements. Vasari relates that Michelangelo, in his eyes the summit of the period, said the artist should have his compasses in his eyes and not in his hand, since the hands work but the eye judges. Judgement had become more important than measurement. In 1607 the painter Federico Zuccaro published a book on the idea of painters, sculptors and architects, in which he distinguished between an inner drawing in the mind and the outer drawing on paper. That question – should the artist follow nature, the ancient models or his own idea? – is where classicism and the academies of the 17th century take over.