From Gothic to Renaissance – the difference in painting

The difference between Gothic and Renaissance in painting lies in the view of space and of the human being. Gothic art (c. 1150–1400) sets sacred figures against a gold ground, makes the most important the largest and tells its story through signs. Renaissance painting (from c. 1420) builds a space with linear perspective, gives the figures weight, anatomy and shadows and places them in a real landscape. The transition began with Giotto around 1305 and was complete with Raphael's The School of Athens in 1511.

Facts

The Gothic: gold, signs and significance

Gothic painting in Italy appeared on altarpieces, in manuscripts and on church walls. Painters such as Cimabue and Duccio painted the Madonna enthroned against a background of gold leaf. The gold was not a sky but a sign of the divine, a light that belongs to no place. The space is shallow, and the figures stand on one another's shoulders rather than behind one another.

The most important people were painted largest, Mary larger than the saints and the saints larger than the donors. This is called hierarchical scale. The figures are slender, with long, soft folds, and their bodies have little weight. The picture was not meant to look like reality but to show a higher reality, and it was read with the help of attributes and gestures. See the period the Gothic.

Giotto: the first step

Around 1305 Giotto painted the chapel in Padua with scenes from the lives of Mary and Christ. In The Lamentation people sit around the dead Christ, and they mourn in earnest. They bend over, fling out their arms, weep. Two figures sit with their backs to us, so that we almost sit in the circle ourselves. The bodies have weight, and the clothes fall in large folds over them.

The background is still not a real landscape, and the sky is a flat blue. But Giotto gave painting people of flesh and blood, and his contemporaries understood that something new had happened. That is why he stands on the boundary: Gothic in date, but the model for the Renaissance. He painted in true fresco; read more in the guide to fresco, tempera and oil.

Perspective: a space to step into

The decisive step was taken in Florence in the 1420s. The architect Filippo Brunelleschi showed how all the lines running into depth meet at a single point, the vanishing point, and Masaccio used the method in the fresco Holy Trinity in Santa Maria Novella, around 1427. There the wall seems to open onto a barrel-vaulted chapel. In 1435 Leon Battista Alberti wrote the book On Painting, in which he described the picture as a window onto the world.

With perspective, size became a matter of distance, not of importance. What is far away is painted small, even if it is a saint. The explanatory diagram below shows how vanishing points work, and Looking at art: perspective and the guide to linear perspective go deeper.

The Renaissance: bodies, antiquity and landscape

Renaissance painters studied anatomy and ancient sculpture to get the body right. They built up volume with light and shade, and the background became a landscape with air and distance. The subjects widened: besides the Bible and the saints came the myths of antiquity, as in Botticelli's The Birth of Venus of around 1485, and portraits of real people.

The high point is Raphael's The School of Athens of 1511, where the philosophers of antiquity stand in a vast piece of architecture with perspective lines that meet between Plato and Aristotle. No gold, no large and small according to rank, just people in a room that seems to continue behind the wall. Read What is the Renaissance?

In the north and in Sweden

In Flanders the renewal happened differently. Jan van Eyck had no mathematical perspective, but with oil paint he could render light on metal, glass and fur so exactly that the room in The Arnolfini Portrait of 1434 feels real. The forms, with pointed arches and long folds, are still Gothic; the observation is already new.

In Sweden the Gothic lasted a long time. When Botticelli painted The Birth of Venus, Albertus Pictor was painting vaults in the churches of the Mälaren valley, with flat figures and clear contours, such as Death Playing Chess in Täby. And Bernt Notke's St George and the Dragon in Storkyrkan of 1489 is Late Gothic in its most dramatic form. See The Swedish Middle Ages and the guide to the parts of an altarpiece.

Look for the difference

Start with the background. If it is gold, or patterned like a wall, the picture is probably Gothic. If it is a landscape with a horizon or a room with a floor running into depth, it is probably from the Renaissance. Then look at the sizes: are the most important figures larger than the others, even though they stand equally near?

Look at the bodies last. If the figures stand lightly on tiptoe, without weight, with swaying bodies and long folds, it is Gothic. If they have weight, stand on the ground with the body resting on one leg and cast shadows, it is Renaissance. The same transition can be seen in architecture; read Romanesque and Gothic architecture, and in Florence you can see the whole journey; see Art to see in Florence.

How to tell them apart

Exercise

What does hierarchical scale mean in Gothic art?