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Course: Europe 1300 - 1800 > Unit 4
Lesson 1: A beginner's guide to the High Renaissance- Toward the High Renaissance, an introduction
- The Sack of Rome in 1527
- Renaissance woman: Isabella d’Este
- The Medici collect the Americas
- Toward the high Renaissance: Verrocchio and Leonardo
- A failed experiment: Medici porcelain
- Preparatory drawing during the Italian renaissance, an introduction
- Galileo Galilei
- Galileo and Renaissance Art
- Conservation: portrait miniatures
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Toward the high Renaissance: Verrocchio and Leonardo
Verrocchio (with Leonardo), Baptism of Christ, 1470-75 Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Why did they put so much attention on the angels instead of putting attention on Christ?(19 votes)
- I think the they are focusing more on Leonardo's work as an example of the emergence of High Renaissance art. Leonardo's angel versus Verrocchio's angel shows this contrast and where art is heading at this point.(34 votes)
- It's mentioned at around0:50that we can't imagine modern artists delegating work to others, or specifically, a student. Unless I'm mistaken, this isn't exactly a crazy notion. Didn't Warhol, for instance, assign work to others, and don't some artists plan works that are later completed/machined/etc. by others?(17 votes)
- Excellent point. In addition to Warhol, Tony Smith, Sol Lewitt and numerous other contemporary artists allowed assistants to complete part or sometimes all of a work. But in all these cases this distance from the artist's "hand" is a part of the conceptual content of the work. For example, Warhol had studio assistants pull his prints but of course his studio was called the factory and idea of mass manufacture was central to his work. He was not particularly interested in the authentic hand of the artist. During the 14th Century, studio assistants who helped complete a work were trained to mimic the style of the master as closely as possible. They were extensions of the artist in a sense. This does still happen of course, but its not the norm.(21 votes)
- why did artist have there students paint part of there paintings?(4 votes)
- From the author:Artists in other periods often worked in workshops with their apprentices (there was no art school in the Renaissance!), and in the Renaissance, the most important part of the painting was the "idea" for it - the composition, the placement of the figures in the landscape, their gestures and poses, etc. The actual manual work of painting, was not considered quite as important, and it was not at all unusual for some of this work to be given to the master artist's apprentices. It sounds funny to us - I know, but artists today also often work in workshops with other artists, and have other people help them complete or execute their work.(14 votes)
- What distinguished the Middle Ages from the renaissance(4 votes)
- One distinction is literature. There is a lot of writing from Petrarch, Alberti, Vassari, Bruni etc. discussing Italy (Florence in particular) and creating this idea history as separated into antiquity, middle ages, and their present time. They were encouraging patrons and artists to learn and imitate Rome (due to their close heritage with the Roman Empire) and because of its greatness. Art History, to be honest, is often biased towards the idea of linear development and of structuring history, and is particularly dependant, like any history, on documentation. Since there is an abundance of documents from the Renaissance, we know what some thought and as any generation, they were criticizing their immediate past and idolizing at antiquity with admiration. In a way, the artists that were chosen by this handful of people (Vassari, Alberti, Petrarch) are the ones that current west history admires.(5 votes)
- What is the gold circle above most people mean?(2 votes)
- It's a halo, which expresses their religious divinity.(6 votes)
- When and what is the high Renaissance?(2 votes)
- You'll hear more of that in the upcoming videos, but it boils down to being the "height" of the renaissance. Everything is at it's maximum; we're at the pitch of perspective for painting, and the architecture is an absolutely stunning fusion of style and ambition. It comes at the the end of the 15th century and you can really find all of this on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Renaissance(3 votes)
- Is it established beyond any doubt that Leonardo painted this angel?(2 votes)
- At2:39what is the meaning of the word flat there(1 vote)
- Duccio's Madonna and Child, tempera on gold leaf, is flat in that it lacks a sense of space , depth, and three dimensionality. It was painted before the development of linear perspective, so there really wasn't much effort made in unifying a perspective and creating a sense of space or depth.
The angels are stacked and overlapping, and yet there nothing establishes a sense of depth apart from the overlap, so it looks more like stacked paper dolls rather than the detailed, modeled and shaded figures we see emerging in the Renaissance period. Duccio's Madonna and Child is very two dimensional, aside from the slight modeling seen in the faces and within the folds of the robes of the figures.(3 votes)
- Who was Leonardo influenced by? Rome's paintings?(1 vote)
- Leonardo Da Vinci was mainly inspired through Nature.
When he was growing up Leonardo watched nature do things and it put a lot of questions in his head such as why blood pumps through our veins.
Leonardo also had a very odd interest in the human body and the organs. Leonardo thought the eyeball was the most interesting part.(3 votes)
- How did we get all this information(2 votes)
Video transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: We're in
the Uffizi, and we're looking at Verrocchio's painting
of "The Baptism of Christ." So we see Saint John on the
right, baptizing Christ. This is simultaneously
the moment that Christ's divine
nature is revealed. And we see that in the Holy
Spirit, in the hands of God above. What's especially fun
about this painting is that Leonardo was
one of his students. And Leonardo painted some
parts of this painting. SPEAKER 2: OK. So that's a wild
idea, right there. Because we think of Leonardo
as the master of the High Renaissance. And the notion of
him as a student, and to actually have some of
his student work available is really fabulous. SPEAKER 1: Well,
it's pretty wild, just the notion that
other people would paint part of your paintings. It's not something that we can
imagine a modern artist doing. SPEAKER 2: But this
was a standard idea, that a master would
have students, would have apprentices. And they would work
in his workshop and often do some of the
less critical elements. So know that Leonardo
was responsible for one of the angels. And SPEAKER 1: Right. So one day, Verrocchio
said, today, Leonardo, could you paint
one of the angels for me? And so Verrocchio painted
one of the angels, and Leonardo painted the other. And I think what's fun about
this is to think about one of the angels as an
Early Renaissance angel and the other angel as a High
Renaissance angel, Leonardo's angel as the High
Renaissance angel. Because it's really
Leonardo who invents the style of the
High Renaissance. To me, I think it's
pretty obvious. SPEAKER 2: So we
have two angels. They're very close. SPEAKER 1: I think about how
one angel, Verrocchio's angel, looks rather
typical-- like a boy. SPEAKER 2: He does
look like a boy. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. Like maybe Verrocchio went out
and got a boy to model for him. Leonardo's angel looks like
it has no earthly model. It's just ideally beautiful. And it's that ideal beauty
that will become so important in the High Renaissance. If you think about figures
like Michelangelo's "David," it's the ideal beauty of
the High Renaissance figures that suggests their
divine nature. SPEAKER 2: So that's
so interesting, because when we think
about the Trecento, we have a kind of
painting that created a representation of
the otherworldly, of the divine, that had
nothing to do with the earthly. But then, in the
15th century, we had artists that were studying
nature, studying our reality. In a sense, you're
saying that Leonardo is surpassing even
that, that he took the lessons of the 15th century
and reworked them in order to be able to
create an even more transcendent representation
of the divine. SPEAKER 1: Well, in
the 1300s, artists would represent spirituality
or in the heavenly by using a lot of gold, halos,
figures that were very flat. And so they suggested
transcendence and kind of otherworldliness. So what Leonardo's
doing is he's keeping all of those lessons of
the Early Renaissance, of how to make the human
figure look real, right? Using modeling,
giving the figure a sense of weight and
gravity, giving the figure a sense of three dimensionality. SPEAKER 2: Understanding
its anatomy. SPEAKER 1: Exactly. All of those lessons of
the Early Renaissance. And yet is able to
imbue the figure with a sense of
transcendence and divinity. SPEAKER 2: So much so
that the halo now almost seems redundant. SPEAKER 1: Exactly. And it's Leonardo who will
do away with the halo. But it's not just
the ideal beauty of the figure that suggests
that kind of transcendence and spirituality. It's also, I think for me, in
the movements of the figure. If you look at Leonardo's angel
holding Christ's clothing, he kneels, facing to the right. His shoulders twist
slightly to the left. His head leans back and up. And it's an incredibly
complex pose. If you think back to
the Early Renaissance, the artists like
Masaccio and Donatello were just really discovering
how to create figures standing in contrapposto, who
could move realistically. But Leonardo is taking a
giant step beyond that. So the figures really move in
a very elegant and graceful way that suggests that
divine nature. SPEAKER 2: So Leonardo is
really offering us a glimpse into the future, a promise of
what the High Renaissance will hold in store for us. [MUSIC PLAYING]