Western Painting - Western Painting - Renaissance and Mannerism

Renaissance and Mannerism

• Fra Angelico

• Filippo Lippi

• Andrea Mantegna

• Masaccio The Expulsion Of Adam and Eve from Eden, before and after restoration

• Paolo Uccello

• Leonardo da Vinci

• Raphael

• Michelangelo

• Albrecht Dürer

• Giovanni Bellini

• Titian

• Sandro Botticelli

• Leonardo da Vinci

• Piero della Francesca

• Giorgione

• Jacopo Tintoretto

• Jan van Eyck

• Jan van Eyck

• Rogier van der Weyden

• Robert Campin

• Hieronymus Bosch

• Pieter Bruegel

• Hans Holbein the Younger

• El Greco

The Renaissance (French for 'rebirth'), a cultural movement roughly spanning the 14th through the mid-17th century, heralded the study of classical sources, as well as advances in science which profoundly influenced European intellectual and artistic life. In Italy artists like Paolo Uccello, Fra Angelico, Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Filippo Lippi, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphael, Giovanni Bellini and Titian took painting to a higher level through the use of perspective, the study of human anatomy and proportion, and through their development of an unprecedented refinement in drawing and painting techniques.

Flemish, Dutch and German painters of the Renaissance such as Hans Holbein the Younger, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Matthias Grünewald, Hieronymous Bosch, and Pieter Bruegel represent a different approach from their Italian colleagues, one that is more realistic and less idealized. Genre painting became a popular idiom amongst the Northern painters like Pieter Bruegel. The adoption of oil painting whose invention was traditionally, but erroneously, credited to Jan Van Eyck, (an important transitional figure who bridges painting in the Middle Ages with painting of the early Renaissance), made possible a new verisimilitude in depicting reality. Unlike the Italians, whose work drew heavily from the art of Ancient Greece and Rome, the northerners retained a stylistic residue of the sculpture and illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.

Renaissance painting reflects the revolution of ideas and science (astronomy, geography) that occurred in this period, the Reformation, and the invention of the printing press. Dürer, considered one of the greatest of printmakers, states that painters are not mere artisans but thinkers as well. With the development of easel painting in the Renaissance, painting gained independence from architecture. Following centuries dominated by religious imagery, secular subject matter slowly returned to Western painting. Artists included visions of the world around them, or the products of their own imaginations in their paintings. Those who could afford the expense could become patrons and commission portraits of themselves or their family.

In the 16th century, movable pictures which could be hung easily on walls, rather than paintings affixed to permanent structures, came into popular demand.

The High Renaissance gave rise to a stylized art known as Mannerism. In place of the balanced compositions and rational approach to perspective that characterized art at the dawn of the 16th century, the Mannerists sought instability, artifice, and doubt. The unperturbed faces and gestures of Piero della Francesca and the calm Virgins of Raphael are replaced by the troubled expressions of Pontormo and the emotional intensity of El Greco.