Thematic Development of Italian Renaissance Painting

Thematic Development Of Italian Renaissance Painting

This article about the development of themes in Italian Renaissance painting is an extension to the article Italian Renaissance painting, for which it provides additional pictures with commentary. The works encompassed are from Giotto in the early 14th century to Michelangelo's Last Judgement of the 1530s.

The themes that preoccupied painters of the Italian Renaissance were those of both subject matter and execution- what was painted and the style in which it was painted. The artist had far more freedom of both subject and style than did a Medieval painter. Certain characteristic elements of Renaissance painting evolved a great deal during the period. These include perspective, both in terms of how it was achieved and the effect to which it was applied, and realism, particularly in the depiction of humanity, either as symbolic, portrait or narrative element.

Read more about Thematic Development Of Italian Renaissance Painting:  Themes, Elements of Renaissance Painting, Subjects, See Also

Famous quotes containing the words development, italian, renaissance and/or painting:

    The highest form of development is to govern one’s self.
    Zerelda G. Wallace (1817–1901)

    If the study of his images
    Is the study of man, this image of Saturday,
    This Italian symbol, this Southern landscape, is like
    A waking, as in images we awake,
    Within the very object that we seek,
    Participants of its being.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)

    People nowadays like to be together not in the old-fashioned way of, say, mingling on the piazza of an Italian Renaissance city, but, instead, huddled together in traffic jams, bus queues, on escalators and so on. It’s a new kind of togetherness which may seem totally alien, but it’s the togetherness of modern technology.
    —J.G. (James Graham)

    I don’t know but a book in a man’s brain is better off than a book bound in calf—at any rate it is safer from criticism. And taking a book off the brain, is akin to the ticklish & dangerous business of taking an old painting off a panel—you have to scrape off the whole brain in order to get at it with due safety—& even then, the painting may not be worth the trouble.
    Herman Melville (1819–1891)