Analysis of Renaissance Paintings - Term Paper Example

Renaissance Paintings Renaissance is a French word that stands for rebirth. The Renaissance was an era of artistic and cultural accomplishments in Europe that took place between the middle of the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. The period featured several idiosyncratic ideas about life, particularly materialism, individualism, humanism, and secularism. The essence of the Renaissance had an inspiring and influential effect on the European society for a very long period, making the Renaissance beyond doubt a golden era in European history. The renaissance differed from the ideals of the middle ages with respect to a number of aspects. The foremost among them was its glorification of man instead of God and that man was the gauge of all things and had indefinite potential. The Renaissance started in the city of Florence in Italy, and subsequently expanded into the rest of Italy and afterwards into Northern Europe. Artistically, the Renaissance shaped a completely new approach to express human emotions and ethics by the use of architecture, sculpture and in particular painting. As history reveals, the painters of the Renaissance, like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and many others, did not evaluate their work merely evaluate on the feats of their large number of predecessors. They utilized the new scientific theories of their age and related their points of view to create paintings that reflected practical and realistic images. They mostly painted idealized figures and pictures based on humanistic concepts and principles, which manifested their ideals of man being separate from God and showed that his environment was a natural occurrence and not the result of a higher power. The paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, for example, reflect the ideals of humanism and materialism. Leonardo da Vinci often referred to as the Renaissance man, was an expert in a number of fields and had an extensive range of interests. He was not only an artist and musician, but also a sculptor, painter, architect as well as a scientist. He dissected the dead bodies of human beings to make the way muscles and bones functioned. His sketchbooks consist of diagrams and operational schemes of flying machine and undersea boats. His famous paintings include Mona Lisa, The Last Supper (which was painted on a plaster wall using oil) and Madonna and Child with Saint Anne. Leonardo da Vinci’s keen interest in human anatomy leads to the perfection of his paintings. He was very skilled with the drawings of the human face and no better painting than that of the Mona Lisa can be a proof to it. The Mona Lisa demonstrates his passion of art in terms of science. The masterpiece with perfectly anatomical features and meticulous portrayal of atmospheric and luminosity conditions gives it a mystical appeal. The portrait of Mona Lisa is the best-known illustration of an expression which reflects an ambiguity between a happy and a gloomy dimension. Her expression, ranging from kind, flirtatious, happy and sad, is left to the viewers to judge. The painting was made on a piece of pine with the use of oil paint. When one looks at the picture, it actually shows the lady in the painting to be smiling and her mouth to be moving. The reason that his paintings looked so real was because of the combination of scientific and artistic elements in his work. He studied the works of light and shadow and the way colors changed from one point to other and used them in creating his magnificent masterpiece. Different people interpret its smile in different ways. While some find it as a happy expression, others find it sad (Stein). Her posture reflects serenity and silence. Everything adjoining her face is shadowy, bringing a lot more focus to the light of her features and the magnetism it provides. The landscape of the canvas has been identified a long time back as the first illustration of a picture on landscape. Seated in the middle of an open lanai with what looks as if to be pillars on each side of her, vast scenery stretches out towards a frozen mountain range. The curvature of her hair and clothes are copied in the undulations of the landscape and steady wave in the waterway and hills at the back of her. The question arising from such a depiction is whether the Mona Lisa is only a portrait or the illustration of an ideal (Andrews). The Sistine Madonna was painted by Raphael in 1513 on a yellow wall on an altar in the Benedictine monastery church of San Sisto, in Piacenza, Italy. In 1513 Raphael Santi was given the assignment of painting the portrait for Pope Julius II in Rome. The picture also earned the names The Madonna of the San Sisto, The Sistine Madonna and Sistine. The picture portrays young Jesus in the arms of Virgin Mary with two contemplative Cherubs painted below her. The Madonna worked by Raphael gives a clear movement of drifting away from the serenity and kindness of the divine to the qualities of human vigor and energy. The painting of Raphael’s Sistine Madonna reflects the idea of humanism at its core. The figures are more of human rather the glorification of the divine. The Sistine Madonna portrays the Virgin Mary holding young Jesus. Unlike the other paintings of Mary which reflect a divine and a serene expression, Raphael’s Mary holds a worried and disturbed expression of that of a concerned mother. Even the young Jesus holds an expression of fright, as if to cry, not like that of the usual smiling and unconcerned face that is depicted. In the picture, both Mary and Jesus look directly at the spectator. Here Mary is portrayed not like the mother of Christ, but as any mother who is concerned about her child. Jesus is also depicted as a normal child who looks as if trying to shrivel back on his mother’s shoulder and is about to cry from some kind of fear. This painting holds an altogether different meaning from a historical perspective. The facial expressions revealed by the Virgin Mary and young Jesus give them a distinct human emotion, the typical characteristic of the Renaissance ideals. It shows a typical development of emotional expression, richness of color and extreme technical sophistication (Religion and Belief). The paintings in the Renaissance era show a distinct divergence from that of the Middle Ages. The renaissance artists and philosophers exemplified man as the central force and not God or the Church as the determining force. It was a rebirth of culture, the development of science, art and philosophy from man’s perspectives. The defining notion of the Renaissance was humanism which was a literary movement that started in Italy in the fourteenth century. Humanism was a distinctive movement in view of the fact that it broke from the medieval practice of having devout religious inspiration for generating art or pieces of literature. Humanist writers were involved with worldly or secular topics rather than rigorous religious themes. Such importance on secularism was the consequence of a more materialistic vision of the world. Contrary to the Medieval Era, Renaissance people were more interested in money and the pleasure of life and its worldly joys. Humanist writers glorified the human being and considered that human was the measure of every phenomenon and had unlimited capability. Reference 1. Stein, Joel, “Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa”, Available from: http://www.nysedregents.org/Grade8/EnglishLanguageArts/samplels.pdf (Accessed on Feb 11, 2010). 2. Andrews, Colin, “Analysis of the Mona Lisa Painting”, Available from: http://ezinearticles.com/?Analysis-of-the-Mona-Lisa-Painting&id=832462 (Accessed on Feb 11, 2010). 3. “Religion and Belief”, The Sistine Madonna by Raphael, Available from: http://www.artrev.com/art/pdf/brochure.asp?pid=6909261634&aid=462&mid=120&original=No (Accessed on Feb 11, 2010). Read More