20/3/2008 - Renaissance Art - Part .I-
Renaissance Art
The rebirth of the Italian cities attracted visitors from all over western Europe. Merchants and bankers hoped to make their fortunes in the Italian city-states. Artists and students sought knowledge and fame. When these travelers returned home, they brought Renaissance ideas with them. In time, the ideas of the Renaissance influenced people far from the Italian peninsula.
William Shakespeare is the best-known writer of the Renaissance. His plays mixed humor with drama, and showed the strengths and weaknesses of people. Audiences flocked to see his presentations of Roman emperors, British kings and queens, and Italian teenagers.
Pieter Bruegel was a Dutch painter who wanted to show people as they really were. Breugal studied Italian art, but he developed his own style. Many of his paintings show peasants working, dancing, and eating.
The Renaissance patrons wanted art that showed joy in human beauty and life’s pleasures. Renaissance art is more lifelike than in the art of the Middle Ages. Renaissance artists studied perspective, or the differences in the way things look when they are close to something or far away. The artists painted in a way that showed these differences. As a result, their paintings seem to have depth.
An artist from Florence named Giotto was one of the first to paint in this new style. Giotto lived more than a century before the beginning of the Renaissance, but his paintings show real emotion. The bodies look solid, and the background of his paintings shows perspective. The art produced during the Renaissance would build upon Giotto’s style.
Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 in the village of Vinci. His name means Leonardo of Vinci. Leonardo began his career working for a master painter in Florence. By 1478, Leonardo left his master and set up his own workshop. People have been trying to guess the secret behind the smile of his Mona Lisa ever since he painted it around 1505. His Last Supper shows clearly the different feelings of Jesus and his followers.
Leonardo’s fame grew—but not just for his painting. Leonardo was truly a “Renaissance Man,” skilled in many fields. He was a scientist and an inventor as well as an artist. He made notes and drawings of everything he saw. Leonardo invented clever machines, and even designed imitation wings that he hoped would let a person fly like a bird.
Michelangelo Buonarroti of Florence was one of the greatest artists of all time. Like Leonardo, Michelangelo was a “Renaissance Man” of many talents. He was a sculptor, a painter, and an architect. When Michelangelo carved a statue of Moses, he included veins and muscles in the arms and legs.
Even condemnations of an "unspeakable," "unnatural vice" gave it a discursive existence and spread intimations of what was erotically possible. Attempted censorship increased the piquancy and desirability of overtly sexual imagery.
The issue is not so much the quantity of evidence as the types, and the ways in which it is read for sexual content. Besides straightforwardly positive or negative representations of same-sex activity, scholars are beginning to notice such modalities as satire, burlesque, irony, nuance, and equivocation.
Whether or not various documented practices began in the Renaissance, new kinds of evidence survive. The advent of print culture codified and disseminated forms of oral culture, such as sexual invective, pasquinades (or lampoons), and obscene jokes. Print technology also enabled the wider marketing of erotic imagery, which in turn increased demand. The Reformation sharpened polemic accusing opponents of same-sex sins.
Homoeroticism is also evident in artists' writings, including poetry by Michelangelo and Bronzino. Cellini's autobiography, written during house arrest for sodomy, noted sexual encounters with women and, less explicitly, erotic attraction to youths. Offices established to regulate sexual activities received denunciations of artists for sodomy with apprentices or models (Leonardo in 1476, Botticelli in 1502, and Cellini in 1523 and 1557, for example).
Conditions of production in a workshop system favored all-male sociability and erotic contact. Trainees were advised to avoid women; many artists did not marry. Several anecdotes record Donatello's erotic relations with apprentices. A succession of attractive models and pupils enthralled Leonardo. For twenty-six years he endured the antics of his favorite (suo creato) "Salai" ("Satan") who entered his service as a ten year old in 1490 and was his model for depictions of youthful, curly-headed male beauty.
Botticelli, described by Vasari as "extraordinarily fond of those he knew to be students of the arts," was renowned for having nightmares about being married. A poet described the married Giovanni Bellini in bed with a boy. Married with two children, the painter Sodoma nevertheless openly adopted the daring nickname by which he is still known. Cellini pled guilty to the charge of keeping an apprentice for five years "as though he were a wife" (a common expression).
Social gatherings in workshops provided sexual opportunities, and such occasions multiplied in the sixteenth century when artist clubs staged fancy-dress parties or theatrical entertainments. Cellini described a Roman dinner party for artists that was attended by female prostitutes and a seductively cross-dressed youth.
Official disapproval and punitive measures co-existed with a fair degree of tolerance among many patrons and humanists. Bonds between patrons and dependent artists were sometimes eroticized. Particularly in restricted circles, such as a poetic coterie, a courtly elite, or a so-called academy (reading group), homoerotic imagery and wit was appreciated.
Bronzino's double-sided painting of the front and rear of a naked dwarf in the Medici court, for instance, makes several homoerotic allusions. The humanist Willibald Pirckheimer wrote a Greek in ion on his portrait sketched by his friend Dürer: "With erect penis, into the man's rectum."
The interests of certain collectors are telling. For example, Antonio Pèrez, Philip II's Secretary of State until accused of sodomy in 1579, owned Correggio's Ganymede and Parmigianino's Cupid carving his bow.
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