ART discussion

Renaissance Historical Context

1429 Joan of Arc liberates Orleans

1431 Joan of Arc burned at the stake

1434 Exiled Cosimo de Medici returns to control Florence

1440 Platonic Academy founded in Florence

1445 Guttenberg begins selling one of the first books published with movable type in the West (movable type invented in China about 400 years earlier)

1453 Turks take Constantinople

1469 Lorenzo de Medici rules Republic of Florence

1470 Portuguese explorers reach Africa's Gold Coast

1484 Pope Innocent VII succeeds to papacy and outlaws witchcraft

1492 Columbus travels to West Indies and South America

1511 First road map of Europe published

1517 Beginning of Protestant Reformation

1522 First circumnavigation of the earth

1527 Sack of Rome

Significant developments in the western world view become influential by the 1400s:

• Increased exploration of the world
• Scientific investigation of nature and the human body
• Medieval religious zeal becomes more tempered
• Development of the city-state and nations
• Growth of capitalism and trade
• Guilds become more powerful and women's participation in them less common
• The artist's social standing is eventually elevated from skilled laborer to gifted intellectual

Humanism: a cultural and intellectual movement during the Renaissance, following the rediscovery of the art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. A philosophy or attitude concerned with the interests, achievements and capabilities of human beings rather than with the abstract concepts and problems of theology.

Francesco Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism." He was a scholar and a poet who lived in Florence in the 1300s who studied poets and philosophers from Ancient Rome such as Cicero and Virgil.

Neo-Platonism

• Renaissance philosophy that liberally merged Christian and pagan doctrine
• Proposed that all life was linked to God by a spiritual circuit
• Therefore, all revelation (whether from the Bible, Plato or classic myth) was one
• Beauty, love and spiritual ecstasy were all the same thing
• One could attain spiritual ecstasy through the contemplation of beauty

High Renaissance 1490 - 1520

• Concept of the "Renaissance ideal" fully adopted by the aristocracy
• Artists recognized as intellectuals rather than craftsmen
• Artists receive more commissions from private sources
• Oil on canvas becomes preferred painting media