Week 2 Project History of Art from the Middle age to Modern Times

The High Renaissance in Italy

The High Renaissance in Italy, dating from approximately 1500-1527, witnessed the apex of artistic advances made in the previous century. A unifying theme of the High Renaissance in Italy was the personality of its artists. Sixteenth century Italian society regarded artists as geniuses, and artists enjoyed a heightened social status.

Like their predecessors, High Renaissance artists continued to focus on representing the human form with anatomical precision, represented three- dimensional space in a believable way, and captured human emotion and psychological states. Art produced in the High Renaissance also tended towards symmetry, balance, and stability.

The High Renaissance starts with Leonardo da Vinci in Florence. The epitome of the so-called “Renaissance Man,” Leonardo believed an artist should be intellectually versatile, and he used art to help explore and explain science and the natural world (Virtruvian man here – istock). Leonardo’s Last Supper (1495-98) shows the compositional and chromatic harmony characteristic of High Renaissance painting. Typical of Leonardo, the fresco was painted using an experimental technique in which a mixture of tempera and oil were applied directly to a thin layer of plaster. The paint did not fully adhere to the wall, and the fresco began to deteriorate almost immediately,

The center of artistic production in the High Renaissance ultimately shifted from Florence to Rome. In an effort to increase papal power, Pope Julius II, elected in 1503, aimed to align sixteenth-century Rome with the grandeur of ancient times. He therefore commissioned artists such as Raphael to create art for the papacy and the Catholic Church. Raphael’s School of Athens (c. 1510-11), a fresco in the papal apartments in the Vatican, depicts the greatest thinkers of classical times in a trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) architectural setting.

In 1508, Julius II asked Michelangelo to adorn the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican. Painted over the span of four years, the central length of the Sistine Ceiling portrays Old Testament accounts of humanity’s struggle for salvation. Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescos are typical of the High Renaissance, and the artist’s own style, in their glori�cation of Christianity, representation of emotion, and meticulous attention to anatomy. The �gures in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescos read as muscular as those in sculptures such as his Pieta (1500) and David (1501-04).