Italian and Northern Renaissance 1. Giotto's app

1. Giotto's appointment as head of the Florence Cathedral workshop in 1334 marked a turning point in the fortunes of the art of painting. The position had only been held by architects and sculptors prior to this time. But Giotto's advances in the art of painting were so remarkable that he earned this influential position. The potential inherent in Giotto's innovations (as much as the quality of the innovations themselves) were instrumental in making painting the dominant art of the Italian Renaissance. The advances Giotto made were steadily improved upon and by the time linear perspective was invented its ready incorporation into painting was a prime argument for the elevation of the craft of painting to a position as one of the liberal arts.

In the view of Renaissance Humanists, based on somewhat exaggerated ancient literary accounts, realism was the outstanding trait of ancient painting. Thus it was the growing realism of painting that enhanced its stature. Much of this stemmed, of course, from Giotto's innovative approach to volume, space, psychology, and realistic depiction of the world in general. In most senses, of course, he was primarily responsible for clarifying the problems. The stage-like space in his Lamentation (1305-6) and other frescoes in the Arena and Bardi Chapels was created primarily by the overlapping of the figures (rather than by landscape or architecture). But these figures were so much more convincing in

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ference between them was that Leonardo left relatively few completed works while D�rer's legacy of paintings, drawings, and prints was considerable. Leonardo was a restless innovator who was often hired for services outside the visual arts. His first appointment at Milan, for example, was as a military architect and engineer and his artistic pursuits were only an official sideline. He left numerous works unfinished and his copious notebooks were a jumble of sketches and subjects written in a mirror hand designed for secrecy. Leonardo was also an experimenter who sometimes attempted new methods that simply did not work. The most famous instance of this was what is probably his masterpiece, the Last Supper (c. 1495-98) at Milan, which began to fall apart shortly after completion because Leonardo used a new, untested oil-tempera medium. D�rer, on the other hand, was a persistent worker who was always primarily employed as a visual artist. Though he was interested in as wide a variety of subjects (mechanics, theories of perspective, observation of natural phenomena) as Leonardo, his writings, including his extensive journals, were composed to be read by others. In addition, though D�rer is well known as the first painter to ex

Category: Arts - I