Art of 15th Century Italy

The Renaissance is a period seen as a rebirth of learning on the classical model. The modern conception of the Renaissance actually derives from the nineteenth century in the work of Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, who published a pioneering work in 1860 in which he saw the Renaissance as almost purely cultural, as the work of a small Italian elite pioneering a new attitude toward human beings. They now saw human beings as people who had suddenly acquired a new consciousness of their own uniqueness and individuality. We n

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mbodied a certain realism that would influence subsequent artists. Donatello did not follow the traditional representations of certain religious images but developed his own ideas based on a close reading of biblical texts. He was not realistic in terms of using contemporary subjects but in avoiding the idealized representations that had been accepted for so long as the way things had to be. Baxandall notes a new desire for pictorial variety which affected Donatello and others, notably Lippi, and Baxandall explains how both of them shaped human figures in groups in such a way that economy of elements was maintained along with a mixture of composition and variety. Baxandall makes a direct comparison between "the eloquent and energetic figures and groups of Donatello's reliefs" (Baxandall 136-137) and "the gracious and restrained Filippo Lippi" (Baxandall 137) because both artists presented groups "in which varied figures combine into symmetrical groups, satisfying because of the tension between variety and symmetry" (Baxandall 137). Baxandall also finds that this is a prime example of fifteenth century thinking expressed in art. Indeed, Baxandall finds that there was a new way of looking at the world and of transforming w
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Approximate Word count = 2677
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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