style="font-size:15px;"> Vittore Carpaccio
(c. 1465 Venice – c. 1525 Capodistria)
Carpaccio was a Venetian painter strongly influenced by Gentile Bellini. The distinguishing characteristics of his work are his taste for fantasy and anecdote and his eye for minutely-observed crowd details. After completing the cycles of Scenes from the Lives of St Ursula, St George and St Jerome, his career declined and he remained forgotten until the nineteenth century. He is now seen as one of the outstanding Venetian painters of his generation.
158. Hieronymus Bosch, c.1450–1516, Northern Renaissance, Dutch, Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns), 1490–1500, Oil on oak panel, 73.8 × 59 cm, National Gallery, London
159. Leonardo da Vinci, 1452–1519, Renaissance, Florentine School, Italian, Lady with an Ermine (Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani), 1483–1490, Oil on panel, 54 × 39 cm, Czartoryski Museum, Cracow
Favourite portrait of the Duke of Milan, the Lady with an Ermine is part of a series of animated portraits painted by Leonardo in Milan: dynamism is given by the bust facing the left side of the panel and the head turned toward the right.
Leonardo da Vinci
(1452 Vinci – 1519 Le Clos-Lucé)
Leonardo’s early life was spent in Florence, his maturity in Milan, and the last three years of his life in France. Leonardo’s teacher was Verrocchio. First he was a goldsmith, then a painter and sculptor: as a painter, representative of the very scientific school of draughtsmanship; more famous as a sculptor, being the creator of the Colleoni statue at Venice, Leonardo was a man of striking physical attractiveness, great charm of manner and conversation, and mental accomplishment. He was well grounded in the sciences and mathematics of the day, as well as a gifted musician. His skill in draughtsmanship was extraordinary; shown by his numerous drawings as well as by his comparatively few paintings. His skill of hand is at the service of most minute observation and analytical research into the character and structure of form.
Leonardo is the first in date of the great men who had the desire to create in a picture a kind of mystic unity brought about by the fusion of matter and spirit. Now that the Primitives had concluded their experiments, ceaselessly pursued during two centuries, by the conquest of the methods of painting, he was able to pronounce the words which served as a password to all later artists worthy of the name: painting is a spiritual thing, cosa mentale.
He completed Florentine draughtsmanship in applying to modelling by light and shade, a sharp subtlety which his predecessors had used only to give greater precision to their contours. This marvellous draughtsmanship, this modelling and chiaroscuro he used not solely to paint the exterior appearance of the body but, as no one before him had done, to cast over it a reflection of the mystery of the inner life. In the Mona Lisa and his other masterpieces he even used landscape not merely as a more or less picturesque decoration, but as a sort of echo of that interior life and an element of a perfect harmony.
Relying on the still quite novel laws of perspective this doctor of scholastic wisdom, who was at the same time an initiator of modern thought, substituted for the discursive manner of the Primitives the principle of concentration which is the basis of classical art. The picture is no longer presented to us as an almost fortuitous aggregate of details and episodes. It is an organism in which all the elements, lines and colours, shadows and lights, compose a subtle tracery converging on a spiritual, a sensuous centre. It was not with the external significance of objects, but with their inward and spiritual significance, that Leonardo was occupied.
160. Fra Bartolomeo, 1473–1517, High Renaissance, Florentine School, Italian, Portrait of Girolamo Savonarola, c. 1498, Oil on panel, 47 × 31 cm, Museo di San Marco, Florence
16th Century
161. Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 1483–1520, High Renaissance, Florentine School, Italian, The Virgin and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist (La Belle Jardinière), 1507–08, Oil on wood, 122 × 80 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris
La Belle Jardinière, or The Virgin and Child with the Infant St John the Baptist, completed in 1507, shows the trio surrounded by a pleasant rural environment. The similarity between the Madonna of the Goldfinch and this depiction of the Madonna is more than coincidental: it represents the ideal of female beauty according to Raphael. Perhaps the same model was used in both paintings.
The sixteenth century begins with the Reformation in 1517, when Martin Luther (1483–1546) issued his Ninety-Five Theses and John Calvin (1509–64) formally tried to reform the Catholic Church. These movements led to the establishment of Protestantism, which emphasised personal faith rather than doctrines of the church. The invention of moveable type by Gutenberg in the previous century helped to make access to the Bible and literacy an important feature of the Protestant Reformation. The Catholic Church, however, reacted with its own Catholic Counter-Reformation by convening the Council of Trent from 1545–63. The most prominent participants in the counter-Reformation were the Jesuits, a Catholic order founded by Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556). The Jesuits also participated in the Age of Exploration as missionaries, establishing themselves throughout Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The Catholic Church also responded at this time with an extreme measure of policing the faith through the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Finally, the English Reformation was supported by King Henry VIII (1491–1547) who wanted a divorce from his wife Catherine of Aragon (1485–1536) because she had not produced a male child. Henry VIII then founded the Church of England, the new church that was formed in the wake of the split with the Catholic Church.
Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) began his experiments by inventing the pendulum and the thermometer in the sixteenth century. Galileo was also interested in astronomy, but it was Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) who developed the heliocentric, or sun-centred, theory that the earth revolves around the sun.
The art of this century was mostly influenced by the apparition of Protestantism and the counter-Reformation as the need for clarity in the works of art meant the end of Mannerism.
The northern lands were embracing Protestantism and this changed the patronage system in art. Due to the wealth from increasing global trade, a new merchant class developed in northern Europe which commissioned more secular works of art for both church and private homes.
Still-life paintings were popular, as were landscapes. Also, the formation of guilds and civic militias created a new market for the group portrait. In Italy, the Catholic Church was the primary patron of art, while in the north, individuals were the principal patrons, thereby creating a market force that determined subject matter. Artists could no longer depend on large church commissions for religious paintings the way they had prior to the Reformation. Conversely, much of Spanish and Italian art was still created through religious patronage. King Francis I of France (1494–1547) was generally considered a monarch who embodied the Renaissance. His courtly style and love of humanist knowledge was far reaching. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) eventually wound up in his court in France, where he found generous patronage for his science and experiments and lived out the rest of his life near Amboise with the support of Francis I.
162. Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi), 1445–1510, Early Renaissance, Florentine School, Italian, Mystic Nativity, c. 1500, Oil on canvas, 108.6 ×
