King Tut

January 28, 2010

Introduction to Art, Music, and Literature

HUM 100

Section 048016

Early Renaissance and High Renaissance: The patronage of art from each era

In the famous era of the renaissance, if you had the gift of painting great works of art, chiseling a block of stone or marble in to a multi-dimensional figure, creating brilliant stanzas of music melody, and writing unforgettable pages of wordplay you probably would have been equivalent to today’s rock star, actor/actress or best-selling author. Money and fame came to the people with this then and sometimes now special talent. Today, in a way, we can compare how artist, sculptors and musicians of the renaissance were heralded for kings, queens, dignitaries and the wealthy of then to a musician performing at the White House or a famous artist painting the First Family’s painting. Any way we compare and contemplate the renaissance has a lot to do with how we view art, listen to music, and even how we use our money in banking.

Florence, Italy became the birthing place for the renaissance (Cunningham & Reich, 2009). There was a new style of art dwarfing the previous Byzantine art style. In the early renaissance, Italian painters and sculptors began specializing in a new style in which came from rhetoric taught by Saint Francis of Assisi. This new style curved artists and their followers “to learn to “see God in the beauty of the world and its creatures” (Cunningham & Reich, 2009). This lead to a new style and generation of artists and sculptors with impeccable talent. Florence was the center of this new movement mostly in part due to its location on a main road connecting Rome and the northern part of the country. The country’s Tuscan dialect was also one of the most accomplished dialects during this time.

Artists in the early renaissance painted mostly for priests, popes, and The Church. This was considered an honor and still is today to be asked by a person with such esteem and...