14th & 15th Century Art in Europe

ART HISTORY

14th Century Art in Europe

15th Century Renaissance art in Italy

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14th Century Italy – early renaissance

• The ideas of the Renaissance first emerged in the city-state of Florence.

• The sculptor Donatello returned to classical techniques such as contrapposto and classical subjects like the unsupported nude — his second sculpture of David was the first freestanding bronze nude created in Europe since the Roman Empire.

• The sculptor and architect Brunelleschi studied the architectural ideas of ancient Roman buildings for inspiration. Masaccio perfected elements like composition, individual expression, and human form to paint frescoes, especially those in the Brancacci Chapel, of surprising elegance, drama, and emotion.

• A remarkable number of these major artists worked on different portions of the Florence Cathedral. Brunelleschi's dome for the cathedral was one of the first truly revolutionary architectural innovations since the Gothic flying buttress.

• Donatello created many of its sculptures.

• Giotto and Lorenzo Ghiberti also contributed to the cathedral.

Naturalism or naturalism - A style in which an artist intends to represent a subject as it appears in the natural world — precisely and objectivly — as opposed to being represented in a stylized or intellectually manipulated manner. Although naturalism is often used interchangeably with the term realism, there is a difference between them. The realism of Gustave Courbet (French, 1819-1877) is more interested in the honest depiction of unpretentious subjects, while the naturalism of Ernest Meissonier (French, 1815-1891) is more a visually accurate depiction of subjects which in other hands might well have been depicted pretentiously.

Florence and Sienna (Northern Italy)

Paintings in and from Florence

• Cimabue

• Giotto

• Brunelleschi

o Founding Hospital

• Masaccio (1425)

o Expulsion of Adam & Eve from...