Raphael, Da Vinci and Michelangelo

Paper Summary:

This paper looks at how these masters, by making their figures come alive as if made out of flesh and blood, symbolize the loftiest goals of the High Renaissance. The paper further looks at how the artists created a new artistic profession that exhibited its own rights of expression, its own character and its own claims to greatness within western civilization.

From the Paper:

"Within a thirty year span, beginning approximately in 1495, the city of Rome replaced Florence as the Italian seat of artistic pre-eminence. A series of powerful and ambitious popes, most notably Julius II and those associated with the rich and powerful De Medici family run by Cosimo De Medici and later on by Lorenzo De Medici, created a new papal state with Rome as its capitol and artistic center of Europe. These popes embellished Rome with great works of art and invited artists from all over Italy to take on some very challenging tasks. In its duration, the "High Renaissance" (ca. 1492 to 1520) produced works of such authority and magnitude that later generations of artists were forced to imitate it in order to compete with the growing competition within Italy and northern Europe. The various masters of this period had of course inherited the pictorial science of their predecessors, yet they made a distinct break from the past and occupied new and lofty ground that had never been explored before."

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