The Renaissance Era

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how between the years 1495 and 1538, following the Byzantine/Gothic periods, a powerful new vitality was stirring amongst the great thinkers and artists which eventually brought about significant and beneficial change in the world of art known as the Renaissance era. It looks at how during the advent of this era, the artist began to view the world around him quite differently and saw that it could be utilized to express true artistic observations. It shows how in the early years of the sixteenth century, this artistic viewpoint became more than a direction, for it blossomed into a theory and a doctrine. It analyzes how the basic premise of the Renaissance era in relation to art stressed the importance of personal experience, the artist's right to know by experimentation, the futility of formal philosophies so prevalent in the preceding eras and the beauty and value of things in the external world.

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 family 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" saw works of such authority and magnitude produced that later generations of artists were virtually instructed in how to represent the natural world in painting and sculpture. 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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