Renaissance Paintings


Renaissance is said to have started from 15th century in Italy. This period marks a distance from the medieval period with certain differences. In traditional sense Renaissance is understood to be a historical age expending through 14th, 15th and 16thcentruries.

Italian renaissance represented a reconnection of the west with classical antiquity, the absorption of knowledge (particularly mathematics), a focus on the importance of living with comforts in the present (Renaissance humanism), and an explosion of the dissemination of knowledge brought on by the invention of printing. In addition, this period witnessed the creation of new techniques in art, poetry, and architecture led in turn to a radical change in the style and substance of the arts and letters.

The development in the art techniques led to the blooming of painting in particular beside other forms of art. Reanaissance period is said to be golden period of Painting by many established scholars. Artists like Piero della Francesca, Sandro Botticelli, Paolo Uccello, Leonardo Da Vinci , Michelangelo Buonarotti, Raphael and Titian established painting at a very high pedestal. They did so with the use of perspective, the study of human anatomy and proportion and through their development of an unprecedented refinement in drawing and paintings techniques.

While Italian painters produced their works through these characteristics, their other counterparts from other natioanlilties represent a different approach, one that is more realistic and less idealized. They included Flemish, Dutch and German painters of the Renaissance such as Albrecht Durer, Lucas Cranach, Matthias Grunewald, Hieronymous Bosch and Pieter Brueghel.

In the depiction of reality the adoption of oil painting played a new and distinct role. Italian painters were inspired heavily from the art of ancient Greece and Rome whereas the northeners retained a styllistic residue of the sculpture and illuminated scripts of the Medieval period.

One finds a reflection of revolution of ideas and science occurred during this time in Renaissance paintings. Dürer, considered one of the greatest of printmakers, is of the view that painters are not mere artisans but thinkers as well. With the development of easel painting in the Renaissance, painting got independence from architecture.These painters did not give much attention to the religious imageries but they painted entirely secular matterrs.They painted what they saw around.

Sixteenth century witnessed a popular demand of movable pictures, which could be hung easily on walls and moved around at will.

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