What Major Developments Were Made In Art

What Major Developments Were Made In Art In The Period 1400-1650? Essay, Research Paper At the beginning of this era, a synthesis of local styles known as the ?International Style? predominated Europe?s art and the Gothic style was dominant in architecture. This era also began in the shadow of the person sometimes seen as the precedent of the great Italian Renaissance masters.? His frescoes, notably those in the Cappella dell? Arena in Padua used the concepts of Byzantine art that governed ideas of foreshortening, shadow and texture to create the illusion of depth.? Giotto?s mastery had recreated the concept of depth on a flat surface, and the slow progress to what we recognise as Renaissance art occurred throughout the fourteenth century. One of the finest pieces of

International Style art is the Wilton Diptych, which dates from 1400 and portrays the commending of Richard II by St. Edmund, St. Edward the Confessor and St John the Baptist to the Christ Child. A love of detail is evident from the painstaking way in which fingers, flowers and even the Infant?s feet are marked out in loving detail. The artist took a fractal approach to the painting, trying to add realism to his scene by adding layer upon layer of detail to the figures.? The foreshortening of limbs and bodies in the painting is testament to Giotto?s influence and the figures themselves have a reasonable deal of realism to them, even if the painting overall does not.? The flowers across the picture are typical of the pre-Renaissance fascination with the delicate and beautiful, and

the diptych shows a great power of observation, but the early date of the painting is clear when we look at the background, and the way that space is portrayed within the picture. ?The gilded background was a show of wealth in a space that usually lay redundant in paintings of this era, as at the time, a high calibre means of representing space had not yet been discovered. The gilded background would have been massively expensive, as would the ultramarine pigments used so freely, notably upon the dress of the figure of the Virgin Mary. The Renaissance era is usually seen as starting at the point when artists ceased to be interested in telling a story so much as in portraying nature and collecting studies of the world. These achieved, they moved on to exploring the laws of vision

and the way in which the viewer perceives the world.? They began to study the human body with a view to enhancing their ability to portray it both in stone and in paint, as their classical forebears had done.? The ?Greek artists of the fifth century were mainly concerned in how to build up the image of the beautiful body? whilst to the Gothic artists, all their skill and tricks were merely ?means to an end, which was to tell a sacred story more movingly and more convincingly[1]?.? The rise of Petrarch, who had become a ?classic? author even by this early stage, and the pre-eminence of humanism had led to a resurgence of respect for the classical world that we see reflected across the Renaissance world.? Renewed awareness of Italy?s great past led to renewed interest in some kind

of revival of the ancient arts.? The millennium that lay between the fall of Rome and their time was to them merely a sad interlude in Italy?s greatness.? Giotto?s art and the art it spawned for a century afterwards had its roots in the artist?s genius in blending the concepts of the rigid Byzantine school into a combination with the precepts of the Italianate school, but further progress would require another genius. His reputation established with Florence Cathedral, Brunelleschi went on to spearhead a revival of Roman forms in architecture.? He did not intend to copy Roman architecture, nor rebuild Italy in the ancient model, but to use Roman ideals to create new modes of harmony and beauty, using columns, pediments and pilasters.? Although rightly remembered as a great