How to identify Renaissance Art Flashcards
- 3-D is finally here
Artists used a combination of accurate and believable proportions and spaces to create, for the first time in the history of art, a very realistic, three- dimensional representation of the world. Gazing at some of their paintings, you’ll feel like you’re part of the scene, or you could just step into it.
- Look for geometric divisions of floors or ceilings
The geometric pattern in a painting does more than give an illusion of deep space, it’s also the reference point for the artist while composing the painting. Renaissance artists reinvented the way paintings were constructed, by using new techniques, such as linear perspective, which gave a sense of depth. They understood that objects and figures seem smaller as they recede into the space, and that’s how they depicted them on a flat surface.
- Foreshortening
is another important technique used by artists. It’s when an object is visually compressed to give the illusion of depth.
- tromp l’oeil
Some artists went as far as creating optical illusions known as tromp l’oeil (literally, a trick of the eye) where you’ll find them in fake domes, for example.
- Religious
The subject matter is mostly religious. If it’s not biblical stories, then it’s hagiographies (i.e. biographies of saints).
- Colours, Robes, Hand Gestures
Look for people with symbolic hand gestures, dressed in flowing, swirling robes, all in bright colors, and unprecedented level of detail.
- Continuous narrative
It’s the illustration of multiple events at different moments from the same story within a single frame.
- Mythological
Although most of the creative output was religious, some artists painted pagan works with Graeco-Roman mythological themes.
- Non-Religious Portraits
That era also witnessed the rise of non-religious individual portraits, of people who were rich and famous. Many of them were donors of chapels and patrons of art.
- Polyptychs
Although painting on canvases (stretched fabrics on single wooden frames) became prominent during the Renaissance, some artists, especially ones from the early Renaissance, continued to paint on polyptychs as was the custom during the medieval era. Polyptychs were wooden panels with folding wings mainly to serve as altarpieces in churches.
- Tondo Format
Paintings in a tondo format (plural is tondi). A tondo is a circular painting, which was an alternative to the rectangular frame.
- Bizarre
Look for paintings that seem like they’re scenes from a bizarre dream or a virtual-reality game where time and place are fluid. Artists fused the contemporary with the biblical and classical. You’ll find figures from events that belong to the first century in biblical villages like Jerusalem, Bethlehem or Nazareth teleported to Tuscan landscapes or inside Flemish houses of the fifteenth century. Other times, the scene’s location is unidentified but surrounded by ancient Roman architecture; columns, niches and round arches. You’ll realize it’s not a biblical locale when you see anachronistic details such as castles on green Tuscan hills or typical Florentine palaces and villas. You’ll easily spot the clean-shaven fashionable Florentines among robed bearded biblical characters, floating angels and popular Franciscan or Dominican monks. Not only would the painter sometimes plant the wealthy art patron who’s paying him into the ancient scene, along with his family, but he, the artist himself, is occasionally there, with a couple friends too.
