Renaissance and Mannerism
This domain covers Italian and Northern art from about 1400 to 1600. The PAU tests linear perspective and proportion, humanist patronage, the difference between Quattrocento and Cinquecento, and the deliberate artifice of Mannerism. Expect questions that ask you to explain how a painting constructs space or how a style changes over time.
Quattrocento: measurability
- Brunelleschi's dome and his demonstration of linear perspective make pictorial space mathematical. Alberti's De pictura (1435) codifies the vanishing point and the picture as window.
- Masaccio's Trinity (c. 1425–27) applies one-point perspective with the vanishing point at eye level; the donor figures kneel outside the sacred space, so the viewer stands in the same measured world.
- Donatello's David (c. 1440s) revives the free-standing nude; Medici patronage turns art into a display of learning and civic virtue.
Cinquecento: the classic
- Leonardo: sfumato, atmospheric perspective, experimental observation. Raphael: balanced, legible composition (School of Athens, 1509–11). Michelangelo: terribilità, sculptural bodies, the Sistine ceiling (1508–12).
- Venice prizes colorito and texture (Titian), Florence prizes disegno; this debate is a standard exam comparison.
- Northern Renaissance adds oil technique's transparency (van Eyck) and printmaking's circulation, plus a strong detail-based realism.
Mannerism: artifice recognized
- From the 1520s, figura serpentinata, elongation, acid or unnatural color, compressed or ambiguous space, and self-conscious quotation of masters.
- Pontormo's Deposition (c. 1528) crowds figures into a vertiginous plane; Parmigianino's Madonna of the Long Neck (1534–40) stretches proportion and leaves a column unfinished; Bronzino paints icy allegories. El Greco carries the mannerist vocabulary to Spain.
Worked example: Masaccio's Trinity and Parmigianino's Madonna
Trinity builds a measurable chapel: the vanishing point is at the spectator's eye level, the architecture recedes rationally, and the figures occupy a coherent box. Parmigianino does the opposite on purpose: the Virgin's body is elongated, the prophet is pushed to the margin, the column does not support anything, and space refuses to close. The comparison is not "good" versus "bad" perspective; it is a shift from perspective as proof of reality to perspective as a visible convention that can be manipulated. That reasoning earns the analysis marks.
Traps that cost marks
- Dating Mannerism to the 1400s or calling it a decline.
- Confusing sfumato (soft tonal transitions) with chiaroscuro (strong light-dark contrast).
- Ignoring the Northern Renaissance when asked about oil technique.
- Describing Raphael as merely "harmonious" without naming composition or viewpoint.