Renaissance and Baroque Art and Culture
Renaissance and Baroque Art and Culture asks you to explain how a work constructs space, addresses a viewer and serves a patron. The Renaissance section tests perspective, proportion and the revival of antiquity; the Baroque section tests theatricality, light and the fusion of architecture, sculpture and painting.
Renaissance: the rules
- Linear one-point perspective: Brunelleschi's demonstration, codified by Alberti in De pictura (1435), with horizon line, vanishing point and commensurable space.
- Humanism and proportion: the body as measure; the central-plan church as geometric ideal.
- Quattrocento Florence under Medici patronage (Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio) versus Cinquecento Rome under papal patronage: Leonardo's sfumato and aerial perspective, Michelangelo's terribilità and non-finito, Raphael's balanced composition; the disegno versus colore debate with Titian.
- Architecture: Bramante's Tempietto, Palladio's villas and I quattro libri (1570). In Spain the Plateresque gives way to Juan de Herrera's desornamentado El Escorial (1563-1584); La Lonja de Zaragoza (1541-1551, Juan de Sariñena) is the Aragonese civil Renaissance.
Baroque: the rhetoric
- Tenebrism and raking light (Caravaggio), diagonal composition, open form, theatrical staging.
- Bernini's marble as flesh and Borromini's undulating geometry; quadratura ceilings; the church interior as a total work of art.
- Dutch realism (Rembrandt, Vermeer) runs in parallel, not as a deviation. In Aragón, Herrera el Mozo's Baroque façade for El Pilar (from 1681) and Ventura Rodríguez's Neoclassical Santa Capilla inside it show styles layered in one building.
Worked example
Raphael's School of Athens and Caravaggio's Calling of Saint Matthew both stage a group in a room. Raphael uses central perspective with the vanishing point between Plato and Aristotle, a stable and legible hierarchy: persuasion through clarity. Caravaggio uses an unseen light source, a diagonal beam, dark ground and contemporary dress: persuasion through shock and identification. Same problem, how to convince, opposite rhetoric.
Traps
- Baroque means exaggerated is not an answer; specify the mechanism of light, diagonal or scale.
- Confusing tenebrism with ordinary chiaroscuro.
- Attributing El Escorial to one architect: Juan Bautista de Toledo began it, Herrera completed it.
- Assuming medieval churches were dark; Gothic interiors were painted and coloured.