Renaissance and Mannerism
The Renaissance and Mannerism question asks you to date and place works c. 1400-1600, to explain the intellectual programme (humanism, antique revival, linear perspective) and to distinguish Quattrocento from Cinquecento, Florence from Venice, Italy from the North, and Mannerism from both.
Quattrocento Florence
- Brunelleschi: Florence Cathedral dome (herringbone brick, double shell, no centring), Ospedale degli Innocenti, the Baptistery mirror perspective experiment.
- Masaccio's Trinity (c. 1427): one-point perspective, vanishing point at the viewer's eye level, barrel vault, donors kneeling outside the sacred space.
- Alberti's De pictura (1435) theorises the picture as a window and the istoria as narrative.
- Donatello's bronze David: first freestanding nude since antiquity, contrapposto, ambiguous iconography.
Cinquecento
- Leonardo: sfumato, atmospheric depth, the Last Supper as psychological drama along the table.
- Michelangelo: terribilità, non-finito, Sistine ceiling, figura serpentinata in the Medici Chapel.
- Raphael: School of Athens, balanced composition, classical architecture, psychological portraiture.
- Bramante's Tempietto and the St Peter's plan debate (central versus longitudinal).
- Venice: colorito over disegno, Titian's Assumption, Bellini, Giorgione's Tempest.
North and Mannerism
- Van Eyck: Ghent Altarpiece, Arnolfini portrait - oil technique, convex mirror, microscopic detail, disguised symbolism.
- Dürer, Bosch, Bruegel: print culture, moralising landscape, the peasant as subject.
- Mannerism: Parmigianino's Madonna of the Long Neck, Pontormo's Deposition, El Greco; acid colour, spatial ambiguity, elegance over rule.
Worked example. A fresco shows a coffered barrel vault receding to a single vanishing point, God the Father supporting the cross, the dove between them, Mary and John flanking, two donors kneeling on a ledge below. Reasoning: the vanishing point sits at the ledge, roughly the height of a standing viewer, so the fresco continues the real space of the nave; the Trinity is arranged in descending tiers of sacredness; the donors occupy the earthly register outside the fictive chapel. Identify as Masaccio, Santa Maria Novella, c. 1427.
Traps. Saying Van Eyck invented oil painting (he perfected it); confusing Mannerism with Baroque; defining sfumato as merely smoky without explaining tone transitions; equating High Renaissance with photographic realism; ignoring the patron and original site; citing Vasari as neutral fact.