Renaissance Art

Renaissance and Rebirth

Despite its origins in Italy, the term that we use to describe this period, Renaissance, is the French word for “rebirth.” The earliest codified usage is believed to be found in the first volume of Honore de Balzac's Scenes From Private Life, The Ball at Sceaux of 1829, and it was subsequently codified in Jules Michelet's The Renaissance of 1855 and in Jacob Burckhardt's German work The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy of 1860. The Italian word is rinascita, used as early as Giorgio Vasari's account of Renaissance art, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Vasari listed three ages of the Italian Renaissance: first, the earliest stirrings in the works of the late Duecento (1200s) and the Trecento (1300s)—such as that of Cimabue, Giotto, Duccio, and the Pisanos; second, the early mature works of the Quattrocento Renaissance (1400s)—such as that of Brunelleschi, Donatello, Massaccio, Alberti, Verrocchio, and Mantegna; and third, the culmination of the Renaissance in works of the late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento (1500s)—such as that of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Bramante, Peruzzi, and Vasari himself. This last phase is now known as the High Renaissance, which is followed by Mannerism.

The touchstone for the original concept of a rebirth is Petrarch's 1341 letter to Fra Giovanni Colonna, in which he expressed the sentiment that Rome would enact her own rebirth if she were able to rediscover her true (classical) self. From Petrarch to Vasari, the new humanists conceptualized their rinascita as being a purposeful and successful break from the medieval art that preceded it. They described this art as being of the maniera tedesca (German manner) or the maniera dei Goti (Gothic), and the term Gothic has been in use ever since, carrying the connotation of being “barbaric” or “uncivilized,” as opposed to the classicism reborn of the Renaissance. Scholarship since the Renaissance has essentially accepted the selfdefinition that these humanists devised. There had been a series of what are now called renascences, or brief renaissances of ancient Roman and early Christian classicism throughout the Middle Ages, including the Carolingian renovatio of Charlemagne, the 10thcentury Ottonian Renaissance, and the socalled Tuscan protoRenaissance of the 11th and 12th centuries (typified by the church of San Minato al Monte in Florence), not to mention the period now known as the Romanesque, which was, quite literally, Romanesque. Erwin Panofsky's introduction to his Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance of 1939 reveals the degree to which 20thcentury scholars still accepted this humanist selfidentity. In this introduction, Panofsky first formulates his famous dictum that although there were examples of classical survivals throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, classical motifs were divorced from classical themes. That is to say, a medieval classical motif was not employed to express classical themes, and when a classical theme was communicated, a nonclassical motif was used. Thus, it is not until the Italian Renaissance that classical theme and motif are reunited, and classicism reborn; all other medieval examples are partial survivals as opposed to revivals. This later concept was later further developed, with some correctives, by Aby Warburg and Georges DidiHuberman.

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