High Renaissance Art in Italy

This course examines what set the High Renaissance apart through selected works of its most well-known masters: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Raphael, and others. Art historians make the distinction between the Early Renaissance of the fifteenth century in Italy and what is called the High Renaissance of the sixteenth century, or the cinquecento as the time period is conventionally known in Italian. The sixteenth century has earned this superlative by what has been quantified as the perfection of pursuits which had begun the century prior- illusionistic perspective, trompe l’oeil works of art, foreshortening, atmospheric perspective, the revival of Classical antiquity in its many forms- although there are appreciable differences between the art of the early sixteenth century and the later sixteenth century, when different political and patronage climates gave birth to entirely new developments, styles which we call Mannerism and the Baroque, which will be the subjects of future courses. Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Titian were all artists who were able to integrate the highest level of pre-existing artistic achievement with their own original invenzioni grounded in the imitation of natural forms which they had observed and contemplated first-hand. Many of these master-painters were also master-engineers, inventors, and experimenters whose distinctive artworks quickly became the new standard for academic and courtly art across the European continent. The High Renaissance is acknowledged as the time when the refinement of artistic theory- linear perspective and the canon of proportions in particular- reached its most harmonious and naturalistic forms. Drawing on original, unpublished material as well as immediately-recognizable masterpieces, this course takes a look at the age's new observation of nature and original innovations in both large-scale frescoes and oil-on-canvas.