Transcript Most important works: Sistine Chapel ceiling

Lecture 7
Renaissance men
What is a Renaissance man?
• A renaissance man or polymath is a person who
is talented (skilled) in multiple fields, and who is
very cultured and has a broad base of knowledge.
• In the actual Renaissance period, men who were
educated aspired to become Renaissance men.
They were expected to know several languages,
understand philosophy and scientific teachings,
appreciate literature and art, and further, to be
deft sportsmen. Such emphasis was inspired by
earlier periods, and for the first time, scholars
had access to many of the Greek philosophers
and writers whose work had been lost for
centuries. (There were few Renaissance women,
since routinely, women were not educated. (
Leonardo Da Vinci
• Perhaps the
quintessential
renaissance man of
this period was
Leonardo Da Vinci,
who was a master of
art, an engineer, an
anatomy expert, and
also pursued many
other disciplines with
great success.
Biographical Information:
• Born on April 15, 1452
• Born as the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da
Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci
in the region of Florence.
• He moved a lot during his childhood.
• At the age of 14, Leonardo was apprenticed to
one of the most successful artists of his day,
Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio.
• Leonardo had the opportunity to learn drafting,
chemistry, metal working, plaster casting, leather
working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the
artistic skills of drawing, painting, and sculpting.
The Baptism of Christ
A painting by
Leonardo and his
master Verrocchio
showing the act of
Baptism of Jesus
Christ. (First
official work)
Most important paintings
1. The Last Supper:
Jesus and his disciples
”one of you shall betray me”
The Mona Lisa
Details about the painting:
• it is regarded as the most famous painting in the
world, and is visited by many thousands of people
every year.
• Leonardo has used a technique known as Sfumato the blurring of sharp edges by blending colours - to
leave the corners of the eyes and the mouth in
shadow. It is this technique that makes the Mona
Lisa's expression ambiguous.
• The background of the painting has been made to
look more hazy, with fewer distinct outlines than the
foreground. This technique is known as aerial
perspective, and Leonardo was one of the first
painters to use it to give his paintings more depth.
• A lot of interpretations have been given to the
portrait whether it belongs to someone or it is a selfportrait.
Not only an artist …
• Leonardo also developed an intense interest
in non-artistic subjects. He worked as a civil
and military engineer and mapmaker for
Cesare Borgia, where he applied his growing
knowledge of mechanics. He used
engineering in achievements like the flying
machine, the control of the water supply, the
construction of engines of war.
• He immersed himself in fields as diverse as
anatomy, biology, mathematics, and physics.
• Leonardo made discoveries in meteorology
and geology, learned the effect of the moon
on the tides, foreshadowed modern theories
of the formation of continents, and deduced
the nature of fossil shells. He invented a
large number of potentially useful and
ingenious machines and devices, among
them an underwater diving suit.
"The heavens often rain down the richest gifts
on human beings, but sometimes they
bestow with lavish abundance upon a single
individual beauty, grace and ability, so that
whatever he does, every action is so divine
that he distances all other men, and clearly
displays how his greatness is a gift of God
and not an acquirement of human art. Men
saw this in Leonardo."
Georgio Vasari
Michelangelo
• Italian Renaissance painter,
sculptor, architect, poet and
engineer.
• Perfectionist, always
criticizing his works and
finding flaws within them. He
was continuously dissatisfied
with his creations.
• Concentration on the details
of the human body (daring for
the Middle Ages).
• Idealization of masculinity
(homosexual)
Most important works:
• Sistine Chapel ceiling
• Paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine
Chapel.
A work representing creation, the Downfall
of Man and the Promise of Salvation
through the prophets and Genealogy of
Christ.
The most famous paintings on the ceiling
include the Creation of Adam, Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Great
Flood, the Prophet Isaiah and others.
The Sistine Chapel Ceiling
Nicolaus Copernicus
Achievements:
*
He discovered that the sun NOT the earth
is at the center of the universe.
Before the Copernican heliocentric, the
world believed in the Ptolematic geocentric
theory which stated that the universe was a
closed space. The Ptolematic theory said
that the earth at the center of the universe.
This theory fed man’s ego because in it
man sat at the center of the earth and the
earth sat at the center of heavens. Man was
made by God and in this image, he was the
next thing to God.
**Copernicus’ theory led man to think that
he is simply part of nature and not superior
to it.
Reaction to his theory:
A man called Andreas Osiander was
frightened by the scientific ideas it
expressed. He wrote a letter to the
reader in place of Copernicus’s original
preface in which he merely presented a
simpler way to calculate the positions
of the heavenly bodies. To this,
Copernicus was shocked because he
was sure of his theory. At that time, he
suffered a stroke and dies on 24th May
1543.
Galileo Galilei
• Copernicus set the scene for major advances
in science, he marked the beginning of the
scietific revolution. Before him science was a
servant to the church but he took the first
step to change that.
• Galileo comes afterwards to confirm
Copernicus’ theory. He even goes beyond
that as he provides evidence.
• Same problem: at the time the church, which
was very powerful and influential in his time,
strongly supported the theory of a
geocentric, or Earth-centered, universe. After
Galileo began publishing papers about his
astronomy discoveries, he was accused of
being a heretic, a person who violates the
Church teachings.
Another opposition:
• He opposed the classical theory of
Aristotle that stated that heavier
objects fall more quickly than lighter
ones. Galileo said that Aristotle was
wrong and that no matter what the
difference in weight, two heavy objects
will fall simultaneously at the same
speed.
Christopher Columbus
• He was an Italian
navigator, colonizer
and explorer whose
voyages across the
Atlantic Ocean led
to general
European
awareness of the
American
continents.
• One of the major
developments of
the Renaissance is
that it gave chance
for the discovery
for new parts of the
world.
Amerigo Vespucci
Amerigo Vespucci
• The successful voyages of Christopher
Columbus increased Vespucci's desire
to take a part in the general European
movement to seek a western passage
to the Indies.
• He was the first person to demonstrate
that the New World discovered by
Christopher Columbus in 1492 was not
the eastern appendage of Asia, but
rather a previously-unknown "fourth"
continent. (America; named after him)
Giovanni Boccaccio
• One of the earliest
Renaissance men.
• Born in Paris in 1313
to an Italian Merchant
and a French noble
women. )illegitimate
son)
• Studied the poems of
Dante in 1373.
IL Decameron
• His most important work
• In it he breaks away from the Italian literary
tradition and presents something new.
• For the first time, Boccacio presented man
as the shaper of his own destiny, rather than
being at the mercy of the Divine grace. That’s
why he’s considered a revolutionary writer of
his time.
• He raised the vernacular to the level of the
classics. (wrote in Italian)
• He made a dictionary of Classical Mythology.
Dante Alighieri
The Divine Comedy:
• His masterpiece
• The Divine comedy is a story divides into
tree main sections: the poet’s journey
through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven.
• Through his masterpiece he established the
Tuscan dialect as the literary language of
Italy.
• Dante argued for the use of the vernacular in
serious works of literature and for combining
a number of Italian dialects to create a
national language.