Transcript Renaissance overview lecture

• 1300-1500
• Characterized by creativity, interest in
learning, and a desired to explore the
human experience
• Renaissance (Ren) means “rebirth”
• A rebirth of “poetry, rhetoric, painting,
sculpture, architecture, music…
• Italian City-States: birthplace of the
Renaissance
• Reasons:
• Contact with the Arab world – Islamic Empires
• New interest in the culture of Rome
• Cities of Italy survived the Middle Ages
– Florence, Milan, Venice, Genoa, etc
• Wealthy and powerful merchant
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Trade and manufacturing
Contributed to politics and economics
Leadership
Stressed education and individual achievements
• Florence and the Medici’s
– Symbolize Italian Renaissance
– 1400s- Medici family organized successful
banking business expanded
– Controlled city government
• Cosimo de Medici
• Lorenzo “the Magnificent”
What was the Renaissance?
• Time of creativity and change in:
• Political, social, economic and cultural
• Worldview
• Renewed interest in classical times (Greece, Rome)
• Saw disorder and disunity of middle ages
• Emphasis on individual achievement instead of
group
• Humanism
– Focused on worldly subjects rather than on
the religious issues that had occupied
medieval thinkers
– Pious Christians hoped to use Wisdoms of
ancients to increase understanding of their
own times
– Return to classical education- Humanists
• Francesco Petrarch
– Wrote sonnets
– Leading Renaissance writers
• Golden Age
– Painting, sculpture and architecture
• Humanist concerns
• Portrayed religious figures
• Art
– Jesus and Mary
• Set figures against Greek or Roman backgrounds
• Portraits of well known patrons
– period in art history started in Italy in the late 13th
century
– represented a revival of the arts
– complete change in how artists would depict the
visible world around them.
– spread throughout Western Europe
– last until the late 1500’s.
• Some notable aspects of this art movement were:
• Oil paint was first used to replace egg tempera as the major art
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medium of the time.
Ideas of Ancient Rome were adapted into many art works in Italy.
More daily life activities were depicted in Dutch paintings.
• A partial list of artists involved during this period
includes:
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Hieronymous Bosch
Sandro Botticelli
Leonardo Da Vinci
Donatello
Albrecht Durer
El Greco
Michelangelo
Van Eyck
Raphael