Renaissance Artists

1. Renaissance Artists From artisan to artist

2. Before the Renaissance... • During Medieval times, artists were considered craftspersons, or artisans—no different from a shoe maker, bricklayer,or baker,working for low wages. • Medieval artists did what they were paid to do and never thought of signing their work! • The low status of sculptors & painters before the Renaissance was evident from the unions or guilds to which they belonged. Sculptors belonged to the Guild of Masons (mason: a person who builds or works with brick or stone). Painters belonged to the Guild of Doctors & Apothecaries (apothecary: druggist or pharmacist) because they got their painting supplies from them.

3. A change of status for artists • The humanists discovered that the ancient Greeks & Romans had great respect for artists & architects. • The rediscovered manuscripts also described forgotten artistic techniques • Artists began to takecredit for their work and they received more pay. • Sometimes they ignored their patron's directions

4. Sandro Botticelli painted himself in the above painting, called Adoration of the Magi.

5. The Renaissance was a self-conscious age! • Prominent men and important families commissioned portraits and busts of themselves. • They were interested in themselves, their social standing, and their own special personalities. • This is the OPPOSITE of the people of medieval times - they would have been shocked! • The Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini & His Wife • By Jan Van Eyck

6. Portrait painting • With the increased interest in self, came an increased emphasis on realism in art. • Medieval painters had paid little attention to realistic detail ... You could tell the figures were human but didn't look like anyone in particular ... Kinda like symbols. • Renaissance painters wanted the figures in their portraits to have distinct facial expressions ... Revealing emotions that the viewer could understand. They wanted them to look like they lived & breathed. They wanted their pictures to be DRAMATIC!

7. Renaissance • Medieval

8. The Natural World • Renaissance painters began to pay attention to the natural world. Most medieval art had been made for churches. • They wanted paintings to look lively & more like the world around them. • They wanted their art to show off their skill & creativity. • One artist who made one of the most important advances on the road to more realistic depiction of life was Brunelleschi who worked in Florence & Rome in the early 15th century. • He was inspired by an essay by ancient Roman writer, Vitruvius, who described buildings and other objects painted on flat surface made to "advance & recede." It would make the painting look more realistic and almost 3-dimensional.

9. The Rediscovery of Perspective • Perspective: a technique that allows artists to show objects as they appear at various distances from the viewer, with distant objects shown smaller & nearby objects larger. • Brunelleschi's Dome of • the Florence Cathedral • Perspective used to paint "School of Athens" by Raphael

10. Renaissance painters: going forward by looking backward • They were now able to place realistic figures in realistic backgrounds. • They began to create spaces so realistic that viewers felt they could step through the painting into the world depicted.

11. Golden Ratio Leonardo Fibonacci came up with a sequence of numbers that, when squared, could be tiled like so: Can you see the pattern? 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…

12. Mona Lisa Revisited • Renaissance men like Leonardo Da Vinci were obsessed with symmetry in nature. • http://io9.com/5985588/15-uncanny-examples-of-the-golden-ratio-in-nature