It is hard to answer when exactly the Renaissance started. No one at the time classified pieces of art as if they knew one day it would be defined as renaissance art. However, generally speaking, the renaissance occurred around the 15th and 16th century. The Renaissance is known for being the rebirth and led the europeans into a more modern era. This is when the idea of Humanism became very popular. Humanism is basically all about liberal arts and people loved to explore the world of philosophy, literature, and art such as paintings and sculptures. Florence was one of the main cities that influenced the world of art. Florence was financially prospering due to their business in taking sheeps' wool and turning it into cloth. It was because they had so much money that many citizens were able to afford hiring artists to paint or sculpt various different things.
Most if not all art from that time period was religious. Citizens were illiterate so the churches would hire artists to illustrate stories from the Bible and this is how people would learn Jesus. Paintings started out very stiff. There was no light sources or shadings and the people looked very 2 dimensional. The renaissance led art to look more natural and life-like. Artists started focussing more on the human body and how it exists in an environment. They also began creating landscapes that had greater depth and a strong sense of perspective.
Artists and architects at this time were greatly influenced by Roman and Greek culture. Paintings and sculptures showed the subjects in either a nude fashion or wearing robes. They were interested in in idea of idealism so they made their subjects very fit and with attractive facial features. An example of this is seen in the Renaissance painting “Doni Tondo”. This painting was created by the revolutionary artist Michelangelo. The scene shows Virgin Mary in the process of taking baby Jesus from Joseph. In the background, the viewer can recognize John the Baptist and beyond him are nude males interacting with each other.
This piece was made for a couple who were at the time struggling to have kids. The couple had lossed four babies. During that time period there was a lot of talk on what would happen to the babies in the afterlife that were not yet baptized before they died. The religion came up with the answer that these unbaptized babies would not go to hell but rather a neutral place called limbo where they would stay until Christ’s resurrection (The Nudes in Limbo, 156). Jesus on that day would bring the babies back to life and they would take the form of themselves at thirty-three years of ages. This was considered to be the perfect age because Jesus was thirty-three years old when he died. So in order to allude to this idea, Michelangelo painted the number of babies the couple loss to give them a piece of mind that they are not suffering. He painted them naked because Michelangelo was inspired by Greek and Roman art which captures “the perfection of the human body” (The Nudes in Limbo, 179). Michelangelo wanted to do more studies on the male figure.
There are many other paintings, sculptures, and mosaics that mimic the same ideas with the same influences. It shows how inspiration can come from anywhere and a single idea can last a lifetime in the art that has yet to come.
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