Artistic Innovations Of Renaissance Florentine Painters Essay

, Research Paper

Charlotte Dean

H2G-06/pd. 3

Mr. Valentin

April 10, 2000

Artistic Innovations of Renaissance Florentine Painters

During the Renaissance, many new, different styles of painting were developed.

Many of these techniques were perfected by Florentine painters. Some of these styles

techniques include perspective, life-like human forms, realistic looking objects and

chiaroscuro. These developments began to form in the early Quattrocento and were slowly

perfected by a long flow of artists. Their influences included new scientific discoveries as

well as new outlooks on religion, life and visual perception of the world.

Perspective was perhaps one of the most significant methods developed and also the

one with the most impact. It is still widely used today. Perspective is a method which is

used to make a three-dimensional space or object appear three-dimensional on a

two-dimensional space. It allows objects to appear closer or further away and gives them

depth. This effect can be achieved by making all of the lines in a painting go towards a

vanishing point on a horizon line. Artists also found that while using a horizon line and

vanishing point, if you made one object in the painting which was identical to another

object, but smaller, the objects would appear to be at different distances from the

viewer.(see fig.1) .During the early Renaissance, as humanism focused attention on man

and human perspective, the viewer assumes the active role. Now, instead of projecting

outward, space recedes from the viewer.s eye into the picture plane..1

The first person to begin using the perspective technique was an artist named Giotto

di Bondone (1267-1337). In an astonishingly short amount of time, Giotto revolutionized

the art of Florence. He is considered by many to be the true father of Renaissance painting.

Since Giotto was from a time before the Renaissance actually began, his style consists of

some methods which later came to be classified as Renaissance, such as perspective and

curvy shapes(see fig.2), as well as some methods which are classified as Gothic, such as

gold paint, large, fancy frames and immense haloes around the heads of all religious

figures(see fig.3). Giotto.s best display of work is in the Arena chapel.

Another contributor to the development of perspective was Filippo Brunelleschi, a

Florentine architect. He discovered that painters could use mathematical laws in planning

their pictures. .This shows an actual point of view through the technique of perspective..2

It was he who officially .discovered. the idea of the horizon line and the vanishing point.

He figured out these mathematical laws using a series of different experiments including the

mirror test. In the mirror test, he would hold up a mirror in front of a building and paint

directly on top of the building.s reflection in the mirror. He would then place another

mirror directly in front of the existing mirror with the painting on it. Since the reflection of

the painting looked the same as the existing building, he knew that his efforts had been

successful.

One of the final artists to perfect the style of perspective painting was Maso di Ser

Giovanni di Mone — Masaccio. Since he lived during a later time period, his paintings

abandoned all use of Gothic style and had strictly Renaissance characteristics. He was one

of the first Renaissance painters to apply Brunelleschi.s laws to his paintings. When he used

these laws in his paintings he was able to create the illusion of space and distance. He was

one of the first artists able to create this illusion by using Giotto.s idea of making a system

of lines head toward a certain focal point. His use of perspective can best be seen in his

work .Trinity..(see fig.4) Masaccio is considered to be one of the greatest masters of

painting.

The second innovation which was developed by a Florentine painter during the

Renaissance was the use of life-like human forms. This painting technique uses curves to

create the illusion of a real person. It is a way of making a human form appear to be

three-dimensional and for its. body to appear to have depth.

One of the .creators. of this new style was Gentile da Fabriano. He died in 1427

and his birth is thought to be around 1370. During the first and second decades of the

1400.s the sculptors totally carried the banner for the new Renaissance style in the

figurative arts in Florence. The painters were largely occupied in making altarpieces for

Florentine churches and chapels, and an occasional fresco, but all in accordance with the

Gothic style.

.This is by no means to say that their works were without quality. Monaco

was a very gifted artist, and many of his minor contemporaries were also

sensitive to the formal coloristic possibilities of the style. But compared

with the four pioneer sculptors, the painters seemed standardiz

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