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129. Piero di Cosimo, Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, c. 1485. Oil on panel, 57 × 42 cm. Musée Condé, Chantilly (France).

Here is one of the artist’s finest portraits. Simonetta Vespucci is depicted as Cleopatra with the asp around her neck. The snake, also being a symbol of immortality, reinforces the strange atmosphere of this work.

Several momentous events mark 1453 as an historical dividing line: the French finally expelled the English to end the Hundred Years War; Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks, extinguishing the last vestiges of the old Roman Empire and establishing Rome as the capital of Christendom; and in art, the Renaissance was in full bloom after synthesising the innovations of the previous two centuries, symbolically concluding the old order of things from Late Antiquity.

As the name suggests, the Renaissance was a re-birth – in this case a re-birth of Classical ideals. Ideologically, Renaissance humanism attempted to reconcile ancient learning with Christian traditions, thus renewing interest in the writings of Ancient authors. The Islamic world had preserved much ancient knowledge, particularly of the Greeks, and these texts were now translated into Latin. Built on the ruins of Antiquity, Italy was the centre of Renaissance thought. Along with the renewed interest in the Antique came an evolution in attitudes towards the body, as Augustinian condemnation of the body yielded before the beauty of ancient nudes. The eroticism of classical myth also shaped this revival.

Among the most famous of Renaissance artists was Botticelli who, under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici of Florence, sometimes based his elegantly idealised nudes on specific antique statues and often painted humanistic subjects. His famous Birth of Venus, while ostensibly a high-minded humanist allegory, focused on a provocative representation of the nude goddess of love. High Renaissance artists of the next century went even further. Michelangelo developed an ideal of muscular masculine beauty that survives even today. The Dying Slave for the tomb of Pope Julius II seems not to be in bondage as was intended, but to be languorously revelling in sexual ecstasy. In Venice, Titian created a parallel ideal of feminine beauty with his reclining nudes, particularly the coy Venus of Urbino.

The rest of Europe developed on a slightly different course. Late medieval stylistic traditions lingered, but artists still used erotic subjects. The Flemish artist Bosch painted visionary images based on religious themes, and managed to make sin look worth the punishment in The The Garden of Earthly Delights, where nude figures frolic and indulge themselves sexually and sensually in a fantastic, dream-like landscape. German artist Dürer brought Italian ideas to northern Europe. Often called the “Leonardo of the North,” Dürer’s scientific interests paralleled those of Italian humanists. His nudes often bore an unexpected mix of Italian idealism and northern realism. Dürer’s artistic revolution was simultaneous with the Reformation, which perhaps had a greater ultimate impact on art and society than Renaissance humanism.

By the 1520s, High Renaissance idealism had evolved into Mannerism. The refined court culture of Europe provided an educated audience for an art appealing to complex and sophisticated tastes. Mannerist artists such as Bronzino employed exquisite artifice in works such as Allegory with Venus and Cupid – a subject so complex and mysterious that its intended meaning is still uncertain. What is clear is the obvious, the transgressive eroticism of a nude Venus in a sexual embrace with her own son. Mannerist artists commonly used eroticism as a means to increase the complexity of their work. With sexuality and erotic bodies on such open display, a reaction was probably inevitable. The Catholic Church responded militantly to the rise of Protestantism with the Counter-Reformation and re-asserted traditional Church doctrines – including strictures against nudity and sexual expression. The Renaissance adulation of the body seemed to have reached an end.

130. Jean Fouquet, The Virgin and Child Surrounded by Angels (detail from the Melun Diptych), c. 1450–1460. Oil on canvas, 94 × 85 cm. Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, Antwerp (Belgium).

The particularity of this painting is due to its geometric composition, set in a convex pentagon often used by Fouquet. The volume given accentuates the sculptural aspect of this Virgin whose face was inspired by Agnes Sorel (the mistress of Charles VII). The diptych assembles the portrait of a Virgin with the one of the patrons in prayer in front of his protector saint.

Jean FOUQUET

(Tours, 1420–1481)

A painter and illuminator, Jean Fouquet is regarded as the most important French painter of the fifteenth century. Little is known about his life but it is quite sure that he executed, in Italy, the portrait of Pope Eugenius IV. Upon his return to France, he introduced Italian Renaissance elements into French painting. He was the court painter to Louis XI. Whether he worked on miniatures rendering the finest detail, or on larger scale in panel paintings, Fouquet’s art had the same monumental character. His figures are modelled in broad planes defined by lines of magnificent purity.

131. Dirk Bouts, Virgo Lactans, c. 1460. Illustration, 29 × 20 cm. Museo Correr, Venice (Italy).

132. Hugo Van der Goes, Diptych: The Fall of Man and the Lamentation, c. 1470–1475. Tempera on wood, 32.3 × 21.9 cm. Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (Austria). Contemporary of Piero della Francesca, Van der Goes is resolute to depict reality while using refined colours. His painting is more and more illusionist here and betrays the artist’s like for details and depiction of light.

133. Antonello da Messina, St Sebastian, 1476. Panel transposed on canvas, 171 × 85 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Dresden (Germany).

Antonello da MESSINA

(Messina, 1430–1479)

If little is known about his life, the name of Antonello da Messina corresponds to the arrival of a new technique in Italian painting; oils. He used them especially in his portraits where they were very popular in his day, such as Portrait of a Man (1475).

Now, if this appears to be not exactly true, still his work influenced Venetian painters. His work was a combination of Flemish technique and realism with typically Italian modelling of forms and clarity of spatial arrangement. Also, his practice of building form with colour, rather than line and shade, greatly influenced the subsequent development of Venetian painting.

134. Andrea Mantegna, St Sebastian, c. 1455–1460. Tempera on panel, 68 × 30 cm. Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna (Austria).

Andrea MANTEGNA

(Isola di Carturo, 1431 – Mantua, 1506)

Mantegna; humanist, geometrist, archaeologist, of great scholastic and imaginative intelligence, dominated the whole of northern Italy by virtue of his imperious personality. Aiming at optical illusion, he mastered perspective. He trained in painting at the Padua School where Donatello and Paolo Uccello had previously attended. Even at a young age commissions for Andrea’s work flooded in, for example the frescos of the Ovetari Chapel of Padua.

In a short space of time Mantegna found his niche as a modernist due to his highly original ideas and the use of perspective in his works. His marriage with Nicolosia Bellini, the sister of Giovanni, paved the way for his entrée into Venice.

Mantegna reached an artistic maturity with his Pala San Zeno. He remained in Mantua and became the artist for one of the most prestigious courts in Italy – the Court of Gonzaga. Classical art was born.

Despite his links with Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna refused to adopt their innovative use of colour or leave behind his own technique of engraving.

135. Andrea Mantegna, St Sebastian, c. 1475–1485. Tempera on canvas, 275 × 142 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris (France).

136. Ercole de’ Roberti, The Month of September: The Love between Mars and Venus (detail), c. 1470. Fresco. Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara (Italy). The pyramidal composition and the attention paid to the quality of the drawing are characteristic of the Florentine researches at the time.

137. Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Martyrdom of St Sebastian, 1475. Oil on poplar, 291.5 × 202.6 cm. The National Gallery, London (United Kingdom).

138. Hans Memling, Vanity (central panel of the Triptych of Terrestrial Vanity and Celestial Redemption), c. 1490. Oil on wood, 20 × 13 cm. Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg (France).

Hans MEMLING

(Seligenstadt, 1433 – Bruges, 1494)

Little is known of Memling’s life. It is surmised that he was a German by descent but the definite fact of his life is that he painted at Bruges, sharing with the Van Eycks, who had also worked in that city, the honour of being the leading artists of the so-called ‘School of Bruges’. He carried on their method of painting, and added to it a quality of gentle sentiment. In his case, as in theirs, Flemish art, founded upon local conditions and embodying purely local ideals, reached its fullest expression.

139. Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi), Primavera, c. 1478. Tempera on panel, 203 × 314 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Italy).

The painting, sometimes called Primavera, but now and again also Realm of Venus, is Botticelli’s most celebrated masterpiece. This work is one in a series of paintings depicting heathen myths and legends in the form of antique gods and heroes. Just as convincingly and naively, and with the same enthusiasm, Botticelli makes the beauty of the naked human body his task. In the large presentation of Primavera he does indeed describe an antique subject, stipulated by his clients and advisers, but he penetrates it with his mind, his imagination and his artistic sense. The composition is built up in nine, almost life-size figures in the foreground of an orange grove. The individual figures are borrowed from Poliziano’s poem about the great tournament in the spring of 1475, the Giostra, in which Giuliano was declared the winner. The artistic appearance of Primavera which, apart from the dull old layer of varnish, is well preserved, deviates from most of Botticelli’s paintings in so far as that the local colours are rather secondary. This is how the artist tried to bring out the full beauty of the figures’ bodies, which, apart from Venus and Primavera, are more or less naked. He enhances this with the deep green background, covered with flowers and fruit. There, where local colours occur to a greater extent as, for example, in the short red robe of Mercury, the pale blue decoration of the god of wind or the blue dress and red cloak of Venus in the middle, the colours have been strongly tinted with gold ornaments and glaze.

Sandro BOTTICELLI (Alessandro di MARIANO FILIPEPI)

(Florence, 1445–1510)

He was the son of a citizen in comfortable circumstances, and had been, in Vasari’s words, “instructed in all such things as children are usually taught before they choose a calling.” However, he refused to give his attention to reading, writing and accounts, continues Vasari, so that his father, despairing of his ever becoming a scholar, apprenticed him to the goldsmith Botticello: whence came the name by which the world remembers him. However, Sandro, a stubborn-featured youth with large, quietly searching eyes and a shock of yellow hair – he has left a portrait of himself on the right-hand side of his picture of the Adoration of the Magi – would also become a painter, and to that end was placed with the Carmelite monk Fra Filippo Lippi. But he was a realist, as the artists of his day had become, satisfied with the joy and skill of painting, and with the study of the beauty and character of the human subject instead of religious themes. Botticelli made rapid progress, loved his master, and later on extended his love to his master’s son, Filippino Lippi, and taught him to paint, but the master’s realism scarcely touched Lippi, for Botticelli was a dreamer and a poet.

Botticelli is a painter not of facts, but of ideas, and his pictures are not so much a representation of certain objects as a pattern of forms. Nor is his colouring rich and lifelike; it is subordinated to form, and often rather a tinting than actual colour. In fact, he was interested in the abstract possibilities of his art rather than in the concrete. For example, his compositions, as has just been said, are a pattern of forms; his figures do not actually occupy well-defined places in a well-defined area of space; they do not attract us by their suggestion of bulk, but as shapes of form, suggesting rather a flat pattern of decoration. Accordingly, the lines which enclose the figures are chosen with the primary intention of being decorative.

It has been said that Botticelli, “though one of the worst anatomists, was one of the greatest draughtsmen of the Renaissance.” As an example of false anatomy we may notice the impossible way in which the Madonna’s head is attached to the neck, and other instances of faulty articulation and incorrect form of limbs may be found in Botticelli’s pictures. Yet he is recognised as one of the greatest draughtsmen: he gave to ‘line’ not only intrinsic beauty, but also significance. In mathematical language, he resolved the movement of the figure into its factors, its simplest forms of expression, and then combined these various forms into a pattern which, by its rhythmical and harmonious lines, produces an effect upon our imagination, corresponding to the sentiments of grave and tender poetry that filled the artist himself.

This power of making every line count in both significance and beauty distinguishes the great master-draughtsmen from the vast majority of artists who used line mainly as a necessary means of representing concrete objects.

140. Anonymous, Universal Chronology, The Creation of Eve, The Original Sin, Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise, Bruges, c. 1480. National Library of Russia, St Petersburg (Russia).

141. Ambrogio and Cristoforo de Predis, Fountain of Love, c. 1490. Biblioteca Estense, Modena (Italy).

142. Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi), The Birth of Venus, 1484–1486. Tempera on canvas, 180 × 280 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Italy).

The title announces the influence here of the Roman classics, as it selects the Roman name, rather than the Greek name for the goddess of love – Aphrodite. The geometric centre of the work is the gesture of modesty near the left hand of Venus, the central figure, although the triangular arrangement of the overall work leads our eye to accept her upper torso as central. Her long tresses and flowing garments throughout make the overall geometric arrangement soft and dynamic. The sides of an equilateral triangle are formed by the bodies of the figures on either side of Venus; the base of the triangle extends beyond the sides of the work, making the painting seem larger than it is (Piet Mondrian will exploit that technique in a minimalist way centuries later). The mature goddess has just been born from the sea, blown ashore by Zephyr (The West Wind), and his abducted nymph Chloris. The stylised waves of the sea bring the shell-boat forward and counter-clockwise to The Hour waiting on the shore. The sea has somehow already provided a ribbon for her hair. Her introspective expression is typical of the central figures in the painter’s work (See Portrait of a Man (1417)). The Hour, symbolising Spring and rebirth, begins to clothe the naked, new-born goddess with an elegant, high fashion robe covered in flowers, similar to her own gown on which there are corn flowers. Several spring flowers are sprinkled throughout the scene: orange blossoms in the upper right; evergreen myrtle around The Hour’s neck and waist; a single blue anemone between The Hour’s feet; over two dozen pink roses accompany Zephyr and Chloris. Cattails in the lower left balance the strong verticals of the orange trees. Each of the figures is outlined in thin black lines, characteristic of the artist. Sometimes the artist doesn’t follow his outline, but doesn’t cover it up either; as we see along the right arm of Venus, the outline has become visible over the years.

143. Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi), Venus and Mars, c. 1485. Tempera and oil on panel, 69.2 × 173.4 cm. The National Gallery, London (United Kingdom).

144. Pietro Perugino, St Sebastian, c. 1490–1500. Oil on wood, 176 × 116 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris (France).

Pietro PERUGINO

(Citta della Pieve, 1450 – Perugia, 1523)

Perugino’s art, like Fra Angelico’s, had its roots in the old Byzantine tradition of painting. The latter had departed further and further from any representation of the human form, until it became merely a symbol of religious ideas. Perugino, working under the influence of his time, restored body and substance to the figures, but still made them, as of old, primarily the symbols of an ideal. It was not until the seventeenth century that artists began to paint landscape for its own sake.

However, the union of landscape and figures counts very much for Perugino, because one of the secrets of composition is the balancing of what artists call the full and empty spaces. A composition crowded with figures is apt to produce a sensation of stuffiness and fatigue; whereas the combination of a few figures with ample open spaces gives one a sense of exhilaration and repose. It is in the degree to which an artist stimulates our imagination through our physical experiences that he seizes and holds our interest. When Perugino left Perugia to complete his education in Florence he was a fellow-pupil of Leonardo da Vinci in the sculptor’s bottegha. If he gained from the master something of the calm of sculpture, he certainly gained nothing of its force. It is as the painter of sentiment that he excelled; though this beautiful quality is confined mainly to his earlier works. For with popularity he became avaricious, turning out repetitions of his favourite themes until they became more and more affected in sentiment.

145. Hans Memling, King David Spies on Bathsheba, 1485–1500. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (Germany).

146. Lorenzo di Credi, Venus, c. 1493. Oil on panel, 151 × 69 cm. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence (Italy).

147. Andrea Mantegna, St Sebastian, c. 1495–1505. Tempera on canvas, 210 × 91 cm. Galleria Franchetti, Ca’ d’Oro, Venice (Italy).

148. Pier Jacopo Alari-Bonacolsi, known as Antico, Apollo, end of the 15th century. Bronze and silver, h: 54.6 cm. Ca’ d’Oro, Venice (Italy).

The sculptor Pier Jacopo Alara-Bonacolsi was called “Antico” because of the references to antique sculpture found in his work. He would have not only seen Greek and Roman statues that had recently been rediscovered and curated, but he also made copies of them and even worked on the restoration of some pieces. Classical subjects and forms inform his work. He is best known for small bronzes such as this one of the archer Apollo, a god of the Greek pantheon. Like some of the bronze statues that survive from Antiquity, Antico’s bronze are often accented with other metals, such as silver in the eyes or gilding on details. Here, Apollo’s cloak, sandals, and his golden hair are gilded, providing a decorative contrast to the duller bronze of the body. Antico took advantage of the technology of his chosen medium and sometimes cast not only the original figurine, but also copies. There are three known versions of this piece.

149. Michelangelo (Michelangelo Buonarroti), Bacchus, 1496–1497. Marble, h: 203 cm. Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence (Italy).

150. Michelangelo (Michelangelo Buonarroti), David, 1501–1504. Marble, h: 410 cm. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Florence (Italy).

151. Albrecht Dürer, Four Naked Women (The Four Witches), 1497. Engraving, 19 × 13.1 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (United States).

Albrecht DURER

(Nuremberg, 1471–1528)

Dürer is the greatest of German artists and most representative of the German mind. He, like Leonardo, was a man of striking physical attractiveness, great charm of manner and conversation, and mental accomplishment, being well grounded in the sciences and mathematics of the day. His skill in draughtsmanship was extraordinary; Dürer is even more celebrated for his engravings on wood and copper than for his paintings. With both, the skill of his hand was at the service of the most minute observation and analytical research into the character and structure of form. Dürer, however, had not the feeling for abstract beauty and ideal grace that Leonardo possessed; but instead, a profound earnestness, a closer interest in humanity, and a more dramatic invention. Dürer was a great admirer of Luther; and in his own work is the equivalent of what was mighty in the Reformer. It is very serious and sincere; very human, and addressed the hearts and understanding of the masses. Nuremberg, his hometown, had become a great centre of printing and the chief distributor of books throughout Europe. Consequently, the art of engraving upon wood and copper, which may be called the pictorial branch of printing, was much encouraged. Of this opportunity Dürer took full advantage.

The Renaissance in Germany was more a moral and intellectual than an artistic movement, partly due to northern conditions. The feeling for ideal grace and beauty is fostered by the study of the human form, and this had been flourishing predominantly in southern Europe. But Albrecht Dürer had a genius too powerful to be conquered. He remained profoundly Germanic in his stormy penchant for drama, as was his contemporary Mathias Grünewald, a fantastic visionary and rebel against all Italian seductions. Dürer, in spite of all his tense energy, dominated conflicting passions by a sovereign and speculative intelligence comparable with that of Leonardo. He, too, was on the border of two worlds, that of the Gothic age and that of the modern age, and on the border of two arts, being an engraver and draughtsman rather than a painter.

152. Piero di Cosimo, Venus, Mars and Cupid, c. 1500. Oil on panel, 72 × 182 cm. Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin (Germany).

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