Renaissance Art and Architecture

The French were slow to accept the innovations that had taken place in the arts in Italy. During the early 16th century an adoption of Renaissance forms came about, through the hiring of many Italian artists to work at the court of King Francis I. Leonardo da Vinci was brought to France in 1516 by Francis, but the great genius was old, and he died there before he could produce any works of significance. The work at the Palace of Fontainebleau became the focal point of French Renaissance art.

Painting in Germany had an illustrious tradition during the Renaissance, thanks to several dominating artistic personalities. German art retained close connections with its Gothic past, but many artists were able to fuse their medieval heritage to the newer developments. Konrad Witz was among the first. Part of a large altarpiece, the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, also known as Christ Walking on the Waters (1444, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva), is a vivid landscape with specific references to such elements of the Swiss countryside as the Alps, and it exhibits Witz's awareness of recent Flemish painting. Germany, however, was slow to accept Italian solutions. German artists did take the lead in the development of the art of printmaking, as well as book publishing, both of which flourished throughout this period.

A consummate painter and graphic master, Albrecht Dürer almost single-handedly brought Germany into the mainstream of Renaissance art. A child prodigy, Dürer was first trained as a goldsmith, but he soon set himself up as a painter and an engraver in his native Nürnberg. His magnificent graphic series, the three versions of the Passion and the Life of the Virgin, spread his style throughout Europe. He was much taken with perspective and understood the science in all its complexity. Dürer was understandably drawn to Italy, which he visited twice, once in 1494 and again from 1505 to 1507. He was closely associated with humanists and philosophers and made prints on allegorical and classical subjects as well as on religious themes. Dürer traveled a good deal during his lifetime; on a memorable trip to Flanders and the Netherlands from 1520 to 1521, he kept an illustrated diary, still preserved. Like many of his Italian contemporaries, Dürer had a theoretical strain of mind and wrote Four Books on Human Proportions (published posthumously 1528). He used the Italian interpretation of antique figural types, rather than studying them directly from ancient sources, in order to achieve his own full, fleshy figures, which are, however, always slightly jagged and harsh. No artist of the time had a more fertile imagination, as is demonstrated by such engravings as Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) and Melencolia I (1514). The greatest humanist of northern Europe, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (whose image Dürer engraved), gave Dürer the highest praise by calling him the “Apelles of black lines,” in reference to the famous Greek painter of the 4th century bc.

Dürer's paintings are often crowded with images, rich in detail, and strongly colored; an example is the Adoration of the Trinity (1508-1511, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). His self-portraits figure prominently in this oeuvre. Among his late pictures, the Four Apostles (1526?, Alte Pinakothek), painted on twin panels, has the simplified grandeur of the Italians, combined with an intensity of expression that typifies art north of the Alps.

Whereas Dürer was a devoted modernist, committed to the new forms and ideas he found in Italy, his contemporary Matthias Gothart-Niethart, called Grünewald, continued in a more medieval current. In this context, Grünewald produced one of the most astonishing works of the entire period, the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512?-1515, Musée d'Unterlinden, Colmar, France), an enormous polyptych with two layers of painted panels that fold back to reveal an elaborate carved central shrine. The main scene of the outer panels, the Crucifixion, is unforgettably grim, with a dead, horribly contorted Christ observed by the mourning Virgin Mary, Saint John the Evangelist, Saint John the Baptist as witness, and Mary Magdalene, all racked with grief and set in a barren, desolate landscape. In his haunting, highly original art, Grünewald seems to have achieved a form of Mannerism without ever having been exposed to the Italian High Renaissance.

In Spain, painters during the Renaissance never fully achieved the modernity found in northern Europe and Italy, although their art was almost totally dependent on these two traditions. The Spanish always imported painters and sculptors for most of their important decorative work. Even in the 16th century, Titian was the leading painter of the Spanish court, although he was not actually present there. In architecture, a fully Renaissance structure was not built until late in the century. Near Madrid, the architects of Philip II built El Escorial, combining a monastery, a seminary, a palace, and a church. Although indebted to Italian High Renaissance style, the austere majesty and complete lack of ornamentation of this structure mark a new style in Spanish architecture.

See also Architecture; Dome; Drawing; Fresco; Illuminated Manuscripts; Metalwork; Miniature Painting; Mural Painting; Oil Painting; Painting; Perspective; Prints and Printmaking; Sculpture; Still Life; Tempera Painting; Watercolor Painting.