Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The High Renaissance
The decades leading up to and starting the
Cinquecento
(16th century) are often seen as a
kind of university faculty meeting, with genteel, silver-haired sages engaged in a collegial
exchange of ideas. A bar brawl might be closer to the metaphorical truth, with artists, sci-
entists, politicians and clergy mixing it up and everyone emerging bruised. The debate was
never as simple as Church versus state, science versus art or seeing versus believing; in
those days, politicians could be clergy, scientists could be artists, and artists could be
clergy.
There were many artistic superstars during this period, and most were locals who ended
up honing their skills in Florence and then moving elsewhere in Italy. Their careers were
well documented by Giorgio Vasari in his gossipy
Lives of the Artists
(
Click here
)
.
Inspired by Masaccio, tutored by Fra' Filippo Lippi and backed by Lorenzo de' Medici,
Sandro Botticelli was a rising Florentine art star who was sent to Rome to paint a fresco
celebrating papal authority in the Sistine Chapel. The golden boy who'd painted the
Birth
of Venus
for Lorenzo de' Medici's private villa in 1485 (now in Florence's Uffizi Gallery)
could do no wrong until he was accused of sodomy in 1501. The charges didn't stick but
the rumours did, and Botticelli's work was critiqued as too decadently sensual for religious
subjects. When religious reformer Savonarola ousted the Medici and began to purge
Florence of decadent excess in the face of surely imminent Armageddon, Botticelli paint-
ings went up in flames in the massive 'Bonfire of the Vanities'. Botticelli repudiated myth-
ology and turned his attention to Madonnas, some of whom bear a marked family resemb-
lance to his Venus.
Michelangelo was another of Lorenzo de' Medici's protégées, and his classically in-
spired work was uniformly admired until the Medicis were ousted by Savonarola in 1494.
By some accounts, Savonarola tossed rare early paintings by Michelangelo onto his bon-
fires (ouch). Without his Medici protectors, Michelangelo seemed unsure of his next move:
he briefly hid in the basement of San Lorenzo and then roamed around Italy. In Rome he
carved a Bacchus for Cardinal Raffaele Riaro that the patron deemed unsuitable - which
only seemed to spur Michelangelo to make a bigger and still more sensuous statue of
David
in 1501. It's now exhibited in Florence's Galleria dell'Accademia.
Leonardo, who hailed from Vinci, southwest of Florence, had so many talents that it is
hard to isolate only a few for comment. In his painting, he took what some critics have de-
scribed as the decisive step in the history of Western art - namely, abandoning the balance
that had previously been maintained between colour and line and choosing to modulate his
