Greetings friends! My name is Cosimo. Allow me to be your guide to the sights sounds and smells of
the Italian Renaissance. So what is the Italian Renaissance? Well the word: REN-AISS-ANCE is a French word that means rebirth. A rebirth is a new beginning and
a new beginning it was! Between the 14th and 17th centuries some really creative
things started happening in Europe especially in drawing sculpture painting
and architecture. During the 1300s Europe rose out of the
Dark Ages. Bubonic plague was a disease which wiped out a lot of the population.
Italy was perfectly situated between East and West for overseas trade. The cash came rolling in. The country was made up of independent city-states the
city of Florence was ruled by a family of bankers - the Medicis. They used their
vast wealth to sponsor the arts and sciences. The true impact of the
Renaissance could really be seen in the visual arts: new styles and techniques
emerged; the influence of geometry and mathematics could be seen as artists
strived for perfection. By the mid 14th century paintings had
very flat decorative religious themed images. All this changed however, with the arrival of painters like Giotto and Fra Angelico. They studied artists from
ancient Greece and Rome and drew from real life. They painted with egg tempera
which was color pigment mixed with egg yolk. They also used gold which could be flattened as thin as leaves and could be brushed
onto the paintings. Our good friend Johannes Gutenberg helped spread these
new ideas to the rest of the world with his invention: the printing press. By
the early Renaissance artists painted people more realistically and placed them in three-dimensional settings. The introduction of perspective
revolutionised the way buildings and backgrounds were painted. The
architecture at the time was also inspired by ancient Greece and Rome:
common features included columns, pilasters, domes. The most famous dome of all was Florence Cathedral, designed by none other than famous engineer and
architect Filippo Brunelleschi. These years saw an explosion in
creativity. Compositions - meaning where people and objects are placed in a
picture - became balanced, proportion perfected! The ideas for artworks no
longer came just from religion. Oil paints took longer to dry and could be
applied thickly or thinly allowing artists to give their works a much more
realistic feel. These artists became the superstars of their day. A true
'Renaissance Man' could be a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, all rolled
into one. Some were even inventors like our good
friend Leonardo da Vinci. Michelangelo Buonarroti was also a painter and
sculptor whose crowning achievement was the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in
Rome. So what was life like for the men women and children of the Renaissance?
Men worked as bankers, farmers or goldsmiths. Women were either silk weavers, midwives, seamstresses or nuns. Children didn't
have it easy either - from the time they learned to put one foot in front of the
other they were expected to work just as hard as the grown-ups. This was a time of
style. What you wore and how you wore it was very important. Women wore sweeping gowns, and every man had to wear a hat. They would show off their new threads at
a variety of public and sporting events. Popular pastimes included chess, bullfighting and jousting. Most music at the time was composed
solely for the church however as with all the arts new styles were introduced
and music was also made simply for people's entertainment. As with any great
action comes a reaction. The perfection achieved in the High Renaissance gave
way to a style called Mannerism. This brought about a much more stylized approach to painting. Cooler colours were used, figures were put in more unusual settings, and
were painted with longer bodies. The Renaissance, which began in Italy,
shook everything up and lasted hundreds of years. It led to big achievements in
art and science and changed how people think. Until next time, mi amici! Arrivederci.
