Imagine yourself walking inside a gallery of Renaissance and Baroque art. You are surrounded by beauty. Striking crimson reds are paired with emerald green in the dresses of angels who sit by a mysterious river landscape with their hands folded in prayer. Their wings are so soft, you wish to touch them. The oil paint's sparkling vivid hues remind you of gems, and you might recall that Ultramarine Blue is indeed made from crushed jewels, and reserved only for the wealthiest patrons and the artists whose work they purchased. But within the golden frames and under layers of jewel-bright paint we see the stuff of nightmares: a thousand Christs suffer a thousand terrible tortures, blood pouring from their wounds, eyes filled with pain. The martyred Saints are tormented by serpents, lions, the desert winds, the loneliness of their exile, their wounds, poisoned arrows. Saint Sebastian in particular almost resembles a porcupine, with all those arrows embedded in his flesh. Clouds gather around lonely, dark hills as Jesus' broken corpse is taken down from yet another one of his crosses, over and over again, by his adoring worshippers. The scenes repeat, repeat, repeat. So many different painters paint the same scene, but each one is a new masterpiece. The sacred figures weep. Holy tears, holy blood. For Christians these paintings represent death, but in death, resurrection and the light of hope. That's what the word Renaissance means: a Rebirth. New life. Life beyond death, the defeat of our mortality. Reincarnation.
Beneath the painting, if you could see the design of the composition, the figures are often arranged in circles, for circles represent an eternal return to life and do not have an ending no matter how you spin it. The pictures are also often composed along the lines of triangles, for triangles are a trinity, and the trinity is holy. A diamond is nothing but two triangles put together. Crosses are a natural choice, squares too for stability. Of course stability can be a little dull, so that's where the artists start to introduce rhythms - repeating visual elements like certain colours or patterns to trick your eye into moving around the picture as if you were following an intricate series of steps in a dance. The new illusion-or rather, the mathematical, geometric science of perspective helps you to feel that the painting and its buildings and landscapes are as real as anything else you have ever seen.
And then there is the light. A beautiful, divine, sacred, transcendent, otherworldly light fills the paintings. It is hard to describe, hard to put into words. Words will fail here, you must only look, and see, and be silent.
I do not know if you are a Christian, but I am not religious in any way, and I wish that I was looking at these incredible paintings. In the distance of the pictures there is blue mist, lakes, mountains, cypresses. They make you want to linger longer in front of each painting. What if, by some unknown wizard's magic, you could drift inside the landscape, and walking inside the painting as if it were a whole country, find yourself a little house with a lemon orchard and a well of pure water, maybe some sheep and goats to tend to...could you stay there forever showing up as the smallest, lightest brushstroke on the canvas? Would anybody but the most studious art historians notice that there was an extra dab of paint on the canvas? But the world outside the painting brings you out of your daydream.
Sometimes Christ is muscular and glorious, and sometimes all you see is the gaunt skeletal ruin of a man about to die - or already dead - from his many terrible injuries, but the artist had been so skilled in his craftsmanship that even this vision is a transcendence, an overcoming of the gruesome reality of pain. A thousand Marys hold fat infants in their arms, with halos of gold, her motherly figure draped in luminous blue silk. A thousand Marys are approached by hosts of angels all called Gabriel, holding white lilies to announce her special role in the religion that would rule much of the Western world for centuries. You notice how terribly un-infantlike many of the Christ children are, their faces too old for their little bodies.
But not all the paintings are Christian. Far from it! Here is the famous Botticelli's Venus, rising from the primal ocean on her seashell. You see the demi-god Hercules in his lion's furs with his club. Artemis with a bright half moon on her brow, she's surrounded by her virgins who are ready to accompany her into the great Hunt. Here, Icarus falls into the ocean, but in another painting, an enchanting blue sky with perfect clouds floats over the lovely island of Naxos in Titian's Ariadne and Bacchus, and as we reluctantly take our eyes from Bacchus' flowing rose-pink drapery, in a different painting, a noblewoman by Raphael holds a baby unicorn to her breast. Rubens had painted Venus trying to cling to her chosen mate Adonis, who rejected her, and the man looks so lively that he's about to leap from the canvas and into freedom from unwanted love. Wait, you ask, why do these paintings show so many pagan mythological scenes, why is there even a unicorn ( a being not allowed passage on Noah's ark) if the prevailing, dominant view was Christianity? It is because in the time of the Renaissance, artists, scholars, and Humanist thinkers began to unearth ancient knowledge and myths from much earlier periods - that of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, as well as ancient Egypt and other cultures. And so you might understand and forgive me for not telling you everything about the philosophy and aesthetics of the Renaissance in this little introduction, the topic is simply too vast! I would have to cover the entirety of Christian faith, pagan religions and mystic cults, the newly emerging Humanism, early feminism thinkers, Machiavellian thought (the contrast to Humanism!), the colours and designs thought to be most harmonious at the time, ideas of beauty and ugliness, even the roots of an all-powerful dystopian government in Piranesi's Carceri d'invenzione (imaginary prisons) from which the English philosopher Bentham would go on to invent the Panopticon, a mass surveillance prison in which the prisoners are completely unaware about being watched. I have not even scratched the surface of what is there. There is so, so much! You must seek out books and read as much as you can. I just wanted to spark an appetite for this marvellous topic.
The Renaissance oil paintings are treasures, and in order to truly understand them, it is necessary to do much research and reading - everything from the bible to Ovid and Virgil and the fragments of Sappho. There is so much to discover, and I wish you good luck in your study journey.
Here are just two books that may help you get started:
A History of Philosophy Volume 3: Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy by Frederick Copleston
Renaissance Humanism: An Anthology of Sources
Margaret L. King (Translator)
Beneath the painting, if you could see the design of the composition, the figures are often arranged in circles, for circles represent an eternal return to life and do not have an ending no matter how you spin it. The pictures are also often composed along the lines of triangles, for triangles are a trinity, and the trinity is holy. A diamond is nothing but two triangles put together. Crosses are a natural choice, squares too for stability. Of course stability can be a little dull, so that's where the artists start to introduce rhythms - repeating visual elements like certain colours or patterns to trick your eye into moving around the picture as if you were following an intricate series of steps in a dance. The new illusion-or rather, the mathematical, geometric science of perspective helps you to feel that the painting and its buildings and landscapes are as real as anything else you have ever seen.
And then there is the light. A beautiful, divine, sacred, transcendent, otherworldly light fills the paintings. It is hard to describe, hard to put into words. Words will fail here, you must only look, and see, and be silent.
I do not know if you are a Christian, but I am not religious in any way, and I wish that I was looking at these incredible paintings. In the distance of the pictures there is blue mist, lakes, mountains, cypresses. They make you want to linger longer in front of each painting. What if, by some unknown wizard's magic, you could drift inside the landscape, and walking inside the painting as if it were a whole country, find yourself a little house with a lemon orchard and a well of pure water, maybe some sheep and goats to tend to...could you stay there forever showing up as the smallest, lightest brushstroke on the canvas? Would anybody but the most studious art historians notice that there was an extra dab of paint on the canvas? But the world outside the painting brings you out of your daydream.
Sometimes Christ is muscular and glorious, and sometimes all you see is the gaunt skeletal ruin of a man about to die - or already dead - from his many terrible injuries, but the artist had been so skilled in his craftsmanship that even this vision is a transcendence, an overcoming of the gruesome reality of pain. A thousand Marys hold fat infants in their arms, with halos of gold, her motherly figure draped in luminous blue silk. A thousand Marys are approached by hosts of angels all called Gabriel, holding white lilies to announce her special role in the religion that would rule much of the Western world for centuries. You notice how terribly un-infantlike many of the Christ children are, their faces too old for their little bodies.
But not all the paintings are Christian. Far from it! Here is the famous Botticelli's Venus, rising from the primal ocean on her seashell. You see the demi-god Hercules in his lion's furs with his club. Artemis with a bright half moon on her brow, she's surrounded by her virgins who are ready to accompany her into the great Hunt. Here, Icarus falls into the ocean, but in another painting, an enchanting blue sky with perfect clouds floats over the lovely island of Naxos in Titian's Ariadne and Bacchus, and as we reluctantly take our eyes from Bacchus' flowing rose-pink drapery, in a different painting, a noblewoman by Raphael holds a baby unicorn to her breast. Rubens had painted Venus trying to cling to her chosen mate Adonis, who rejected her, and the man looks so lively that he's about to leap from the canvas and into freedom from unwanted love. Wait, you ask, why do these paintings show so many pagan mythological scenes, why is there even a unicorn ( a being not allowed passage on Noah's ark) if the prevailing, dominant view was Christianity? It is because in the time of the Renaissance, artists, scholars, and Humanist thinkers began to unearth ancient knowledge and myths from much earlier periods - that of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, as well as ancient Egypt and other cultures. And so you might understand and forgive me for not telling you everything about the philosophy and aesthetics of the Renaissance in this little introduction, the topic is simply too vast! I would have to cover the entirety of Christian faith, pagan religions and mystic cults, the newly emerging Humanism, early feminism thinkers, Machiavellian thought (the contrast to Humanism!), the colours and designs thought to be most harmonious at the time, ideas of beauty and ugliness, even the roots of an all-powerful dystopian government in Piranesi's Carceri d'invenzione (imaginary prisons) from which the English philosopher Bentham would go on to invent the Panopticon, a mass surveillance prison in which the prisoners are completely unaware about being watched. I have not even scratched the surface of what is there. There is so, so much! You must seek out books and read as much as you can. I just wanted to spark an appetite for this marvellous topic.
The Renaissance oil paintings are treasures, and in order to truly understand them, it is necessary to do much research and reading - everything from the bible to Ovid and Virgil and the fragments of Sappho. There is so much to discover, and I wish you good luck in your study journey.
Here are just two books that may help you get started:
A History of Philosophy Volume 3: Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy by Frederick Copleston
A History of Philosophy Volume 3: Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy covers the fourteenth to the early-seventeenth centuries. In this period there was the breaking of the link between philosophy and theology – beginning with the work of Ockham. As the growth of empirical science led to the philosophical explosion of the renaissance, changes in philosophy reflected the discovery and adventure in the physical world.
Frederick Copleston was a Professor of the History of Philosophy and Dean of the Faculty of Theology at London University. This eleven-volume work is one of the most remarkable single-handed scholarly enterprises of modern times. Brimming with detail and enthusiasm, A History of Philosophy gives an accessible account of philosophers from all eras and explains their works in relation to other philosophers.
Renaissance Humanism: An Anthology of Sources
Margaret L. King (Translator)
By far the best collection of sources to introduce readers to Renaissance humanism in all its many guises. What distinguishes this stimulating and useful anthology is the vision behind King shows that Renaissance thinkers had a lot to say, not only about the ancient world--one of their habitual passions--but also about the self, how civic experience was configured, the arts, the roles and contributions of women, the new science, the 'new' world, and so much more. --Christopher S. Celenza, Johns Hopkins University