Lorelei (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} lucinatrivia) wrote,@ 2007-11-06 18:27:00 |
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The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
Santa Maria Novella: Giotto's crucifix hanging suspended over you: stand directly under it, and look up, and there the body of Christ hangs over you almost dripping its blood protectively over you. In a city of crucifixes embracing every aspect of Christ from emaciated suffering to supernormal humanity to pathos to pardoning deity, this is a massive figure enacting redemptive sacrifice over your head.
The revelation: Ghirlandaio. Whom I have always dismissed as utterly wet and weedy, the Fotherington Thomas of the Renaissance. But his frescoes seen not in photograph-sized images but in more than lifesize scale before your eyes teem with vivacious human beings going about their daily life, only with heightened colours. In Santa Maria Novella, in Santa Trinità, you could walk into his walls and enter his Florence - or rather, for his own contemporaries, see in your own city that pedant Poliziano, that powerful Lorenzo subservient to the reality of St Francis' spirituality.
Filippino Lippi: perspective and realism, capturing in art what you really see with the eye, words bandied around about every Renaissance artist. But his trompe l'oeil in - yet again - Santa Maria Novella is the most convincing fraud I've ever seen. Impossible not to credit that there is some 3D there, but no.
Ucello: I've always found him mysterious, but again in more than lifesize frescoes what emerges is a great fear - a fear of death, a fear of men in armour with spears attacking the unarmed, a fear of devastation decimating the land. Not a consoling vision for the cloister of Santa Maria Novella.
The Baptistery: the theory is that modernists had nowhere to go with conventional art, so to be radical they had to be destructive. What rubbish. The fresco in the Baptistery is the most overwhelmingly commanding piece of art, and yet faced with it Ghiberti and Brunelleschi were inspired not to despair or destruction but to negativity.
And finally my own Donatello. Dazzling, dazzling, dazzling. From the deliciously and vital youth of the cantorie to the futurist severity of St Mark to the near abstraction of the Magdalena. How can one man have run the course of the entire history of art in one scupture?
Santa Maria Novella: Giotto's crucifix hanging suspended over you: stand directly under it, and look up, and there the body of Christ hangs over you almost dripping its blood protectively over you. In a city of crucifixes embracing every aspect of Christ from emaciated suffering to supernormal humanity to pathos to pardoning deity, this is a massive figure enacting redemptive sacrifice over your head.
The revelation: Ghirlandaio. Whom I have always dismissed as utterly wet and weedy, the Fotherington Thomas of the Renaissance. But his frescoes seen not in photograph-sized images but in more than lifesize scale before your eyes teem with vivacious human beings going about their daily life, only with heightened colours. In Santa Maria Novella, in Santa Trinità, you could walk into his walls and enter his Florence - or rather, for his own contemporaries, see in your own city that pedant Poliziano, that powerful Lorenzo subservient to the reality of St Francis' spirituality.
Filippino Lippi: perspective and realism, capturing in art what you really see with the eye, words bandied around about every Renaissance artist. But his trompe l'oeil in - yet again - Santa Maria Novella is the most convincing fraud I've ever seen. Impossible not to credit that there is some 3D there, but no.
Ucello: I've always found him mysterious, but again in more than lifesize frescoes what emerges is a great fear - a fear of death, a fear of men in armour with spears attacking the unarmed, a fear of devastation decimating the land. Not a consoling vision for the cloister of Santa Maria Novella.
The Baptistery: the theory is that modernists had nowhere to go with conventional art, so to be radical they had to be destructive. What rubbish. The fresco in the Baptistery is the most overwhelmingly commanding piece of art, and yet faced with it Ghiberti and Brunelleschi were inspired not to despair or destruction but to negativity.
And finally my own Donatello. Dazzling, dazzling, dazzling. From the deliciously and vital youth of the cantorie to the futurist severity of St Mark to the near abstraction of the Magdalena. How can one man have run the course of the entire history of art in one scupture?
