Great Art Ep.1: On Renaissance | NTD Arts & Culture

What makes a renaissance great? Why are the big three practically considered saints? And how much did Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael really transform art? Join us as Columbia professor David Rosand explains the poetry in the paintings of these Italian high renaissance masters and shows us how the stories depicted in some of their most famous pieces is the key to understanding these great artists. The late David Rosand was a passionate scholar of Italian renaissance art who contributed groundbreaking research that continues to shape and inspire students of art history today. The Meyer Shapiro Professor of Art History Emeritus joined the Columbia University Art History faculty in 1964 and twice served as chairman of the department. He published over 80 works and served on the Art Advisory Council of the International Foundation for Art Research and was a board member of Safe Venice, Inc. and in 2007 was awarded the Paul Oscar Christeller Award for Lifetime Achievement by the Renaissance Society of America. The Italian Renaissance is a long period and there was one great historian of it at the very beginning and that is Giorgio Vasari who was an artist in the 16th century but who wrote the most important set of biographies of the artists. He essentially structured the Renaissance in three phases that correspond more or less to the 14th century, the 15th century and the 16th century. And for him the 14th century, that is beginning around 1300, was the beginning of a new enlightenment, that is a moving out of the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages and the beginning of a renovation in the arts, in all of the arts, that is in painting, sculpture and architecture. At the beginning of the 15th century, another generation, especially in Florence, according to Vasari's view, advanced the arts and this was what Vasari called the second phase of the Renaissance. And then came the third phase, which for Vasari was the modern period and it began at the very end of the 15th century with Leonardo da Vinci and Leonardo was followed in this vision by Michelangelo and by Raphael. But it was Michelangelo who, according to Vasari and also to the culture of the time, it was Michelangelo who brought art to its fullest perfection. The lives themselves that Vasari wrote are rather like saints' lives, that is, he created a situation in which the artist was celebrated not merely for his technical ability but also for his inspiration and that meant that behind the great creations of Michelangelo, above all, lay the figure of God. That is the way in which he sets up the biographies. Raphael, for example, is the perfect gentleman. He's a young man, he actually died young, full of grace. And according to Vasari, God sent Raphael to Earth in order to bring culture to the artists, who were otherwise a very uncouth bunch. And so Raphael brought this kind of social grace to them. But then still, God looked down on, this is of course Vasari's vision, God looked down on the struggling artists who were trying to bring their art to perfection without any success. God took pity on them and he sent Michelangelo to show them what true art was. So that the whole history of art becomes a kind of parallel to the history of religion, that is, of the Christian religion. With God, instead of God sending his only begotten son, Jesus Christ, etc., for the salvation of man, he sends artists. And above all, he sends Michelangelo. And with Michelangelo, art has reached its highest moment of perfection. That leaves a problem, which we don't have to discuss today. What happens after Michelangelo, if perfection has been reached? And it became something of a problem for Michelangelo's younger contemporaries. But it begins with Leonardo. And what Leonardo does is to, in effect, to gather up the entire advances, let us say, in 15th century art. And these advances are fundamentally mathematical. So that crucial to Western painting from the early 15th century on is the art of perspective. That is, perspective construction. The creation of a spatial illusion that is based upon mathematical certainty. That is, its applied geometry. And this becomes a crucial part of the rationalization of painting. Leonardo becomes a master of that, without any question. And he declares early in his career that mathematics is the absolute foundation for understanding the world and, above all, for understanding painting, which is, for him, a philosophy. Toward the end of his life, that is, later in his career, Leonardo found that mathematics could not answer everything. He spent much of his career trying to do the impossible, namely to square the circle. And he became disillusioned with mathematics. In place of mathematics, what he discovered, in effect, was that nature is constantly changing. And it was the changeability of nature that Leonardo recorded in his drawings. It is the changeability of nature. In the changeability of nature, he found an analogy for the very nature of art itself. So that, with Leonardo, we begin to get, let's just say, a theoretical explanation of the art of sketching. That is, of the rapid notation. Leonardo is filled with advice to young painters. Don't finish your drawings. Do them rapidly. Don't worry about the details. You will always come back and change them. And this notion that a work of art can be changed is something that Leonardo articulates in his writings and becomes a crucial part of subsequent Western painting. Not everywhere, not at all times, but it becomes a very important part of the attitude toward creativity. Another part of this moment, that is, this third period of Vasari's historiography, what he calls the modern manner, what we, that is, what scholarship now would call the high renaissance, that is, the generation of Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, a crucial part of that involves a change in attitudes toward creativity in general. Whereas in the early 15th century, Alberti, who writes the first treatise on art in the Renaissance, declares that geometry is the foundation of painting. What geometry offers, that is, what mathematics offers, is certainty, is rational control. And also mathematics was part of what was a liberal art. And so the social aspect of all of this is important. What the 15th century is arguing is that painting is not merely a mechanical art, that is, something worked with the hands, but it is an art that comes from the mind. And that is demonstrated by its mathematical foundation. Once that is established, and once mathematics, that is, geometry of perspective, becomes a standard part of painting, it is no longer necessary to argue it. But something else comes along, and this is where these figures of Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo become crucial. Something else occurs in which painting, not only painting, but especially painting, is seen not so much as applied mathematics, but rather as something closer to poetry. That is, it's not the rational application of rules that are important, but, and here Michelangelo plays the crucial role, but rather it is the question of being inspired. And inspiration, the idea that the artist somehow is filled with something larger than himself, that is, a divine idea in the mind, this transforms the stature of the artist. He becomes less a mathematician and more something like a prophet, a poet, somebody who receives the word from on high, but through his hands gives it form. So that the whole notion of creativity is articulated in the early 16th century, and we'll see this exactly in one of Raphael's paintings, in which he pays tribute to Michelangelo, so that the art itself becomes the physical, formal, visible expression of an idea. And this, of course, will have a lot to do with the Neoplatonic tradition, but it's more important than just localizing it that way, because it becomes the basis for, I would say, the entire tradition of Western art. The Romantics at the end of the 18th century and the early 19th century, in effect, rediscover it, but it's been there all along. The traditions of connoisseurship that become articulated especially, well, from the 16th century on, but especially in the 18th century, pay tribute to it. The idea that, for example, in a single stroke of the brush, or rather of the pen in Western art usually, in a drawing, one gets a sense of the spirit of the artist. This is something that is not very far from Chinese aesthetics, in the sense of recognizing the artist in his mark. In fact, this can be traced back to ancient Greece. So that there are these traditions, and what is interesting about them, I mean, not to expand beyond the Italian Renaissance, but at least to me is interesting about them, is how much various cultures share the ways in which they demonstrate their respect for the artist by allowing a certain kind of divinity, or not necessarily divinity in all cultures, but a special spiritual nature to what is otherwise a very physical thing. Although the physicality of Western art is something that does distinguish it from much of, I think, much of Asian art, but we can come back and we'll talk about that with Michelangelo.