Renaissance art history and major developments

Art

As Baxandall points out, "a fifteenth century painting is a product of a social relationship," (p. 1). That social relationship was carefully forged and affected by a confluence of interests including those that are commercial, cultural, religious, and perceptual or aesthetic in nature. The relationship between client and artist was one constrained by social convention, legal tradition, and also the expedience of broader interests. Money has played a long-underestimated role in the history of art, notes Baxandall. For this reason, it helps to examine fifteenth century paintings in terms of not only their aesthetic values and symbolism but also in terms of how financial or class-based issues impacted issues like the materials used, how the artist was paid, and the size of the piece. Painting, Baxandall states, was "too important to be left to the painters," (p. 3). Two of the most important conventional characteristics of fifteenth century paintings that illustrate the "market ordering" transactions of art include the grouping of human figures in the composition and also the use of color -- what Baxandall refers to as the "splendor of hues," (82).

Grouping of human figures imparted meaning relative to gender norms and even cosmologies. Painters imbued their human groupings with an internal logic that reflected social conventions and proscribed norms. Botticelli's work is replete with examples of the use of human groupings to reflect "market ordering" transactions in art of the fifteenth century. For example, "The Liberal Arts Receiving a Young Man" depicts a tightly woven group of people in a distinctly secular setting. Here, gestures that used to be squarely within the province of religious hierarchy had become secularized in symbolic ways. The "straightforward form" welcomes the youth, highlighting the impending triumph of reason and science over religion that the Renaissance would come to represent throughout Europe (Baxandall 68). The shift of power and wealth from ecclesiastical sources to capitalist ones plays itself out meaningfully in frescoes and canvases like these.

Likewise, the resurgence of ancient Greco-Roman sensibilities, styles, and symbols represented a shifting "marketing ordering" of art and corresponded with the layout of human forms in linear composition. In Botticelli's "Primavera," for example, the central figure is that of Venus. The client-artist relationship had shifted because the source of wealth and power had shifted. Moreover, the viewer starts to play a more central role in composition during the fifteenth century. Figures like Venus in "Primavera" beckon or otherwise directly engage the viewer via eye contact and other means. Organizing the human forms on the canvas was a primary conventional characteristic that illustrated the "market ordering" transactions of art in meaningful ways.

Paintings depicting fewer figures than "Primavera" or "The Liberal Arts Receiving a Young Man" can be even more telling of the "market ordering" transactions of art. For example, two figures and their interactions with one another, even without the viewer's intervention, "can be so richly evocative of an intellectual or emotional relationship," (Baxandall 74). The grouping of forms would have also symbolized paintings from prior generations in which the client-artist relationship shifted, always denoting hierarchy, social status, and relative power. There is an internal and structural logic to compositions, including not only the arrangement of human forms but also of architectural elements as in Domenico Veneziano's The Annunciation.

In addition to groupings of forms, color and hue became a powerful conventional characteristic in fifteenth century paintings to illustrate the "market ordering" of art. Some colors were clearly and often exorbitantly more expensive than others, as many were derived from semiprecious stones or precious metals. Although gold had largely fallen out of favor, especially in the arts of Flanders, the use of ostentatious colors would have conveyed important signs relative to the power and wealth of the client and patron of the art. Color was essentially political. Use of black, white, and all the colors of the spectrum including metals would send signals not only about the subject of the painting but of the underlying meaning and social status of the client commissioning the work and willing to pay the price.

The viewer perceived himself or herself as possessing a great responsibility to the arts during the Renaissance. There was, as Baxendall puts it, "an expectation that cultivated people should be able to make discriminations about the interest of pictures," (36). A well-defined list of artist competencies would soon develop and evolve based on expanding knowledge of geometry and linear composition. More esoteric seeming concepts like harmony could be nearly quantified using geometric principles. DaVinci's studies are among a great canon of Italian work testifying to the increased value placed upon realism, precision, and also geometry in art. Content had psychological, social, and political merit, too. As patrons and clients of art became increasingly secular, religious motifs nearly divorced themselves from the heaviness that they had possessed during the Byzantine era.

2. During the Renaissance, a relationship between economic and cultural value developed. Value had been once tied to rather mundane factors including the price of pigments. For instance, the use of ultramarine and of course, gold leaf, were immediate signs of the art patron or client's wealth and endowment. Willingness to pay for expensive materials later transformed into willingness to pay for expensive talent, as artists themselves essentially became human resources. Skill became the new commodity in art, especially in regions like Calvinist Flanders in which ostentatious flaunting of wealth via the use of gold leaf would have been frowned upon but more subtle displays of power could be embedded in the presentation of deft painting skill. Florentine culture was undoubtedly different, and yet the emphasis on skill started to trump most others in terms of the value of art on the market.

In Florence, unlike Venice and other cultural hubs, lavish and dramatic representations on the canvas became valued highly. These dramas played themselves out on the canvas, draping religious stories in the contemporary aesthetic conventions. Moreover, realism became an aesthetic goal to aspire to in Florentine art of the fifteenth century. Reexamining and revisiting classical Greek human forms, Renaissance artists endeavored to render the human form in motion especially, which was no small feat on the two-dimensional canvas. Pisanello's "Studies of a Girl," sketches of a dancer, offer insight into the evolution of aesthetic taste and sensibilities. The artist's ability to communicate with the viewer on multiple dimensions also became highly valued, helping to deem a painting "good" or worthwhile. Boticelli, for instance, would embed myths and symbols from the classics and also Christianity into a painting, thereby creating and maintaining a vernacular language of art. The placement of bodies, the movement of bodies and their interactions with one another, the interactions between people and their surroundings, the dramas being depicted, and the symbols contained in those dramatic events were all part of the painter's lexicon. An educated Florentine public would have had no trouble at all deciphering Florentine art, but it could have been considered highly contextual and culturally specific.