Cultural Capsules: Renaissance & Baroque

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A Cultural Capsule: Renaissance

Hello reader! We would like to thank you for your interest in learning about us and our times. We call our period 'The renaissance' in that it is a renewal of the Classics of Antiquity. This movement started in the 14th century although it has its beginnings in the 12th via the interest in the Classics via the cities and centres of the Hanseatic League of city-states. The Middle-ages was seen as a period of cultural stagnation due to full-blown feudal wars after the fall of the Roman Empire. This then is the cultural revival, an effort to return to the ideal in terms of beauty, the arts, human thought and expression. The works of Plato, Aristotle, Virgil & the arts, sciences & architecture of the Greek civilization became of interest to Philosophers, artists, musicians & scientists/alchemists.

Art - works that exemplified Renaissance art via paintings, murals, visual design and sculptures are expressions of beauty and the human emotion evoking the environment, the social situation and the ideal, moving and stirring a reaction of admiration, love, awe and a bevy of human emotions. Here are two of the best examples:

? Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" - a 16th century oil painting, it is the enigmatic portrait of Lisa Gherardini, a Florentine merchant's wife. In this painting, much of the Renaissance techniques in oil painting has been used and evoked from the subject's enigmatic facial expression, hand and body presentation to symbolise his values and moral views, to the use of spatial geometry and atmospheric illusionism via colours and forms. The flawless skin tones of the subject in the painting are the best representation of the technique known as sfumato.

? Donatello's "Bronze David" - Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi created this statue in the early 15th century in Florence. He specializes in creating perspectival illusionism especially in Bas relief or shallow sculptures although he is equally a gifted painter. The Medicis commissioned him to create this piece and was the first free-standing work nude and unsupported bronze cast of a male since the period of Antiquity.

Music - Renaissance music is an attempt at reviving or recreating the classical - that of the Greeks & the Romans. Music was all about polyphony and mostly tied to religious ...