Renaissance Art

New view of the artists' production marked a crucial stage in the history of art, and its ramifications were not limited to types produced for the domestic interior, but reverberated throughout almost every branch of artistic activity. Nowhere is this developing attitude seen better than in the history of types destined for public worship. It is to these types and their functions that we must now turn, for the church and its contents mirror the major concerns and ideals of Renaissance art and life.

Altarpieces, like domestic decoration, came in many types, which often overlapped in both form and function; and, like all types of Renaissance art, altarpieces changed over the centuries. This change was a combination of modifications in religious beliefs, the developments of new types of imagery, and the dictates of fashion, the desire for the new. Since many of the fundamental developments of Renaissance art were initiated and carried out in the altarpiece, its history reveals much about the artistic and spiritual climate of the age.

Nowhere else in the long history of Italian Renaissance art are the holy figures so disturbingly realistic as they are in Mazzoni's series of terracotta groups. It is as though Christ and his devoted cadre really exist in the chapels and niches of the churches they dominate with their unsettling presence; the body of Christ, the center of the Eucharistic miracle, is made startlingly real.

Renaissance art commissioned by prince or commune could be found throughout the Renaissance city, from its characteristic, encircling walls to its seat of government. Protective city walls, erected and maintained by the commune, were more than symbolic: often they were the city's only line of defense against the many marauding mercenary armies so common in the Renaissance. In times of tranquillity the great gates that breached the walls gave the visitor his or her first introduction to the city. Often such gates were decorated with frescoes and statues.

Finished in 1583, Giambologna's statue marks an important development both in the history of the decoration of the Piazza della Signoria and in the history of Renaissance art. The group was originally conceived by the Flemish sculptor as a solution to the complicated problem of weaving figures together in three dimensions, a problem first explored with great skill by Donatello in the Judith and Holofernes, the work that probably spurred Giambologna to begin his own statue. Because Giambologna's group was a formal exercise, it had no title; but when it was erected in the loggia, where it stood along with Judith and Holofernes and Cellini's Perseus, it became necessary to name it. The figures in such violent, twisting motion suggested the Rape of the Sabines, and this title was given to the statue.

The very fact a work could be made without a subject-that is, that it could originate as an attempt to solve a formal rather than a contextual problem-was something new in the history of Renaissance art. Giambologna's Rape of the Sabines takes one step further those altarpieces for churches and those domestic pictures that, about 1500, began to be appreciated more for their artistic nature than for their message. Such an attitude, which is much like our own conception of art in embryonic form, was one of the Renaissance's principal contributions to the history of art. Paintings and sculptures were losing the iconic impact that had made them such powerful, and often awesome, objects.

Giorgio Vasari, Alessandro de' Medici, Uffizi, Florence, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) was a busy painter who executed many commissions for the Medici. However, his fame rests on his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (published in 1550 and revised extensively in 1568), an invaluable source of information and attitudes about Renaissance art.