Of Petrarch and Portraits

Renaissance translates to "rebirth" in French... 

Italian also being a Romance language with its roots in Latin, there's a vague similarity between what a lovely lady on a fashion runway in Milan might call the Rinascimento, formed from a verb, rinascere, "to be reborn", and the French word spoken by a lovely mademoiselle as she poses au naturale on the Rive Gauche for a sadly starving young artist with much talent... 

And those readers fortunate enough to have read Caesar in the original know balding Gaius Julius would utter "renascentia" if there'd been occasion for similar concepts of new beginnings to cross his mind...

Laura de Noves, wife of Hugues de Sade (a distant
ancestor of the infamous Marquis) is believed to have
been the mysterious noblewoman whom Petrarch
adored from afar despite her rejection of his amorous
overtures.

You and I will normally use this word, Renaissance, to describe a time spanning roughly three and a half centuries.  For the non-academically inclined, this period from the early 1300s until the mid-1600s  is sometimes only a list of names (Medici and Leonardo and Petrarch, for instance) and places (Florence, usually) committed to short-term memory before a History of Western Civilization midterm...

If our short term memory extends beyond the test, we may recall our professors or high school teachers spoke glowingly of the Renaissance.  Painting became more realistic as artists consciously applied themselves to capturing the natural world through an understanding of linear perspective and anatomy.  Men wishing to know about the world observed it and recorded what they saw accurately-- paving the way for the scientific revolution...

Slowly, sometimes haltingly, a new world view emerged in the city-states and nations of Europe from a combination of observation of the natural world surrounding mankind and a rediscovery of ancient Greek and Latin authors such as Aristotle and Cicero.  A poet, Petrarch, saw the period after the collapse of the Roman Empire as an age of darkness when the light of learning gave way to celebration of barbaric ignorance.  Many modern writers credit him with giving us a concept of medieval times as The Dark Ages...

[Readers with a scholarly interest will remind me controversies about the Renaissance abound inside the academic community.  French historian Jules Michelet appears to be the first modern author to use the term "Renaissance" to define a specific era.  He did this in 1855 in a history of his homeland which, not surprisingly, emphasized the role of La Belle France in civilizing the rest of Europe...



Renaissance painters often evoked classical themes,
placing them alongside contemporary figures, as in
this detail from Sandro Botticelli's allegorical
The Birth of Spring

Contemporary thinkers debate whether the Renaissance represents a clean break with the past or simply a continuation of a gradually developing civilization.  Some say it was a time of decline fueled by a pessimism that caused intellectuals to look to the past to find inspiration in a world ravaged by the Black Death.  Others duel with articles on the role played by powerful families like the Medici of Florence versus the impact made by the intellectual contributions of artists and scientists themselves.  But few scholars even try to ignore the impact on the transmission of knowledge caused by the invention of the printing press.]   

A good number of educated people will also credit Petrarch with more than inspiring an easily remembered historical term like the Dark Ages.  They see him as "The Father of Humanism"...

When the poet (who was born in Tuscany in 1304 and who died near Padua in 1374, aged 69 years and 364 days) is so honored by authors, they usually echo Georg Voigt, a German historian, who used "humanism" to describe a revival of interest in Classical Greek and Roman learning during the Renaissance.  As politically and philosophically savvy readers are aware, humanism is an umbrella term.  It has also been associated with movements with quasi-religious overtones.  Today, it generally refers to a non-theistic world view embracing ideals of reason and altruism and freedom from the scourge of superstition...

In an attempt to create more realistic images, Renaissance artists experimented
with linear perspective and the balancing of light and shadows.  Paolo Uccello's
Presentation of the Virgin is also another example of the Renaissance tendency
to link ancient events with contemporary European society.

[Petrarch was a modern man in several senses of the word.  His father was a lawyer who wished his two sons would follow in his footsteps.  Petrarch, of course, rebelled against this decision, although he packed his bags and spent the seven years of school required for this training in quiet rebellion, secretly plotting to be a poet and man of letters.  He eventually found a career in the Church as a widely traveled ambassador.  Despite the celibacy expected of him, Petrarch fathered at least one son and one daughter.  And he became the poster child for unrequited love when his eyes first fell upon a woman named Laura on April 6, 1327, during Good Friday services.  There is a hint in his writings that he attempted to have requited love with Laura but she refused his advances on the grounds she was wed to another.  He spent the rest of his life in lonely adoration of this fair haired woman of modest but dignified bearing, celebrating her beauty in some of the finest poetry of the early Renaissance.]

Let's briefly return to the Renaissance and some of the artistic innovations that sprang from its turbulence...

We should perhaps start with Giotto...



Giotto: The Marriage at Cana

Giotto di Bondone (1266-1377) was described by Giovanni Vallani, a banker who lived at roughly same time as "the most sovereign master of painting in his time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature."   Giotto was amongst the first artists to realize two dimensional images could roughly duplicate illusions of three dimensional reality...

Linear perspective can be defined in several ways but each definition boils down to creating illusions of depth and distance.  One simple way to demonstrate this concept is to draw two parallel lines (such as railroad tracks) that gradually come closer and closer until they meet.  Buildings nearest the viewer are drawn larger while those which are supposed to be far away are smaller. Not surprisingly, the real trick to achieving a realistic linear perspective requires some understanding of mathematics, particularly basic geometry.  Not surprisingly, rules for creating an illusion of depth were developed by artists whose work required an understanding of geometry-- most notably, the architects Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) and Leon Alberti (1404-1472)...

[Brunelleshi's masterpiece, Santo Spirito church in Florence, started five years or so before Brunelleschi's death and not completed until 1481, remains among the world's best examples of using form and the illusion of converging lines to create a sense of incredible depth.]



Filippo Brunelleschi: Interior, Santo Spirito

Renaissance painters also created more realistic works because they showed greater understanding of color than their predecessors...

We say the sky is blue and we may describe a certain man's shirt and pants as blue.  But if I paint these three things-- sky, shirt, pants-- with the same shade of blue, I will have a canvas that looks rather unsophisticated and a bit primitive.  But if I use three shades of blue, my work appears a bit more natural...

Understanding color requires the understanding of a basic principle: adding white will lighten a color, adding black will darken it.  And understanding color requires knowing that blending two colors together will create a third color: yellow weakens red to create orange, blue and red transform into purple...



The cangiante technique in Renaissance Art: the prophet Daniel
from Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel uses color substitutions to
achieve lighting and shading effects that would be ineffective if
the original color is used.

[Lest we appear disrespectful to artists of the Dark Ages, we should note the costs and difficulties of obtaining many pigments limited the creative expression of painters during those times.  Renaissance artists employed many of the same techniques (such as egg tempera, fresco, and encaustic) used by their predecessors but enjoyed much greater access to paper and pigments.]

Four painting techniques used by Renaissance painters deserve special mention...

Michelangelo employed one of these techniques, cangiante, a form of color substitution, several times during the painting of the Sistine Chapel.  Cangiante is used when the painter is unable to make the original hue light or dark enough to achieve the desired effect or when a darker or lighter version of the original color will make the painting look flat and dull.  In our illustration, Michelangelo substitutes green for blue in attempting to show us the shadows of the prophet Daniel's robes...

Sfumato, another Renaissance technique, blurs sharp outlines by gradually blending one tone into another through very careful application and overlapping of thin glazes.  Leonardo da Vinci coined the term and became its most prominent advocate.  He saw sfumato as "being without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke".  Unione, the third method, attempts to maintain vibrant colors during the sfumato process...

Sfumato technique in Leonardo's Mona Lisa

Chiaroscuro, the fourth technique, utilizes strong contrasts between light and dark, to create illusions of three dimensional reality.  It (not surprisingly) takes its name from merging two words translating to light and dark.  From the standpoint of an optical physicist, chiaroscuro uses value gradation of color and analytical division of light and shadow shapes to achieve the appearance of volume...



Chiarascuro effects can be achieved in modern
photography by manipulating contrasts and the
values of lighted and shaded areas.

The basic principles of chiaroscuro, incidentally, were not born in Renaissance days.  A 5th Century BCE Greek painter, Apollodoros, is said to have been the father of this form of "shadow painting"...

We might note these techniques, particularly sfumato and chiaroscuro, can be used by photographers as well as painters.  A camera functions best when it captures the scene before its lens.  However, as it does so, it creates a two dimensional image defined only by length and width.  The depth perceived by the human eye vanishes on the computer screen or the printed photograph when we review the pictures of something which looks so magnificent in person but so drab when captured...

A number of photographers, either through formal training or personal experience, find themselves more comfortable working with black and white rather than with color.  This is due, in part, to the fact that contrasts between black and white and varying shades of gray help create a sense of depth lacking in most untreated color images...

Down the line, we'll chat about Renaissance representations of living forms-- humans, animals, and plants...

Today, it suffices to say perhaps our lovelorn poet Petrarch was onto something when he thought there was much value to studying The Classics...

Raphael's The School of Athens employs a multitude of techniques (linear
perspective, foreshortening, and the manipulation of hue and light, to name a
few) to create a realistic homage to the enduring influence of classical Greece. 

 

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Sergio Garcia Rill: Milky Way Rainbow

 

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Barbara Jacquin: Bass Player in New Orleans

 

CREDITS

Note: All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia, without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted: black and white desert landscape photograph by Louis R Nugent