Essay On Renaissance Artistic Treaties

Essay on Renaissance artistic treaties

The ideals defended by the Renaissance revolve around the aesthetic ideas of number, light, symmetry, beauty. Concepts and theories that are given thanks to a paradigm change given by humanism and rationalism, which defend a change of look towards the human being, placing this as the center of the universe and as a measure, and at the same time also a proliferationof science, such as mathematics, optics … sciences that helped the study of perspective in art, and in the case of empiricism, a current that helped in the analysis of nature, to extract the truth, making aMimesis (another important concept that had already been giving from neoplatonism). All this together with a triumph of secularization and the birth of individualism. 

This rebirth brought with it the need to reform the rules of art production and for that a lot of classicism sources that came to this time were collected. Well, as Gombrich says "the idea of rebirth was intimately linked in the spirit of Italians to that of a recovery of the greatness of Rome". At the same time, the humanistic artists of this era that covers the fifteenth and sixteenth century – which would be, in art, the quattrocento and the cinquecentto – were prolific writers of treaties;On painting, sculpture and architecture mainly. The arrival of the modern times sets two aspects, one theoretical and another historic. The theoretical, that is, the treaties, is formed with the normative books that establish the rules to follow, how to execute an art or discipline.

You can think of Alberti, Palladio or Leonardo. 

The objective is beauty when assessing a work of art. They help artists, giving them a point of support to study and, thus, to claim their social role. They do not feel their destination determined by the place they occupy, but are determined to labat it through their action ”, or as Alfred von Martin said: it is the formation of a completely new social layer, of a new aristocracy of talent and active energy(which replaces the previous one by birth and rank) and that associates the economic art to the economic art, but always the economic moment (the bourgeois) that, predominantly, determines the style of that life.

The quattrocento is not understood without Florence and all the artists and traders who sprouted within their court. Treaties arise from the science-art relationship, and especially from the notion of Ars Liberalis, art as science. It also arises, as I commented before, from a face expensive nature and seniority. This originates in El Trecento with Giotto, culminating this path in the sixteenth century. The artist goes from being an artisan to being an intellectual. It is in the 15th century Italian when the typical medievo recipes are replaced by works of greater theoretical content. Some Italian Renaissance treaties are those of Vignola or Alberti. These new treaties will coexist with the ancient treaties, which despite the conception at that time of the Middle Ages as the time of decay of the arts, will also have great diffusion. The new representation method collects from geometry and mathematics. 

The paintings and architectures are windows to reality. Alberti, in this way, develops a scientific theory of arts based on rules derived from science to achieve a figurative transcription of reality, both in proportions and in perspective. Art is, for him, a reflection of reality, an extension of nature. This new conception influences this scientific perspective. Picture will be a great systematization of the pictorial technique, and in terms of this issue, painting begins to worry about the proportions, linked to the human body and the harmonic fee. This body harmony reflects cosmic, divine harmony, a notion that refers to neoplatonism. In this way, it is at this point where mathematical science intervenes, which justifies the balance of proportions. Architecture and urbanism are also considered an extension of the human body. Both architecture and urbanism must have compositional parameters adjusted to functionality. This is also presented by Alberti or il Filare. 

Thus become a microcosm, having its elements that reflect absolute unity and harmony, and its balance would reside in symmetria. Alberti is a continuator and admirer of the praxis initiated by the author of the great dome Cathedral Florentina. This treaty speaks, among other things, of the visual pyramid – a two or more escape points – and nature, specifically how to conceive it pictorially. He also talks about the head as a measure of all things, what he had already theorized vitrubio. And also references to the old manner. 

Therefore, the characteristics of the theory of painting that underlie picture as key ideas to understand its conception of pictorial art are: the imitation of nature, the correct imitation and the representation of beauty.