Mannerism and the late Renaissance

Between the High Renaissance and the Baroque, from the death of Raphael in 1520 until 1600, art was at an impasse. All problems of representing reality had been solved and art had reached a peak of perfection and harmony. So what now? The answer: replace harmony with dissonance, reason with emotion, and reality with imagination. In an effort to be original, Late Renaissance, or Mannerist, artists abandoned realism based on observation of nature. In the High Renaissance, when times were more stable, picture compositions were symmetrical and weighted toward the center. In the Late Renaissance, compositions were oblique, with a void in the center and figures crowded around the edge of the frame.

Mannerist paintings are identifiable because their style is predictable. Figures writhe and twist in unnecessary contrapposto. Bodies are distorted sometimes grossly muscular. Colors are lurid, heightening the impression of tension, movement, and unreal lighting. Notable Mannerists were Pontormo and Rosso, Bronzino, whose precious, elegant portraits featured long necks and sloping shoulders.

The Spanish Renaissance

El Greco. After coming to Venice, he appropriated Titian's vivid color and Tintoretto's dramatic lighting and was also influenced by Michelangelo, Raphael, and the Mannerists in Rome. The most striking characteristic of his paintings comes from the inner light. Unearthly illumination flickers over the canvases, making his style the most original of the Renaissance.

Critics have disputed whether El Greco should be considered a Mannerist; some claim he was too idiosyncratic to be classified. His art manifested certain undeniable Mannerist attributes, such as an unnatural light of uncertain origin and harsh colors like strong pink, acid green, and brilliant yellow and blue. His figures were distorted and elongated and the compositions full of swirling movement. Like the Mannerists, El Greco in his religious paintings cared little for accurately representing the visual world. He preferred to create an emotion–laden vision of celestial ecstasy.

stubble – the short stiff hairs on a man’s face that grow into a beard if he does not cut them off.

torments – severe physical or mental pain that someone suffers, often caused deliberately by someone else.

genre –a particular style used in cinema, writing, or art, which can be recognized by certain features.

hazy – not clear because there is smoke, dust, or water in the air.

peer – someone who is of the same age as another person.

chiaroscuro – the way that light and dark areas create a pattern, especially in drawings and paintings.

perspective – a way of thinking about something.

hatching – a pattern of parallel lines that are drawn across each other, used especially in drawings for showing dark areas.

oblique – not expressing something directly.

lurid – a lurid colour is very bright in an ugly way.

undeniable – certainly correct or true.

Answer the questions to the texts.

· Why did the Northern Renaissance happen later than in Italy?

· How did the northern Renaissance differ from the Italian Renaissance?

· What are the main features of the German Renaissance?

· What new techniques were invented in German?

· Who are the most famous German artists?

· What are the distinctive features of El Greko masterpieces?

· How did Mannerism differ from the Renaissance?

· What is the difference between engraving and woodcut?

· Why did graphic arts become so popular?

Translate the sentences from English into Russian.

1.While the Italians looked to Classical antiquity for inspiration, northern Europeans looked to nature.

2. One of the first masters of the new art of portrait painting, van Eyck included extreme details like the beginning of stubble on his subject's chin.

3. Hans Holbein is known as one of the greatest portraitists ever.

4. Durer was the first to use printmaking as a major medium for art.

5. Mannerist paintings are identifiable because their style is predictable.

Look at the pictures. Discuss the following questions.

Color

1. Which painting is very light?

2. When an artist mixes white with colors, the artist makes a tint. Can you show me some places in these paintings where there are tints?

3. When an artist mixes black with a color, a shade is created. Can you show me some places in this painting where there are shades?

4. Can you show me some places where tints and shades are used right next to each other? Artists call this positioning contrast.

5. Which artwork has bright colors on one side and dark colors on the other?

Value

1. Can you show me some tints in some of the artworks?

2. Can you show me some shades in some of the artworks?

3. Is there a person (or other object) in a dark room or place? Where is the light coming from in the picture?

4. Help me find some big, dark shapes that are around some objects. Can you trace in the dark shapes with your finger?

5. Which artwork uses light and dark shapes of color that look very flat?

5. Retell the text according to the plan:

1. The Northern Renaissance.

2. The German Renaissance.

3. The Late Renaissance.

4. The famous artists and the new technologies.

Unit6

Baroque: the ornate age

1. Discuss the following questions:

· What do you know about this period?

· What examples of Baroque style in architecture do you know?

· Was this style popular in Russia?

· Who are the prominent artists of the period?

· Where did it start?

During the baroque period, Europe produced a multitude of painters, architects, sculptors, landscape architects, and composers, some of whom are listed below. Choose five of the people listed below, identify each of them, and cite at least two examples of their work that people still enjoy today. What generalizations can be made, if any, regarding who set the standards of artistic taste during the baroque period?

Meindert Hobbema

Pieter de Hooch

Jacques Lemercier

André Lenôtre

Louis Le Vau

J. B. Lully

François Mansart

Bartolomé Murillo

Jean–Marc Nattier

Balthasar Neumann

Claude Perrault

Giovanni Piazetta

Matthäus Pöppelmann

Jusepe de Ribera

Jan van Ruisdael

Andreas Schlüter

Antonio Scarlatti

Heinrich Schütz

Johann Wenzel Stamitz

Georg Philipp Telemann

Giovanni Tiepolo

Georges de la Tour

Sir John Vanbrugh

Anthony Vandyke

Diego Velázquez

Jan Vermeer

Antoine Watteau

Read and translate the text.

Baroque art

Baroque art (1600–1750) succeeded in marrying the advanced techniques and grand scale of the Renaissance to the emotion, intensity, and drama of Mannerism, thus making the Baroque era the most ornate in the history of art. While the term «baroque» is often used negatively to mean overwrought and ostentatious, the seventeenth century not only produced such exceptional artistic geniuses as Rembrandt and Velazquez but expanded the role of art into everyday life. In Catholic countries like Flanders, religious art flourished, while in the Protestant lands of northern Europe, such as England and Holland, religious imagery was forbidden. As a result, paintings tended to be still lifes, portraits, landscapes, and scenes from daily life.

Italian Baroque

Artists in Rome pioneered the Baroque style before it spread to the rest of Europe. By this time, art academies had been established to train artists in the techniques developed during the Renaissance. Artists could expertly represent the human body from any angle, portray the most complex perspective, and realistically reproduce almost any appearance.

Caravaggio. The most original painter of the seventeenth century, Caravaggio injected new life into Italian painting after the artificiality of Mannerism. He took realism to new lengths, painting bodies in a thoroughly «down and dirty» style, as opposed to pale, Mannerist phantoms. He advocated «direct painting» from nature. «The Conversion of St. Paul» demonstrates Caravaggio's ability to see afresh a traditional subject. Other painters depicted the Pharisee Saul converted by a voice from heaven with Christ on the heavenly throne surrounded by throngs of angels. Caravaggio showed St. Paul flat on his back, fallen from his horse, which is portrayed in an explicit rear–end view. Caravaggio's use of perspective brings the viewer into the action, and engages the emotions while intensifying the scene's impact through dramatic light and dark contrasts. This untraditional, theatrical staging focuses a harsh light from a single source on the subject in the foreground to concentrate the viewer's attention on the power of the event and the subject’s response.

Bernini.Gianlorenzo Bernini was more than the greatest sculptor of the Baroque period. Bernini's masterpiece – and the culmination of Baroque style was «The Ecstasy of St. Theresa». It represents the saint swooning on a cloud, an expression of mingled ecstasy and exhaustion on her face. The sculptor's virtuosity with textures made the white marble «flesh» seem to quiver with life, while the feathery wings and frothy clouds are equally convincing. The whole altarpiece throbs with emotion, drama, and passion.

Flemish Baroque

The story of Flemish Baroque painting is really the story of one man, Sir Peter Paul Rubens. Energy was the secret of Rubens's life and art.

His output of more than 2,000 paintings was comparable only to Picasso's. One painting that created a sensation, establishing Rubens's reputation as Europe's foremost religious painter, was «The Descent from the Cross». It has all the traits of mature Baroque style: theatrical lighting with an ominously dark sky and glaringly spot-lit Christ, curvilinear rhythms leading the eye to the central figure of Christ, and tragic theme eliciting a powerful emotional response.

Rubens was probably best known for his full–bodied, sensual nudes. His ideal of feminine beauty that he painted again and again was: buxom, plump, and smiling with golden hair and luminous skin woman. One characteristic Rubens shared with Hals and Velazquez was that his method of applying paint was in itself expressive. Rubens's surging brushstrokes made his vibrant colors come alive. Nowhere was this more evident than in his hunting pictures, a genre he invented.

Van Dyck. Van Dyck was a supreme portraitist, establishing a style, noble yet intimate and psychologically penetrating, that influenced three generations of portrait painters. He transformed the frosty, official images of royalty into real human beings. Yet van Dyck's ease of composition and sense of arrested movement, as though the subjects were pausing rather than posing, lent humanity to an otherwise stilted scene. He had an ability to flatter his subjects in paint, all becoming slim paragons of perfection, despite eyewitness accounts to the contrary. One trick van Dyck used to great effect was to paint the ratio of head to body as one to seven, as opposed to the average of one to six. This served to elongate and slenderize his subject's figure.

Dutch Baroque

Dutch art flourished from 1610 to 1670. Its style was realistic, its subject matter commonplace. But what made its creators more than just skilled technicians was their ability to capture the play of light on different surfaces and to suggest texture by the way light was absorbed or reflected. Before the Baroque era, landscape views were little more than background for whatever was going on in the front of the picture. The Dutch established landscape as deserving of its own artistic treatment.

As a genre of painting, the still life began in the Netherlands. Artists tried to achievean extraordinary realism in portraying domestic objects. Often still lifes were emblematic, as in «vanitas» paintings, with symbols like a skull or smoking candle representing the transience of all life.

Hals. Frans Hals's contribution to art was his ability to capture a fleeting expression. Whether his portraits depicted musicians, gypsies, or solid citizens, he brought them to life, often laughing. His trademark was portraits of men and women caught in a moment of rollicking high spirits. Hals's most famous painting, «The Laughing Cavalier», portrays a sly figure with a smile on his lips, a twinkle in his eyes, and a mustache rakishly upturned. Hals achieved this swashbuckling effect chiefly through his brushstrokes. Before Hals, Dutch realists prided themselves on masking their strokes to disguise the process of painting, thereby heightening a painting's realism. In this «alia prima», technique, the artist applies paint directly to the canvas without an undercoat. The painting is completed with a single application of brushstrokes. Hals transformed the stiff convention of group portraiture.

Rembrandt. Probably the best-known painter in the Western world is Rembrandt van Rijn. For the first twenty years of his career, Rembrandt's portraits were the height of fashion. During this prosperous period, he also painted Biblical and historical scenes in a Baroque style. These intricately detailed works were lit dramatically, with the figures reacting melodramatically. The year 1642 marked a turning point in Rembrandt's career. His dearly loved wife died. In his mature phase, Rembrandt's art became less physical, more psychological. He turned to Biblical subjects but treated them with more restraint. A palette of reds and browns came to dominate his paintings, as did solitary figures and a pervasive theme of loneliness. He pushed out the limits of chiaroscuro, using gradations of light and dark to convey mood, character, and emotion.

He almost carved with pigment, laying on heavy impasto «half a finger» thick with a palette knife for light areas and scratching the thick, wet paint with the handle of the brush. This created an uneven surface that reflected and scattered the light, making it sparkle, while the dark areas were thinly glazed to enhance the absorption of light.

Vermeer. The painter Johannes Vermeer is now considered second only to Rembrandt among Dutch artists. While other artists used a gray/green/brown palette, Vermeer's colors were brighter, purer, and glowed with an intensity unknown before. Besides his handling of color and light, he balanced compositions of rectangular shapes lend serenity and stability to his paintings. A typical canvas portrays a neat, spare room lit from a window on the left and a figure engrossed in a simple domestic task. But what elevates his subjects above the banal is his keen representation of visual reality, colors perfectly true to the eye, and the soft light that fills the room with radiance. He used a «camera obscura» to aid his accuracy in drawing. This was a dark box with a pinhole opening that could project an image of an object or scene to be traced on a sheet of paper. His handling of paint was also revolutionary.

ornate – decorated with complicated patterns or shapes.

explicit – said or explained in an extremely clear way, so that you cannot doubt what is meant.

quiver – to shake with short quick movements.

throb – if a painful part of your body throbs, the pain comes and goes again and again in a regular pattern.

buxom – a buxom woman is rather fat in an attractive way, with large breasts.

flatter – to praise someone in order to get something that you want, especially in a way that is not sincere.

paragon – someone who is perfect or who is the best possible example of a particular quality.

swashbuckling –used about a character in a story, film etc who has a lot of fights and exciting experiences.

chiaroscuro – the way that light and dark areas create a pattern, especially in drawings and paintings.

serenity – a feeling of being calm or peaceful.