How Renaissance artists rediscovered and refined classical techniques for depicting the human figure.
The Kritios boy , the Venus De Milo and Michelangelo's 'David'.
These female sculptures, however, are depicted clothed in column-like robes and with secretive Mona Lisa smiles that represent a stylised ideal rather than an accurate representation. And Greek artists weren’t satisfied with that – they wanted to create sculptures that appeared to be energetic images of idealised humans and gods.
This can be seen to great effect in the Kritios Boy, the first sculpture extant known to have used contrapposto. While the figure has a lot in common with the solid, tense kourai – the faint smile, the arms by his sides – his waist, and the changes in posture its position causes, became a revelation in Western art.
The sculpture tells the story of the Trojan priest Laocoön, who together with his sons meets a terrible fate: bitten and poisoned by venomous serpents. In the various versions of the story, the father and at least one of his sons, Antiphantes and Thymbraeus, perish. Some variations of the myth claim that the snake attack was to prevent Laocoön from exposing the Greek ruse of the Trojan horse, while others say that he offended a god – usually Poseidon, Athena or Apollo.
The discovery of this sculpture changed more than just the history of Ancient Greek art, however – it also altered the future of both painting and sculpture. The 16th century was the age of the height of the Renaissance, the ‘rebirth’, when polymath artists went back to the art and science of antiquity and rediscovered its treasures.
Many in the Church had expected the Second Coming of Christ and the end of the world to occur not long after the turn of the first millennium. They hadn’t thought much beyond this, and indeed Medieval religious art is often packed with this waiting tension. As a consequence, the Church’s art style was decorative, stiff, wilfully incorrect anatomically, and old-fashioned. It felt out of place, and the Church didn’t want to represent its key figures as aloof, stylised or ugly any longer.
Most artists tasked with depicting David chose to show him at the end of the most famous tale about him – immediately after the defeat of the giant Goliath, with his enemy’s head at his feet. Art historians theorise that Michelangelo chose to depict the young hero before his victory, before the fight had even begun.
Until now we have focused on sculpture, but all sculptors need to be able to sketch out the germ of their idea before they begin to chisel marble or model a cast for a bronze. A near-contemporary of Michelangelo’s, fellow Florentine Leonardo da Vinci was not just an artist, but the typification of the phrase ‘Renaissance man’.
Da Vinci’s representation of the Vitruvian Man takes some of Vitruvius’ ideas and improves on them. For example, the polymath has added the extra limbs, capable of depicting a range of 16 different poses. Vitruvius believed that the human body could fit into both a circle and a square. Something darker than just geometrical skill contributed to Leonardo’s mastery of anatomy, however. His success enabled him to gain permission to do something forbidden to many jobbing artists, something highly controversial in a predominantly Catholic Europe that believed in bodily resurrection on the Day of Judgment. He was allowed to dissect corpses.
Meanwhile, in the world of art, his anatomical drawings were copied by luminaries of the Renaissance such as Cellini, Vasari and Dürer. He helped to define how movement worked upon the limbs and joints of the body, making art become ever more lifelike. 'Ecstasy of Saint Teresa' sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini depicting the female form.
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