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Oil Painting and Renaissance, Part 2 |
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The climax of late 15th-century painting came in the work of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Leonardo studied painting in Florence, but he spent much of his life working in Milan. The last few years of his life were spent in France in the service of King Francis I.
The climax of late 15th-century painting came in the work of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Leonardo studied painting in Florence, but he spent much of his life working in Milan. The last few years of his life were spent in France in the service of King Francis I.
Leonardo is the perfect example of the “Renaissance Man” because he was interested in and well-informed about a great many subjects: literature, science, mathematics, art—almost everything about man and nature. Like many artists of the time, he was a sculptor and an architect as well as a painter. His paintings, particularly The Last Supper, the Mona Lisa, and the Madonna of the Rocks, have made him famous. The unique way he handled light and shadow is his most unusual characteristic. Leonardo’s remarkable ability to grasp and express mysteries of man and nature made him one of the greatest of all painters.
The talented painter Rafaello Sanzio, known as Raphael (1483-1520), from Urbino, was called to Rome by Pope Julius II. Many influences went into the transformation of his beautiful style of painting. From his early training in Urbino he developed a feeling for spaciousness and open landscape. When he was 21 years old, he went to Florence, where he absorbed the achievements of the Florentines. From them, especially from Leonardo, he learned how to group figures in space, Michelangelo’s influence can be seen in the twisting postures of his human figures.
Everything Raphael painted—especially his madonnas—has an air of serenity and dignity. His famous madonna painting, La Belle Jardiniere (“The Beautiful Gardener”), painted in 1507, has an unusually pleasing composition. Raphael envisioned man as the ruler of his environment, not as its servant, a High Renaissance idea beautifully expressed in this painting.
One of the greatest 16th-century artists was Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564). In sculpture, architecture, and painting he was so outstanding that he was called the divine. He was born in Caprese, and as a young man studied the works of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, and the Greeks and Romans.
In 1505, Michelangelo was called by Pope Julius II to Rome, where he was commissioned to work on a number of projects. The most important were the Pope’s tomb, the decoration of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, and the new basilica of St. Peter’s.
The Sistine ceiling, which took 4 years to paint under difficult conditions, is composed of hundreds of figures from the Old Testament. In all his representations of the human figure, whether in sculpture or in painting, Michelangelo strove for monumentality.
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Evaluating an Oil Painting 
