The 15th and 16th centuries saw the flowering of the Renaissance, a period of renewed interest in classical antiquity that emphasized humanism, naturalism, and the development of new artistic techniques.
It began in Italy and later spread throughout Europe, with distinct regional styles and priorities.
Key periods
The Early Renaissance (15th century)
Originating in Florence, the Early Renaissance, or Quattrocento, established the foundations for the later High Renaissance.
Masaccio (1401-1428): Credited with popularizing linear perspective and creating realistic figures with solidity and emotion.
Donatello (1386-1466): His bronze David was the first free-standing nude sculpture since antiquity, demonstrating classical influence.
Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510): Known for elegant mythological paintings like The Birth of Venus and Primavera.
Jan van Eyck (1390-1441): A pioneer of the Northern Renaissance who mastered oil painting and meticulous detail, as seen in The Arnolfini Portrait.
A grave, statuesque young woman gazes down at a positively enormous child, who lies sideways across her lap.
Her deep red gown is open to reveal her breast, which she offers to her son - though he seems uninterested.
He turns his head away from his mother to look out at the viewer, while playing with the beads which dangle from her scarf.
We know from their delicate haloes that these are the Virgin Mary and infant Christ, but this is a very modern Mary, painted in a newly realistic manner.
Bacchus (1496-1497) is a marble sculpture by the Italian High Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect and poet Michelangelo Buonarroti.
The statue is somewhat over life-size and depicts Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, in a reeling pose suggestive of drunkenness.
Commissioned by Raffaele Riario, a high-ranking Cardinal and collector of antique sculpture, it was rejected by him and was bought instead by Jacopo Galli, Riario’s banker and a friend to Michelangelo.
Along with the Pietà the Bacchus is one of only two surviving sculptures from the artist's first period in Rome.
La decisione di Giulio II di rifare integralmente la decorazione della volta fu probabilmente dovuta ai gravi problemi di natura statica che interessarono la Sistina fin dai primi anni del suo pontificato (1503-1513).
Essi dovettero essere la conseguenza degli scavi eseguiti sia a nord che a sud dell’edificio per la costruzione della Torre Borgia e del nuovo San Pietro.
Dopo che nel maggio del 1504, una lunga crepa si aprì nella volta, fu incaricato Bramante, allora architetto di Palazzo, di porvi rimedio, il quale mise in opera alcune catene nel locale soprastante la Cappella.
Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) "put the oscuro (shadows) into chiaroscuro".
Chiaroscuro was practised long before he came on the scene, but it was Caravaggio who made the technique a dominant stylistic element, darkening the shadows and transfixing the subject in a blinding shaft of light.
It is part of the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna, Austria.
History
The series of Jupiter's Loves was conceived after the success of Venus and Cupid with a Satyr. Correggio painted four canvasses in total, although others had been programmed perhaps.
The Master of the Female Half-Lengths, active ca.1530-1540, was a Dutch Northern Renaissance painter* or likely a group of painters of a workshop.
The name was given in the 19th century to identify the maker or makers of a body of work consisting of 67 paintings to which since 40 more have been added.
The works were apparently the product of a large workshop that specialized in small-scale panels depicting aristocratic young ladies at half-length.
Jacopo da Pontormo, original name Jacopo Carrucci (born May 24, 1494, Pontormo, near Empoli, Republic of Florence (Italy)-buried Jan. 2, 1557, Florence) Florentine painter who broke away from High Renaissance classicism to create a more personal, expressive style that is sometimes classified as early Mannerism.
Pontormo was the son of Bartolommeo Carrucci, a painter. According to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, he was apprenticed to Leonardo da Vinci and afterward to Mariotto Albertinelli and Piero di Cosimo.
Julius II's decision to completely renovate the decoration of the Ceiling was probably due to the serious problems of a static nature that affected the Sistine Chapel from the earliest years of his pontificate (1503-1513).
They must have been the result of the excavations carried out both to the north and to the south of the building for the construction of the Borgia Tower and for the new St Peter's.
After a long crack had opened in the Ceiling in May 1504, Bramante, then the Palace architect, was charged with finding a solution and he fixed some tie rods in the area above the Chapel.
However, the damage suffered by the old painting must have been such as to convince the pontiff to entrust Michelangelo with a new pictorial decoration.
This is the only easel painting that can be dated with certainty to Rosso's stay in France in 1530-40.
The cushions beneath Christ's body bear the blue alerions on an orange background of the coat of arms of Constable Anne de Montmorency, from whose château at Ecouen the Pietà was taken to the Louvre in the late 18th century.
The marks visible on the bodies of Christ and St John are due to an initial, reversed composition - vsible under X-ray photography - which Rosso had blacked out.
Revolutionary in his way of painting, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) personifies in every aspect of his eventful life the romantic figure of the damned artist.
Caravaggio was a leading Italian painter of the late 16th and early 17th centuries who became famous for the intense and unsettling realism of his large-scale religious works.
Caravaggio's innovations inspired Baroque painting, but the latter incorporated the drama of his chiaroscuro without the psychological realism.
The mighty composition, painted by Michelangelo between 1536-1541, is centred around the dominant figure of Christ, captured in the moment preceding that when the verdict of the Last Judgement is uttered (Matthew 25:31-46).
His calm imperious gesture seems to both command attention and placate the surrounding agitation. It starts a wide slow rotary movement in which all the figures are involved.
The biographies of Michelangelo by Vasari (1550) and Condivi (1553) recount that following the artist’s return to Florence from Bologna in 1495, his first commission was for a marble sculpture of a “San Giovannino” for Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’Medici (cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent), now identified as the present work.
Rather than following the model of Donatello’s Saint John the Baptist (Florence, Museo del Bargello) as other Florentine sculptors had done, Michelangelo depicted the Baptist as much younger, no more than a boy of six or seven.
It is a 5.17-metre (17.0 ft)[a] marble statue of a standing male.
The statue represents the Biblical hero David, a favoured subject in the art of Florence.
Originally commissioned as one of a series of statues of prophets to be positioned along the roofline of the east end of Florence Cathedral, the statue was placed instead in a public square, outside the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of civic government in Florence, where it was unveiled on 8 September 1504.
The Recanati Polyptych is a painting by the Italian Renaissance painter Lorenzo Lotto, executed in 1506-1508 and housed in the Civic Museum of Villa Colloredo Mels, Recanati, Italy.
The work is dated and signed Laurent[ius] Lotus MDVIII.
Lotto began to work on the piece in 1506 as a devotional for the church of San Domenico in Recanati.
This style is characterised by its exciting effects of light and unpolished naturalism.
Rubens did not make this painting to be sold; instead he retained possession of it. He probably used it as study material for the pupils in his studio.
Peter Paul Rubens | Old Woman and Boy with Candles, 1616-1617 | Museum Mauritshuis The Hague
Baroque music refers to the period or dominant style of Western classical music composed from about 1600 to 1750.
The Baroque style followed the Renaissance period, and was followed in turn by the Classical period after a short transition (the galant style).
The Baroque period is divided into three major phases: early, middle, and late. Overlapping in time, they are conventionally dated from 1580 to 1650, from 1630 to 1700, and from 1680 to 1750.
Baroque music forms a major portion of the "classical music" canon, and is widely studied, performed, and listened to.
The term "baroque" comes from the Portuguese word barroco, meaning "misshapen pearl".
Key composers of the Baroque era include: Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi, George Frideric Handel, Georg Philipp Telemann, Domenico Scarlatti, Claudio Monteverdi, Alessandro Stradella, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Arcangelo Corelli, François Couperin, Heinrich Schütz, Dieterich Buxtehude and Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber.
The Baroque saw the formalization of common-practice tonality, an approach to writing music in which a song or piece is written in a particular key; this type of harmony has continued to be used extensively in Western classical and popular music.
During the Baroque era, professional musicians were expected to be accomplished improvisers of both solo melodic lines and accompaniment parts.
Baroque concerts were typically accompanied by a basso continuo group (comprising chord-playing instrumentalists such as harpsichordists and lute players improvising chords from a figured bass part) while a group of bass instruments—viol, cello, double bass—played the bassline.
A characteristic Baroque form was the dance suite.
While the pieces in a dance suite were inspired by actual dance music, dance suites were designed purely for listening, not for accompanying dancers.
During the period composers experimented with finding a fuller sound for each instrumental part (thus creating the orchestra), made changes in musical notation (the development of figured bass as a quick way to notate the chord progression of a song or piece), and developed new instrumental playing techniques.
Baroque music expanded the size, range, and complexity of instrumental performance, and also established the mixed vocal/instrumental forms of opera, cantata and oratorio and the instrumental forms of the solo concerto and sonata as musical genres.
Dense, complex polyphonic music, in which multiple independent melody lines were performed simultaneously (a popular example of this is the fugue), was an important part of many Baroque choral and instrumental works.
Playing music in Baroque era | Johann Sebastian Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565)
La musica barocca è un'epoca nella storia della musica colta occidentale che segue il Rinascimento e si estende dall'inizio del XVII fino a circa la metà del XVIII secolo.
Le caratteristiche tipiche di questa lunga ed eterogenea epoca musicale sono la rappresentazione degli affetti (l'assegnazione di tipi di rappresentazione musicale a stati d'animo specifici), lo stile concertato (l'interazione di gruppi sonori eterogenei) ed il basso continuo (le voci della melodia sono contrapposte a una voce di basso, che è notata con numeri per indicare gli accordi da suonare).
Per questo motivo è stato suggerito il termine “Era del direttore d’orchestra”.
Nel periodo barocco la musica strumentale si emancipò dalla musica vocale e diede origine anche all'orchestra nel suo senso moderno.
L'inizio del periodo barocco nella musica fu segnato intorno al 1600 dall'invenzione della monodia (canto solista o voce solista strumentale con accompagnamento) e dal nuovo genere dell'opera in Italia, il cui principale rappresentante fu Claudio Monteverdi.
Lo stile drammatico e carico di emozione fu trasferito alla musica strumentale da Girolamo Frescobaldi e adattato in Germania da Heinrich Schütz alle caratteristiche della lingua tedesca.
Dopo questa fase iniziale, intorno al 1640, ebbe inizio in Italia l'alto barocco, con un carattere più lirico e una maggiore fluidità formale, con Francesco Cavalli come compositore di opere, Giacomo Carissimi di oratori e poi Arcangelo Corelli con la musica per archi.
In Francia, uno stile barocco indipendente, in cui la danza rivestiva maggiore importanza, fu instaurato da Jean-Baptiste Lully, nelle cui opere, a differenza dello stile italiano, il contenuto espressivo del canto rimase contenuto.
In Inghilterra, Henry Purcell combina influenze italiane e francesi con la tradizione locale e le peculiarità della pronuncia inglese.
In Germania la scuola organistica della Germania settentrionale, importante anche per la musica vocale sacra, trovò in Dietrich Buxtehude un rappresentante di spicco.
Nel tardo barocco, a partire dal 1690 circa, la combinazione degli stili nazionali sviluppatisi nel periodo dell'alto barocco giocò un ruolo importante, in Francia con François Couperin, in Germania con Georg Philipp Telemann e in Inghilterra con Georg Friedrich Händel.
La tensione tra i rapporti tonali viene ora utilizzata per sviluppare forme più ampie, come nella forma ritornello (con una parte ricorrente chiamata ritornello) di Antonio Vivaldi.
Un cambiamento di stile con melodie più dettagliate e una riduzione della polifonia (più voci indipendenti) iniziò negli anni Venti del Settecento, inizialmente nell'opera italiana, ad esempio con Leonardo Vinci e Giovanni Battista Pergolesi.
Jean-Philippe Rameau presentò la prima teoria dell'armonia (la teoria della successione di armonie di più toni).
Anche Domenico Scarlatti, compositore di sonate per clavicembalo attivo in Spagna, divenne un precursore del periodo classico, rompendo la continuità barocca, mentre allo stesso tempo la densità strutturale di Johann Sebastian Bach, che servì da modello per i compositori del periodo classico, funge da contrappunto.
L'anno della morte di Bach, il 1750, è spesso utilizzato come punto di fine di un'epoca.
La musica barocca serviva principalmente a rappresentare la nobiltà e la chiesa.
I musicisti erano organizzati in forma di corporazione oppure avevano un impiego fisso.
La tipologia dell'imprenditore musicale inizia a farsi notare solo a metà del XVIII secolo, in un'attività musicale in cui la borghesia è sempre più coinvolta.
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