The Renaissance And Linear Influence In The Italian Renaissance

The Italian Renaissance was the revival of Greco-Roman art and culture, which spread all across western Europe from the 14th century to the 16th century. The name of one powerful family became synonymous with this cultural phenomenon: the Medici. Just like the Rockefeller family was to the American industry, the Medici of Florence were to the Italian Renaissance. By the early 15th century, the banker Giovanni de’ Medici established the dynasty’s wealth. His son Cosimo de’ Medici became a great patron for the arts, and later on, Lorenzo de’ Medici followed his grandfather’s footsteps and was called “The Magnificent” for investing lavishly on artistic works such as buildings, paintings, and sculptures. The characteristics of the artistic style found in the majority of these works were Humanist in nature, and included chiaroscuro, contrapposto, and linear perspective. Humanism

Although it was first introduced by the Greeks and Romans, Brunelleschi was the first to develop linear perspective in the Italian Renaissance. Linear perspective helped artists make the illusion of distance certain and consistent. Brunelleschi mainly used linear perspective for architecture, however, artists like Donatello and Ghiberti, who was Brunelleschi’s rival applied it to many of their works. In Donatello’s Feast of Herod, the architectural setting in the panel decreased in size systematically with increasing distance from the viewer. In Ghiberti’s Isaac and His Sons, all the orthogonals of the floor tiles converge on a vanishing point in on the center of the work when the orthogonals of the architecture do not. Overtime, artists like Masaccio experimented with linear perspective like in his work Holy Trinity where the vanishing point is at the foot of the cross, pulling two views together, with one view looking up at the Trinity and the other down at the