The dawn of the Renaissance in Florence: origins, development, style

The term Renaissance was first used in 1855 by Jules Michelet, and thanks mainly to Jacob Burckhardt’s best-known work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy of 1860, it became established to denote that period of “rupture” with the Gothic tradition that arose in Italy, and particularly in Florence, in the early fifteenth century. The break was not so marked, however, because for several years Gothic trends and Renaissance trends coexisted. Renaissance civilization nowadays is seen more as a continuation and evolution (albeit sharp and animated by different principles and models) of medieval civilization than as an irremediable fracture point.

One of the major trends of the Renaissance was the rediscovery ofclassical antiquity, which, however, already permeated part of Gothic art (especially in sculpture): there were, however, substantial differences. Meanwhile, the recovery of the classical in the Renaissance was total: forms, contents, modes, symbols, and techniques of ancient art were imitated and practiced by Renaissance artists. Second, ancient art was seen as an opportunity to study modernity and observe rules: in sculpture, for example, ancient art was the starting point for the study of figures, bodies, anatomies. And also, the birth of scientific perspective, whose canons were developed by an architect, Filippo Brunelleschi (Florence, 1377 - 1446), came after a long study by the latter of ancient architecture. Third, Renaissance classicism was seen as a way of representing man in his reality.

Birth of the Renaissance in Florence

Why is Florence the place where we can say that the Renaissance originated? In Florence, and in Tuscany in general, the rediscovery of antiquity had already laid its foundations two centuries earlier, through the work of sculptors, men of letters(Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarch in fact had initiated the study of ancient literature) to find fulfillment with the work of the humanists, such as Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni, who in Florence gave a considerable impetus to the study of classical sources. What’s more, Florence was not, in the early fifteenth century, dominated by a lordship or court that dictated tastes, but had a republican form of government that favored the rise of a very rich and powerful bourgeoisie that financed and protected artists. As a result, patrons and patrons often competed with each other, and this competition gave rise to a healthy rivalry between artists who tried to come up with new patterns and models (even if they were often not fully understood by a patronage still culturally bound to late Gothic stylistic features). From this bourgeoisie then later emerged the Medici, who in 1434, with Cosimo the Elder, “took over” the city, establishing a de facto seigniory that, however, did not fail to encourage the arts, and indeed nurtured their development. These were in essence the factors that allowed Florence to play a leading role in the process that gave birth to the Renaissance as we understand it today.

Filippo Brunelleschi, the “father” of the Renaissance in architecture, has been mentioned: it was he, as mentioned above, who sanctioned the birth of scientific perspective, which was the greatest innovation that divided, this time indeed sharply, Gothic art from Renaissance art, and he was the architect of a series of buildings that were directly inspired by classical art. The most famous of all was surely the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence(read an in-depth look at the dome here), which found its roots in the Pantheon in Rome. The first artist to apply Brunelleschi’s scientific perspective in painting (e.g. in the Trinity, 1425-1427, Florence, Santa Maria Novella) was Tommaso di Mone Cassai, better known as Masaccio (San Giovanni Valdarno, 1401 - Rome, 1428), who despite his very short parabola (he disappeared at only twenty-seven years of age), is considered the “father” of the Renaissance in painting. His novelty was such that it influenced an entire generation of artists, and it was he who marked in painting the division between Gothic and Renaissance art by securing for himself a very prominent role in the entire history of Western art. This role, in sculpture, fell instead to Donato de’ Bardi better known as Donatello (Florence, 1386 - 1466): the detachment from Gothic sculpture coincided in Donatello with the representation of natural reality, learned through the study of ancient art. If Brunelleschi and Masaccio adopted a “scientific” point of view, which was one of the souls of the Renaissance, Donatello instead approached art with the other Renaissance soul, that of naturalness. The Florentine sculptor’s study of anatomies and the range of expressions he was able to give his works were no longer part of the repertoire of art since antiquity, and these results were achieved even in those works that Donatello produced alongside those of classical inspiration (such as the Monument to Gattamelata in Padua, Pa, made between 1445 and 1453), or those that departed from the more classicist instances of the Renaissance (such as the Magdalene of the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, circa 1453-1455: read an article on the work here) that nevertheless fell squarely within modernity because of their intense and almost extreme realism.

Artists of “transition”: Lorenzo Ghiberti, Beato Angelico

Alongside the three “fathers” of the Renaissance immediately emerged the figures of a number of artists who, trained in the late Gothic sphere, immediately gave their works of art a Renaissance imprint. The main names are those of Lorenzo Ghiberti (Florence, c. 1380 - 1455) as far as sculpture was concerned and Beato Angelico (Florence, c. 1395 - Rome 1455) for painting. Older than Donatello and Masaccio respectively, the former wanted to give a Renaissance twist to his art still marked by late Gothic elegance and preciousness. The culmination of this modernization process occurs in the reliefs for the Gates of Paradise (1425-1452) of the Florence Baptistery (but the original panels are in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence), where the sculptor applies, on the one hand, Brunelleschi’s scientific perspective (with Brunelleschi he rivaled in 1401 in the celebrated competition for the north door of the Baptistery, seen as one of the founding moments of the Renaissance, but surpassing his rival with a composition stylistically more backward than that of the architect) and on the other the stiacciato invented by Donatello. The stiacciato is a technique that allowed reliefs to give the feeling of depth by decreasing the overhang of the relief from the background as the subject moves away from the viewer’s point of view.

Similar was the path taken by Guido di Pietro, who later became Fra’ Giovanni da Fiesole and is known today as Beato Angelico: at first he was a distinctly late Gothic painter, trained in the examples of Gherardo Starnina and Lorenzo Monaco, but on coming into contact with Masaccio his art changed radically, and he was able to merge the vigorous plasticism of Masaccio’s matrix (as well as the application in painting of scientific perspective) with the delicacy of colorism and elegance that are typically late Gothic. What’s more, Beato Angelico also posed himself as an innovator of iconographies that had been entrenched for centuries: it was he, for example, who eliminated the gold background from polyptychs, as can be seen in the San Marco Altarpiece (c. 1440, Florence, Museo Nazionale di San Marco).

The fact that the right climate was created in Florence for the development of the Renaissance did not mean, however, that the three artists who initiated the innovations met with a high level of success, and the cause was mainly the lack of openness to the new on the part of the patrons: Masaccio did not work for prestigious patrons (his only major patron in Florence was the merchant Felice Brancacci), Donatello for a time had to work in Padua, Brunelleschi lost the 1401 competition, won by Ghiberti, because patrons were not yet “ready” for the innovative charge of his work, and he saw some projects refused. And Beato Angelico himself had to propose the novelties of his art gradually to his patrons who were still tied to late Gothic stylistic features. We should not forget, for example, that in 1423, a full seven years after the creation of Donatello’s Renaissance San Giorgio (Florence, Bargello Museum) and while Masaccio was busy in the Brancacci Chapel, Gentile da Fabriano produced his masterpiece, theAdoration of the Magi, one of the pinnacles of international Gothic.

The dawn of the Renaissance in Florence: origins, development, style

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