The High Renaissance

Raphael, Michelangelo, and da Vinci

(The fifth of my nine posts about European culture from the 400s to the 1700s.)

The Renaissance peaked in Italy from 1490 to 1525, reaching its great culmination in the High Renaissance. 

            For nearly two centuries the Catholic artists of Europe had aspired to new heights and applied new techniques — foreshortening and perspective, light and shade, space and movement, texture and composition, and use of oil.  Then, in masterpieces of harmony and strength – of unsurpassed beauty and power – the artists of the High Renaissance fulfilled the work of earlier Renaissance artists and reached the heights to which their predecessors had aspired.   

     The High Renaissance artists integrated the elements of Renaissance art into a transcendent new matrix.  In High-Renaissance culture there was the grand, majestic, exalted, spiritually sublime, and ineffable Judeo-Christian vision, full of revelation, virtue, and grace.  And there was the emerging vision of Western society and culture, with its unique mix of logic, erudition, emotion, aesthetics, and worldly activity.

Let’s look at three minor figures of the High Renaissance and then the Big Three: Raphael, Michelangelo, and da Vinci.

Titian, Correggio, Caravaggio

      Titiano Vecellio (c. 1485-1576), better known as Titian, transcended Italy to offer the first true European art.

            Titian excelled at both portraits and sacred art.  His colors were rich and sumptuous.  His work shows physical magnificence and every realistic care.  And yet it is marked by visionary fervor, imaginative daring, supreme artistic self-confidence, and scenes that enchant us. 

            Like no artist before him, Titian portrayed people as warm, breathing, and palpable.  His finest work is probably his 1522 masterpiece The Resurrection.  His many other powerful religious paintings include his 1557 Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, in which angels appear from Heaven to welcome home the dying Lawrence.

            Antonio da Correggio (c. 1489-1534) offered up the Nativity in Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1530), a painting in which bright Divine Light emanates from the Babe as delighted angels hover above.  It is an inventive masterpiece of incandescent luminosity, harmony, ease, and charm, and reflects the elegance of the High Renaissance.

            We could regard Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573-1610) as the last master painter of the Italian Renaissance.  Caravaggio showed superb command of every artistic device and excelled at painting artfully angled light, details of intense realism, dramatic contrasts of light and shade, and color. 

            Intense but never eccentric or modish, Caravaggio’s painting at his best could apply realism to liberate spiritual truth.  In his 1596 Ecstasy of Saint Francis, we watch Francis swoon as an angel shares in his Divine illumination, vision, and rebirth.  His 1600 Calling of Saint Matthew is dramatic and uses defining light in a new way. 

In his 1601 Supper at Emmaus we see the two disciples suddenly recognize that the stranger they are eating with is the resurrected Christ.  And his 1606 Seven Acts of Mercy brings Christ’s words in Matthew 25:35-36 to life on canvas.

Raphael

Raffaello Sanzio, better known as Raphael (1483-1520), had a superior command of the human form.  While he was less serious than Michelangelo or Leonardo, Raphael’s paintings were just as expressive and plenty dramatic.  Raphael’s range was wide, and more than the other two, Raphael delighted people.

            In many of his paintings, Raphael depicted theological ideas, Bible scenes, and human virtues.  No one of Raphael's time painted a more lovable Mary or a more elevating saint.  Raphael’s madonnas were wonderfully inventive — of a real and living woman, beautiful, reverent, devoted, tender, and serene.  Raphael’s madonnas have elevated viewers, inspired devotion, and triggered aesthetic rapture.

            The Madonna della Sedia (c. 1515) is an accomplished work of art, showing Mary as confident yet graceful, charming yet calm — an appealing maternal ideal.  In Raphael’s Madonna in the Sistine Chapel, both the Virgin and the Child are beautiful and solidly real even as they seem to levitate supernaturally between Heaven and Earth.    

            In Raphael’s 1517 painting Christ on the Road to Calvary, the dramatic action involves every individual participant, each of whom expresses unique feeling and thought in his or her gestures and face.  The mourners’ endurance is dissolving.  Mary is despairing and grieved yet elevated and calm.  Roman soldiers are full of their own power, and angered by a delay.

            And then there is Christ Himself, sharing a private gaze with His mother.  Christ’s face is clearly distressed by this physical and mental torture, yet infused with Divine beauty and strength.  With his unique inventiveness, Raphael lifts the whole scene onto its transcendent spiritual stage. 

            In 1517, Raphael sent to Brussels his full-size colored designs for episodes in the lives of Peter and Paul.  Here Raphael captures natural interaction of figures in a realistic narrative even though the concept and work are monumental.

            In Raphael’s La Disputa — Dispute of the Sacrament — Mary and John the Baptizer overlook Church leaders on Earth disputing the Eucharist.  Raphael’s fine Eucharist fresco The Triumph of the Sacrament also graces the Vatican.

            The Liberation of Saint Peter is a nearly perfect painting, unrivaled in presentation of figures, in visual imagery, and in skill of composition.  And in his magnificent last painting, The Transfiguration, Raphael shows Christ in Light above the apostles as they try to depossess a boy of demons.

            Raphael both assimilated and transformed human and spiritual experiences.  Raphael applied his instinct for form, with which he created each composition’s harmony.  With imagination and grace, he added an atmosphere of the supernatural with light and intimating subtleties.  

            More than anything else, Raphael’s genius was to invent virtual scenes that are easy for us to enter.  Raphael’s highest and unmatched gift is the way he invites us into a world, liberates our imagination, and steps aside. 

            Raphael produced a large number of quality paintings, all the more remarkable because Raphael died at age 37.  And Raphael’s influence was extensive.  Because Raphaelesque style was more life-like, (unlike Michelangelo’s profound style) it spread with ease across Italy and well beyond.

Raphael was also an architect.

            In Rome around 1513, a banker named Agostino Chigi (1466-1520) commissioned Raphael (1483-1520) to design, both architecturally and artistically, a mausoleum chapel at San Maria del Popolo.  Chigi wanted his memorial chapel to glorify the Divine and the eternal.

            As we step into the Agostino Chigi Chapel, we enter a dimension beyond anything to which we are accustomed.  Our ordinary experience stops, and we encounter something both eternal and fresh.

            The chapel is splendid yet austere, a temple of meditative calm.  In a richly luminous harmony, art and architecture draw us into the eternal world.  As we gaze up into the center of a bright dome, Yehovah looks down at us and summons us to a vision of Heaven. 

            The Chigi chapel takes our breath away.   It is one of the great works of the Renaissance – and one of the great works of all time.

Michelangelo

While Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) — who signed his name  Michelagnolo – was a world-class painter, a gifted architect, and an inspired poet, he was the most profound sculptor who ever lived.

            Michelangelo was a painter of power and feeling.  His 1525 painting The Supper at Emmaus demonstrates his greatness, as does his powerful and rarefied 1504 Holy Family — Doni Tondo — in which Mary receives the Child into her arms with both a mother's love and a disciple’s homage. 

            And from May 1508 to October 1512, Michelangelo poured out the riches of his imagination on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  He painted 300 figures — each a masterpiece of composition, movement, and sacred meaning — across 6,300 square feet of the Sistine ceiling.

            As we walk into the Sistine Chapel and look up, the eight panels carry our mind through the Biblical narrative from Creation to Christianity.  Suspended over us we see our soul, dragged down here by our mortal human nature, reaching out with homesick yearning for our Creator, Whose pure Divinity is glorious, magnificent, and unlimited in creative power.  And surrounding us on all sides are the prophets and other Divinely inspired figures of the Bible.

            This work of art is, of course, admired the world over, primarily for the noble beauty and powerful impact of Michelangelo's supreme harmonization of the human and the Divine.

As a sculptor, Michelangelo clearly attained and occupied a level of artistic excellence that was all his own.

            At 17, he was already using marble to express human energy with economy and facility.  By his mid-twenties he produced his marvelous and flawless Pieta, a sculpture fusing naturalistic beauty with deep religious feeling in a remarkable new manner. 

            During these years, Michelangelo also completed his mature and majestic Mary with the Dead Christ, which set a new standard of carving — a standard no sculptor on Earth had ever achieved before.  It was greeted with astonished respect.  With its religious ideal, its noble strength and tender pathos, and its simultaneous expression of human endurance and human fragility, the sculpture induces deep feelings of sorrow, gratitude, and prayerful reverence.

            Michelangelo's 14-foot free-standing white marble sculpture of David, dignified, poised and proud, and heroically athletic — a grand and timeless ideal of masculinity.  Michelangelo’s 1505 life-sized Madonna and Child is as fine a sculpture of the Madonna and the Babe as anyone has ever made.

            From 1513 to 1544, Michelangelo worked on his finest sculpture, his remarkable and majestic marble Moses.  And his sculpture of The Victory embodies how virtue defeats evil, frees our soul, and links our soul to the Divine. 

            Michelangelo sculpted the life-sized Christ Risen.  Two of his sculptures of saints at San Lorenzo, Florence — Saint Damian and Saint Cosmas — are works of rare expressiveness in marble. 

            He crafted no background, no landscapes.  And so the human beings he crafted often seem to hang in space.

            But what human beings they are.  Three-dimensional.  Moving.  Majestic.  Noble.  Real and natural, yet ideal and spiritual.  In superlative ripeness yet exceeding nature, their physical beauty reflects the true beauty of their soul and true Divine Beauty.  They are transcendent, exalted, made in God’s image and likeness.  And in their perfection they pull us toward perfection.

Da Vinci

            Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) produced only ten paintings, beginning with his Adoration of the Magi.  Yet each painting, including the Mona Lisa and Lady with an Ermine, is a work of the highest quality and originality – scientifically observant and technically accurate while revealing the inner reality of things, including expressions of the human spirit.

            With his own innovative technique, Leonardo achieved better gradations of light and dark colors, most beautifully exhibited in the Virgin of the Rocks.  He finished his Madonna and Child with Saint Anne in 1499. 

            Da Vinci had an unprecedented gift for portraying human character and personality — especially in painting facial expressions in all their subtle shades,.  Da Vinci painted with skill and depth, animating the human face and establishing convincing relationships between figures. 

            In his highly original 1497 masterpiece The Last Supper, Leonardo captured this moment of high emotional drama, harmonized the painting as a whole, balanced groups of apostles, and strikingly gave each apostle a facial expression that showed his relationship to Christ. 

  But Leonardo da Vinci was far more than a painter.      

            Leonardo was a painter, sculptor, architect, designer, engineer, inventor, scientist, mathematician, writer, and musician.  He was an artist, a scientist, a theorist, and an experimenter.  His mind was empirical, mechanical, mathematical, observant, and creative. 

            Da Vinci designed everything from sewers to palaces, from latrines to fountains, from stables to chapels.  He dissected corpses and he painted angels.  And he drew prototypes of an airplane, a helicopter, and a submarine.

            He sketched, he dissected, he analyzed, he contemplated.   With his restless curiosity, Leonardo searched for knowledge and for beauty.   With awareness and precision beyond any person before him, he eyed the external world, came to know it, and represented it accurately.

            Leonardo was interested in every aspect of the physical world.  His notebooks were filled with sketches and thoughts about everything from water to storms, from optics to hydraulics, from engines to meteorology.  He eyed the human body and human moods and facial expressions as phenomena, with scientific detachment and psychological acuity. 

            Leonardo’s curiosity and observations were so wide-ranging that he became the most influential pioneer of the adventurous, speculative investigation that has fueled Western and global progress ever since. 

           No man better embodies the Renaissance mind than Leonardo da Vinci.  Da Vinci stands even today as the ultimate, supreme, and archetypal genius of all time, and as history’s great polymath genius.  And his genius is a pioneering genius, showing us all the breadth of the human mind, including our own.