An Introduction to the History of Western Europe

by James Harvey Robinson

Importance of Italian art in the Renaissance period.

124. The stimulus of the antique ideals of beauty and the renewed interest in man and nature is nowhere more apparent than in the art of the Renaissance period in Italy. The bonds of tradition, which had hampered mediæval art,[231] were broken. The painters and sculptors continued, it is true, to depict the same religious subjects which their mediæval predecessors had chosen. But in the fourteenth century the Italian artists began to draw their inspiration from the fragments of antique art which they found about them and from the world full of life and beauty in which they lived. Above all, they gave freer rein to their own imagination. The tastes and ideals of the individual artist were no longer repressed but became the dominant element in his work. The history of art becomes, during the Renaissance, a history of artists.

Italian architecture.

Italy inherits the art of Greece and Rome.

The Gothic style in architecture had never taken root in Italy. The Italians had continued to build their churches in a more or less modified Romanesque[232] form. While the soaring arches and delicate tracery of the Gothic cathedral had become the ideal of the North, in Italy the curving lines and harmonious proportions of the dome inspired the best efforts of the Renaissance builders. They borrowed many fine details, such as capitals and cornices, from the antique, and also—what was far more important—the simplicity and beauty of proportion which characterized classical architecture. Just as Italy had inherited, in a special sense, the traditions of classical literature, so it was natural that it should be more directly affected than the rest of Europe by the remains of Greek and Roman art. It is in harmony of proportion and beauty of detail that the great charm of the best Renaissance buildings consists.

Niccola of Pisa, 1206–1280.

It is, perhaps, in sculpture that the influence of the antique models was earliest and most obviously shown. The sculptor, Niccola of Pisa (Niccola Pisano), stands out as the first distinguished leader in the forward movement. It is evident that he studied certain fragments of antique sculpture—a sarcophagus and a marble vase that had been found in Pisa—with the greatest care and enthusiasm. He frankly copied from them many details, and even several whole figures, in the reliefs on his most famous work, the pulpit in the baptistery at Pisa.[233] But while sculpture was the first of the arts to feel the new impetus, its progress was slow; it was not until the fifteenth century that it began, in Italy, to develop on wholly independent and original lines.

Frescoes and easel pictures.

The paintings of the period of the early Renaissance were usually frescoes; that is, they were painted directly upon the plaster walls of churches and sometimes of palaces. A few pictures, chiefly altar pieces, were executed on wooden panels, but it was not until the sixteenth century that easel paintings, that is, detached pictures on canvas, wood, or other material, became common.