The Classical World Gained, Lost, Then Reborn in the Renaissance

Before Figures, there was clay, and the need for utensils. But people in all cultures move toward design. But within the world of design, Wilhelm Worringer suggests that humanity swings back and forth through time, from loving abstract design, to loving representational design.

From simple utilitarian clay to abstract religious figures, modeling those figures on those early representations of the human form, among the Cycladic figures, to those of the Egyptians, whose methods the Ancient Greek artisans copied

We have seen the Greeks move from abstraction to representation, from protogeometric, geometric, archaic, classical, late classical, and hellenistic. The Romans just copied the Greeks. But Rome Falls 476 CE, and so does this world, expanded as it was in Northern Europe, the place to which we go now.

Medieval Periods lack proportion, perspective, representational detail, cxontrapposto…but we begin to see a turn in the early 15 th century back to and older Greco-Roman sense of these things. So too, themes other than Christian ones remerge, as do bodies….

Compare Michelangelo’s “David” with the order, proportion and balance, and the calmness of classical Greece and Rome. Now, consider, just as the Hellenstic period made the Classical period a little more frenetic, so too, post renaissance restoration art did the same thing. Check out Bernini’s David…