1. The Renaissance

2. What was the Renaissance?
“Rebirth”
Revival of art & learning
Bring back culture of Classical Greece & Rome
Led to new values such as importance of the individual

3. The Crusades & the Plague
What happened in the late Middle Ages that changed the way people thought about life?
The Crusades & the Plague

4. The Plague Ppl who survived wanted to celebrate life
Question the Church when they didn’t prevent or stop the plague
30-70% of European population died
Believed plague was caused by God
RCC did nothing to stop the plague
Ppl lost faith

5. How did the Crusades lead to the Renaissance?
Cultural Diffusion
The Crusades had another impact
Crusaders travelled to the Holy Land where they came into contact with Muslims
Abbasids held on to knowledge that came from Greece and Rome while the Europeans went through the Dark Ages Cultural Diffusion
Ships brought back goods and ideas to port cities
Starting the Renaissance

6. The Beginnings Where did it begin? Why Italy? Italy Thriving cities
Gradually spread to the rest of Europe
“Northern Renaissance”
Thriving cities
Wealthy merchant class became patrons of the arts
The Medici Family
Classical heritage of Greece & Rome
Cities
Trade spurred by the Crusades led to the growth of city-states in n. Italy
N. Italy was urban while the rest of europe was rural
Fewer ppl due to plague=higher wages for survivors
Merchants
Wealthy merchant class develops
Become involved in politics
Earned social rank; not inherited like with landowning nobles
Individual importance
The Medici Family
Banking family in Florence w/ branches throughout Italy
Cosimo Medici-wealthiest European
Dictator of Florence for 30 yrs
Lorenzo the Magnificant- Cosimo’s grandson
Greece & Rome
Looked to ruins of Rome
Studied Latin and Greek manuscripts

7. How did artistic techniques & ideas change in the Renaissance?
Perspective-2D on a one dimensional surface
Perspective
Middle Ages
Used religious subjects to convey a spiritual idea
Renaissance
Portrayed religious subjects using realistic styles

8. Perspective
First used by classical artists but abandoned by medieval artists
1400s-rediscovered by Italian artists
How does it work?
Optical Illusion
As parallel lines move away from a viewer they come together until they meet at a vanishing point on the horizon

9. Renaissance Example #1: The School of Athens, Raphael
The Catholic Church commissioned Raphael to paint a room in the Vatican, the city in which the Pope lives and where the church is centered. He painted both religious and secular scenes. The School of Athens is one of the secular scenes in which Raphael depicts Greek and Roman philosophers that Renaissance writers studied. He also painted himself into the scene. Raphael uses the perspective drawing which depicts the philosophers realistically. He based them on real people including the artists he looked up to like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.

10. Renaissance Example #2: David, Michelangelo
Michelangelo’s statue David (pictured to the left) is the most famous example of high Renaissance sculpture. It depicts David from the Old Testament of the Bible who goes to battle against Goliath, a giant that others were too afraid to fight, to defend the Israelites. According to the story, he defeated Goliath with only a slingshot, rocks, and the help of God.
Michelangelo, like most Renaissance sculptors, modeled David on Greek and Roman statues. You can see the similarities between David and The Hermes from Atalante (pictured on the right). Both are realistic, and idealized depictions of the human form. Both are also in contrapposto, a relaxed standing position in which more weight is on one leg than the other.
Michelangelo was able to create such a realistic sculpture because he, like many other Renaissance artists and scientists, studied anatomy by dissecting human bodies and drawing their skeletal and muscular structures.
Source: “Michelangelo, David Video.” Khan Academy.

11.                                                                                                                                                 
Renaissance Example #3: Brief Biography of Leonardo da Vinci ( )
Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, in Vinci, Italy. By the age of 20, he was qualified as a master artist skilled in metalworking, leather arts, carpentry, drawing and sculpting and established his own workshop. In 1482, Lorenzo de' Medici, a man from a prominent Italian family, commissioned da Vinci to create a silver lyre and bring it to the Duke of Milan, as a gesture of peace. Da Vinci did so and then wrote Ludovico a letter describing how his engineering and artistic talents would be of great service to Ludovico's court. From 1482 until 1499 Ludovico commissioned Leonardo to work on a great many projects. It was during this time that da Vinci painted "The Last Supper." “The Last Supper” depicts the scene from the New Testament in the Holy Bible when Jesus reveals to his disciples that one of them, Judas, will soon betray him and lead to his arrest and execution. Da Vinci's most well-known painting, and arguably the most famous painting in the world, the "Mona Lisa," was a privately commissioned work and was completed sometime between 1505 and For da Vinci, the "Mona Lisa" was forever a work in progress, as it was his attempt at perfection. The painting was never delivered to its commissioner; da Vinci kept it with him until the end of his life. Da Vinci’s talents inarguably extended far beyond his artistic works. Like many leaders of Renaissance humanism, he did not see a divide between science and art. His observations and inventions were recorded in 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, including designs for flying machines, plant studies, war machinery, anatomy and architecture. Source: Leonardo da Vinci. (2015). The Biography.com website. Retrieved 4/28/15.

12. Who is Mona Lisa?

13. Renaissance Example #4: The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo
This grand fresco contains over three hundred figures over five hundred square meters of ceiling. It took Michelangelo four years, lying on his back, to complete this masterful work, which stands even today as a testament to this one man's dedicated and accomplished artistry. The scenes depicted are from the Book of Genesis, the most famous of which is The Creation of Adam. The outstretched hands of God and Adam are an iconic image, perhaps the most widely known and imitated detail from any renaissance piece. Michelangelo, in this work, demonstrated his deep understanding of the human form, and how to depict it in a huge array of different poses.  The complex, twisting figures and vibrant colors of this work, and the sculptures with their writhing forms, played a huge role in the birthing of an entire artistic movement. Mannerism, largely derived from the work of Michelangelo, is a deliberately stylized form of sophisticated art, in which the human body is idealized. It can be characterized by often complex, and sometimes witty, composition and unnatural use of vibrant colors. Without Michelangelo, the works of later Mannerist artists like, for example, Pontormo and Bronzino, would not exist. Raphael was also strongly influenced by Michelangelo, as were later ceiling painters in the Baroque period, and many others since. His influence on art over the past centuries cannot be estimated. He is rightly viewed as a genius, and as the archetypal Renaissance man.

14. Coincidence?
God giving life and therefore wisdom to Adam

15. When thinking of Renaissance artists, think of the…
Michelangelo
Donatello
Leonardo
Raphael

16. The Renaissance leads to…
The Scientific Revolution
New ways of explaining the world and how it works
The Enlightenment
New ways of thinking about the purpose of and types of govt.
The Reformation
New way of thinking about Christianity