Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [28]
The rich, handsome, wildly successful Raphael went from triumph to triumph, a star of the brilliant papal court. He was a devoted lady’s man, “very amorous,” said Vasari, with “secret pleasures beyond all measure.” When he caught a fever after a midnight assignation and died on his thirty-seventh birthday, the entire court “plunged into grief.”
Raphael’s art most completely expressed all the qualities of the High Renaissance. From Leonardo he borrowed pyramidal composition and learned to model faces with light and shadow (chiaroscuro). From Michelangelo, Raphael adapted full-bodied, dynamic figures and the contrapposto pose.
TITIAN: THE FATHER OF MODERN PAINTING. Like his fellow Venetian painters, Titian (pronounced TISH un; 1490?-1576), who dominated the art world in the city for sixty years, used strong colors as his main expressive device. First he covered the surface of the canvas with red for warmth, then he painted both background and figures in vivid hues and toned them down with thirty or forty layers of glazes. Through this painstaking method, he was able to portray any texture completely convincingly, whether polished metal, shiny silk, red-gold hair, or warm flesh. One of the first to abandon wood panels, Titian established oil on canvas as the typical medium.
After his wife died in 1530, Titian’s paintings became more muted, almost monochromatic. Extremely prolific until his late 80s, as his sight failed Titian loosened his brushstrokes. At the end they were broad, thickly loaded with paint, and slashing. A pupil reported that Titian “painted more with his fingers than with his brushes.”
Titian, “Bacchanal of the Adrians,” 1518, Prado, Madrid. This pagan wine party contains the major ingredients of Tition’s early style: dazzling contrasting colors, ample female forms, and asymmetric compositions.
THE VENETIAN SCHOOL
While artists working in Florence and Rome concentrated on sculptural forms and epic themes, Venetian painters were fascinated with color, texture, and mood. Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516) was the first Italian master of the new oil painting technique. Titian’s mentor, Bellini was also the first to integrate figure and landscape. Giorgione (1476-1510) aroused emotion through light and color. In his “Tempest,” a menacing storm cloud created a sense of gloom and mystery. After Titian — the most famous of Venetian artists — Tintoretto and Veronese continued the large-scale, majestic style of deep coloring and theatricality. In the eighteenth century, the Rococo painter Tiepolo carried on the Venetian tradition, as did Guardi and Conaletto in their atmospheric cityscapes.
ARCHITECTURE IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE. Informed by the same principles of harmonious geometry that underlay painting and sculpture, architecture recovered the magnificence of ancient Rome. The most noted Renaissance architects were Alberti, Brunelleschi, Bramante, and Palladio.
A writer, painter, sculptor, and architect, Alberti (pronounced al BEAR tee; 1404-72) was the Renaissance’s major theorist who wrote treatises on painting, sculpture, and architecture. He downplayed art’s religious purpose and urged artists to study “sciences” like history, poetry, and mathematics as building blocks. Alberti wrote the first systematic guide to perspective and provided sculptors with rules for ideal human proportions.
Another multifaceted Renaissance man, Brunelleschi (pronounced brew nell LESS kee; 1377-1446) was skilled as a goldsmith, sculptor, mathematician, clock builder, and architect. But he is best known as the father of modern engineering. Not only did he discover mathematical perspective, he also championed the central-plan church design that replaced the medieval basilica. He alone was capable of constructing a dome for the Florence Cathedral, called the Eighth Wonder of the World. His inspiration was to build two shells, each supporting the other, crowned by a lantern stabilizing the whole. In designing