Renaissance_ A Short History, The - Johnson, Paul [48]
His practice flourished, and in due course these buildings and what he wrote about them became known all over Europe and were imitated and adapted to different climates and latitudes. Thus the Palladian style was born, spread, in time crossed the Atlantic and went east to India and beyond. He was the only one of the Renaissance architects to give his name to a style that has endured. He was also the last of the true Renaissance architects—that is, men inspired by a love and knowledge of the antique, especially Roman, past, who wanted to re-create its best features, suitably modified, in the sunny cities and countryside of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. By the time he died in 1580, the work of the Renaissance, in Italy at least, was complete, and its buildings were spread out for men to see, to love, to learn from and to be warned by, and a different spirit was in the air.
PART 5
THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSIONS OF RENAISSANCE PAINTING
The history of painting during the Renaissance is enormously complicated and involves hundreds of good or outstanding painters, operating over a huge geographical area for the best part of three hundred years. In order to understand it, certain salient points must be grasped from the beginning. And the first point concerns visualization—that is, the way in which painters analyzed the visual world with their eyes and brains, and transferred what they saw to a two-dimensional surface. In deep antiquity, particularly in Egypt, the early civilization where the arts were most strongly developed, the visualization was aspective: that is, the artist, working in paint or low-relief sculpture, conveyed to his two-dimensional surface not so much what he saw as what he knew was there. All the details that he felt were significant for his purpose, not just those to be seen from a single viewpoint, were systematically put down. The result is real and truthful in the sense that everything represented is there, and so the information conveyed is exact. But the eye does not see it, or all of it, so in another sense it looks false or clumsy or primitive.
Since the artist is striving to create illusion, to produce a two-dimensional something that looks exactly like the real thing, he is never content with aspective art, unless (as in ancient Egypt) he is constrained by canonical conventions laid down by religious dogma. The ancient Greeks were subject to no such constraints, or freed themselves from them, so that from the seventh century B.C., and especially during the classic period of Greek art in the fifth century B.C., they developed various devices, such as foreshortening of the human figure and the use of perspective, to create two-dimensional illusions of reality. This replacement of aspective art by perspective art was one of the greatest steps forward in human civilization. It is not always easy to follow, since virtually no Greek wall painting survives. What does survive is usually on the curved or spheroid surfaces of painted vases and other utensils. The Greeks learned not only to portray the human body as it is seen, but to present it in realistic action and in the context of its surroundings. By using foreshortening and other illusionistic devices, and by deploying perspective conjunctions, they contrived to conquer pictorial space, just as in the twentieth century we began to conquer astronomic space. The Romans inherited their knowledge and skills, and some of their flat-surface painting does survive, notably at