Period 1, team 8

Renaissance art, which is known as the “rebirth” of art from its many ancient traditions, occurred parallel to changes in philosophy, literature, music and science. However, despite the changes that were affecting everyday society, one constant remained: the Catholic Church. Churches were major buyers of art: they often called upon artists to paint something religious and biblical, despite whatever the artist may have believed. Although the artists were limited thematically, they still found ways to pervade their artwork with fragments of their beliefs and ideals.

One of Michelangelo’s most famous works, the Sistine Chapel ceiling represents how Michelangelo inputted his own personal likes into a Church sponsored piece of art. Originally, the Pope who commissioned this artwork requested that the ceiling simple be filled with twelve large figures of the Apostles. However, Michelangelo was adamant about drawing a huge, large-scale project that would take years to complete simple because he found that the drawing he had schemed up was much more aesthetically pleasing. It is evident that there was a major difference in priority when it came to Michelangelo and the Pope – the Pope wanted something representative of the Church, whereas Michelangelo wanted an artwork that he could be proud to call his own. Eventually, the Pope agreed on using Michelangelo’s large scale project – however, he wanted the theme of the artwork to describe humankind’s need to have a relationship with God. The artwork Michelangelo drew became made up of nine scenes from the Book of Genesis, five of which were framed and supposed by four naked youths. The narrative of the ceiling illustrated that God made the world and all humans; even when humanity became disgraceful; it was God who sent his son to save humankind. The message that the Church tried to send across through this painting was that humanity needed God. Humanity was disgusting, sinful, and heavily flawed – without God, humanity became even dirtier, and therefore, even more useless. However, Michelangelo believed in what he called “Humanism,” which means that he believed humans were born potentially noble and beautiful. In order to show this, he inserted “non-biblical” figures such as the Sibyls; he cited his reason for adding them to be “aesthetic purposes” when in actuality, he inserted the characters in order to stress his own personal belief. Michelangelo’s adding of non-biblical figures reflects the change that the society outside Church felt – many people were drawing away from the Church’s beliefs and forming their own opinions and beliefs. However, the fact that most of the drawing remained pertinent to the Catholic Church proves that, although they were losing supporters, the Catholic Church remained a very strong entity in terms of political and social standing.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s artwork not only represented the themes that the Catholic Church wanted him to express, but also his personal interests and affinities. For example, although the Church had “The Last Supper” commissioned in order to depict the reactions of the apostles to Jesus’ method that soon, one of his apostles would betray him; Leonardo Da Vinci inserts a more humane side of Jesus within his painting – one not often seen by the Catholic Church. In his painting, instead of Jesus hovering at a height above his apostles and his human followers in order to represent his superiority in terms of power and ethics, Da Vinci places Jesus at a height level to his apostles. Furthermore, instead of creating “The Last Supper” on a dry wall instead of wet plaster, Da Vinci created an artwork that was not considered to be a true fresco like the one the Church had asked him to create. Da Vinci created his artwork this way because he simply believed that it would look better – once he sealed it, he thought, the dark spots of his painting would look darker and the bright spots would look brighter. Da Vinci took a large creative step in painting the artwork on dry wall, simply because he thought it would look better – this heavily reflects the synthesis of religious asceticism and secular aestheticism because, ultimately, the painting was one of religious asceticism that was adjusted in order to benefit the appeal of aesthetics. Da Vinci took many creative liberties with his artwork, reflecting a paradigm shift of Churches having nearly complete control over a piece of art to artists having control in inserting pieces of their style within their creation. Another one of Da Vinci’s artwork, “The Vitruvian Man,” depicts a male figure in two positions, superimposed onto a circle and a square. This image exemplifies the blending and synthesis of art and science and reflects the movement of a heavy following in religious beliefs to a stronger following in science. “The Vitruvian Man” also played heavily on the idea of human proportions, therefore promoting an interest in math as well as science, both of which were topics unexplored by the Catholic Church. “The Vitruvian Man” reflected what the world outside the Catholic Church was doing - slowly moving away from a heavily religious based mindset to a mindset that considered the merits of math and science.

Although Leonardo Da Vinci and Michaelangelo both existed many centuries ago, the concepts that they introduced to art remain evident, even to this day: art is a reflection of the world that the creator lives in. To look at art is to look at a society.