Renaissance Synthesis Question Wylie P6 T8

Beginning during the Middle Ages in Florence, Italy and subsequently sweeping through the rest of Europe, the Renaissance stood as a cultural movement depicting the burgeoning art culture and religion’s heavy foothold on the muted secularism of artists Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci. The influence of the Catholic Church bridged over from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, further underlining both the conjoining of and disparity between Renaissance artists’ aesthetics and the Church’s stressed religious asceticism.

Michelangelo’s painting, “Creation of Adam,” highlights the marriage of his innovations in art with regards to sculpting human emotions by capturing his subjects’ emotions. Although Michelangelo focused on humanitarianism, he did not abandon depicting Biblical fixtures and instead invested in melding the two dichotomies, thereby drawing a parallel between how his preoccupation with the human body did not divert away from the spiritual and religious content. Religious asceticism trickles through with the patronage of the Church and commissioning of Michelangelo to singlehandedly paint the Sistine Chapel and present Biblical scenes of their interpretation.

Similarly, Da Vinci typified the Renaissance humanist ideology in how he joined art and science while still emanating religious principles from his painting, “The Last Supper.” Da Vinci delved deeper in the sciences than did Michelangelo, but didn’t forsake his scientific studies for the arts and alternatively pursued both the arts and sciences while maintaining the Renaissance’s asceticism. In “The Last Supper,” Da Vinci portrays the significant biblical principles prevalent during the Renaissance and stressed by the Church to uphold.

Developing against a religious backdrop, the Renaissance reflected both the differences between artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Church and the harmonizing of Renaissance artists’ budding secular aestheticism and grounding religious asceticism. Amidst changing perspectives of Michelangelo and Da Vinci, Renaissance culture and society witnessed the rise of self-awareness, individualism, and religion’s underlying influence in the arts.