Renaissance Synthesis Wyl. P.1 T.4

By mid-15th Century Europe, the rebirth of Classicism gave rise to Humanism, celebrating man’s ability to reason. In Italy, amid a prosperous Florentine mercantile landscape, the Renaissance exploration began to bud. Leonardo Da Vinci, born 1452, and Michelangelo 23 years later, followed similar ascents in study and expression. They sprang from a class of gentlemanly tradesmen, yet opted to apprentice with early Renaissance artists, Verrocchio and Ghirlandaio, respectively. As teenagers, they joined young princes and popes taught by the thinkers of the day at the school of Lorenzo Medici, ruler of Florence. However, the Church’s omnipotent wealth was their main source for commissions and it exerted control that they express sacred themes.

Painting subjects that promoted asceticism, their work belies other vision and beliefs. Leonardo’s zest for anatomical knowledge, contributing to Renaissance anatomy in Treatise on Painting and the Human Figure, was garnered in autopsies and hidden in mirror-code in his journals. A seamless synthesis of his aim and the Church message is evident in the fine proportion in heads, bodies, and hands in The Last Supper. Elusive expressions like the Christ child in Madonna and Child peering at the viewer with other-worldly candor are possibly derived from research on the “science” of Physiognomy. But his final painting, Saint John the Baptist, takes on a sardonic grin. Deemed inappropriate, another painter fixed some elements, cloaking the nude in fur pelts and placing a reed-cross to amend the overt, oddly heavenward point of his finger. Michelangelo also inferred unruly messages. The Sistine Chapel was commissioned as 12 robed apostles amid a starry sky, but he delivered robust male nudity, celebratory of sensuous anatomy. Likewise, another artist applied coverage. In the depiction requested by one-time friend, Pope Clement, The Last Judgment, the welts from a flailing contain Michelangelo’s face. Like many in society, Leonardo and Michelangelo contained anger at suffering wrought by a Church needing reformation.

Danny Shapiro, Ivy Arbolado, Claire West, Edward Tyler