art for art's sake: part one - art history from the renaissance to realism

I stumbled upon a hub on Rembrandt a couple of days ago. In his hub entitled How to Appreciate Rembrandt's Night Watch, Watcher by Night describes his close encounter with the master's The Militia Company of Frans Banning Cocq (also known as The Night Watch) and how photography will not supplant or reproduce the awe inspired by the actual objet d'art. To cut to the chase, I was inspired by his hub and was transported to my years in college when I took up art studies and my interests had not yet diversified. So in tribute to the arts, and to the various masters who have blinded me with divine beauty while I sat teary eyed in the darkroom, I offer a brief history of the various movements, periods, ages in the art of painting.

The age of Michelangelo (Buonarroti) and Leonardo da Vinci began in Italy and spread all over Europe roughly from 1300 to 1600. Renaissance, which literally means rebirth ore revival, is the embodiment of the resurgence of man's interest in classical learning, the world around him and his power as an individual. This snowballed after the Medieval period. This rebirth is said to have been fueled by economic growth, openness to other cultures and political status quo.

The innovations in painting include the depiction of landscape, the introduction of both linear and aerial perspectives and detailed compositions. Although Michelangelo and da Vinci are the two most often referenced painters in discussions about the period, it was Masaccio and his frescoes who is credited with planting the first seed. Moreover, the names of da Vinci and Michelangelo rose to prominence only after the second wave of Renaissance masters that included Antonio del Pollaiuolo and Andrea del Verrocchio. This period is known as the High Renaissance.

High Renaissance also brought to fore painters like Germany's Konrad Witz and Jan van Eyck in Flanders (the present day provinces of Nord Department in France and Flanders in Belgium) and the Netherlands.

Mannerism is actually a late Renaissance style of painting and architecture. It became popular from 1520 to 1580 and, again, it originated in Italy. Its main proponents were Florentine artists like Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo da Pontormo, and later, the Spanish painter EL Greco. The movement was epitomized by the elongation of figures or objects, distortion of artistic elements like proportion and space, emotional drama and overall imbalance. This artificiality is considered an intellectual sophistication as opposed to its predecessor's naturalistic approach and overall harmonious quality. Another techniqe popular during this period is foreshortening.

The term mannerism is based on the Italian word for manner or style - maneria. The Mannerist masters are said to have been heavily influenced by Michelangelo's (who himself would later work in the Mannerist style) artwork for the Medici and Sistine chapels.

Great realism became in vogue again with the advent of the Baroque movement. From 1550 to 1750, Baroque artists displayed fascination with the visual form and the dramatic contrast between light and dark or chiaroscuro. They also added elements that showcased dynamism, movement and energy specially when depicting popular themes such as martyrdoms and scenes of ecstacies. Discarding the Mannerist ideals, artists in this movement went back to the Renaissance obsessions with unity and balance - but this time, with more intense emotion and greater realism.

Scholars are not certain as to the etymology of the movement's name. Some say that it came from the Spanish word barueco or pearl with an irregular shape while others argue that it came from the Portuguese barocco. But whatever the name's provenance is, it is apparently irrelevant for it has become so popular that the movement has further been subdivided according to country with each subdivision a complete area of study on its own. Generally, Baroque is largely associated with Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt (van Rijn) and Caravaggio.

Coming into the forefront of the art world from 1715 to 1780s, the Rococo movement's preoccupation with frivolous ornamentation and delicate lightness is widely associated with the reign of Louis XV in France, the movement's place of birth. Stemming from the decorative arts and interior designs commonly seen in churches, paintings of Rococo masters exhibited ornateness through the use of delicate colors and curving patterns. They achieved this by decorating their canvases with mythical figures or heavenly creatures. Rococo is said to have been derived from the French word rocaille meaning shell.

Major movers of Rococo include Jean Honoré Fragonard and Giovanni Battista among many others. Unfortunately, the movement wholly disappeared, and abruptly so, after 1789. On this year, the French Revolution ended.

Heavily influenced by Roman and Greek antiquities, particularly by freshly excavated Greek vases that showed flat and silhouetted figures, the Neoclassical movement painters did away with the ornateness or frivolity of typical Rococo work. Instead they painted pictures that featured simple compositions like figures in calm, static poses. This was mainly due to their quest for solemn, and at times moralizing, tone, compositional logic and clarity.

The movement spread over from Europe to North America with French Jacques-Louis David and American Benjamin West leading the charge. Moreover the Americans named theirs Greek or Federal Revival. The period started in 1750 and ended around the 1880s.

With the onset of the Napoleonic Wars, the Romantic painters started finding their muse - the affairs of the world around them. From 1800-1880, the Romanticist movement turned their backs to the "formal" style of their most immediate predecessors and painted contemporary events with more color and vivid drama. The drama was conjured by putting side side complementing colors to evoke vivacity and more life. This juxtaposition was further enhanced by long, powerful, if not nervous, brushstrokes. Moreover, the themes also shifted from the heroic to scenes of suffering and at times, violence.

The painters who heralded the resistance to scientific study and rationalization of nature and the Age of Enlightenment's social and political forms, include such names as Francisco Goya of Spain, Eugene Delacroix of France and in the US, the Hudson River School's Thomas Cole.

Though a formal school of art in realism did not evolve fully, it was nonetheless embraced by painters whose aims were to depict what was "ugly" as opposed to the highly subjective nature of Romanticism and the Romanticists' focus on what was "beautiful". Moreover, realism tend to be defined as a response to societal issues thereby accruing another name - social realism. Although technically realism is not defined by particular innovative techniques, most realist paintings could be described as simple and restrained. This movement began in the 1830s and lasted a little more than 20 years (1850s).

Some of the well-known realist painters are French artists Gustave Courbet and Jean Francois Millet and Americans William Sidney Mount and Thomas Eakins.

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