Compare And Contrast Italian Renaissance Painting And Sculpture To The Northern Renaissance Painting And Sculpture
...in the North, you have to understand the roots of the Renaissance. Renaissance has a special meaning, referring to a period of the grand florescence of the arts in Italy during the 14th century and progressed and migrated, in the 15th and 16th centuries, to Northern Europe. The Renaissance was stimulated by the revival of the classical art forms of ancient Greece and Rome. The “re-birth of knowledge,” better known as the Renaissance, can be contributed to the teachings of the Humanists at the time.
Francesco Petrarch took little interest in his legal studies, and much rather preferred to spend his time learning about the classical Greek and Roman philosophers. In his readings, lying out before him were the ancient values of “…Greek love of physical beauty, of nature, of freedom and the ideals of the Greek city-states [which] appeared side by side with the historical awareness, political power and firm determination of the Romans (Letts 8).” From the ancient texts Petrarch, re-discovered the significance of liberal studies once considered for a free man in Greek or Roman culture to follow, called Studia Humanitates. A free man studying Studia Humanitates, would study grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy and would be called a Humanist. When Humanism began to spread, the result was the Renaissance, which restored life and values which had been buried for centuries. The renewed interest of these ancient ideas triggered the coming advancements in art, science and society. To contrast and differentiate the Italian Renaissance with its Northern counter-part is simplistic, to compare between the two becomes slightly more difficult.
Throughout history the primary historical focus of the Renaissance was based primarily on Italy, but north of the Alps, the arts had reached an apex a century earlier in the Gothic, the antithesis of the classical....
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