Artists and Realism Formal education was not the only way through which humanists shaped the minds of their age. Art, architecture and books were wonderfully effective in transmitting humanist ideas. ‘ “Art” is embedded in nature; he who can extract it, has it… Moreover, you may demonstrate much of your work by geometry. The more closely your work abides by life in its form, so much the better will it appear…No man shall ever be able to make a beautiful figure out of his own imagination unless he has well stored his mind by much copying from life.’ – Albrecht Durer ( - ) This sketch by Durer (Praying Hands) gives us a sense of Italian culture in the sixteenth century, when people were deeply religious, but also had a sense of confidence in man’s ability to achieve near-perfection and to unravel the mysteries of the world and the universe.
Artists were inspired by studying works of the past. The material remains of Roman culture were sought with as much excitement as ancient texts: a thousand years after the fall of Rome, fragments of art were discovered in the ruins of ancient Rome and other deserted cities. Their admiration for the figures of ‘perfectly’ proportioned men and women sculpted so many centuries ago, made Italian sculptors want to continue that tradition. In , Donatello ( - ) broke new ground with his lifelike statues.
Artists’ concern to be accurate was helped by the work of scientists. To study bone structures, artists went to the laboratories of medical schools. Andreas Vesalius ( - ), a Belgian and a professor of medicine at the University of Padua, was the first to dissect the human body. This was the beginning of modern physiology.
‘Praying Hands’, brush drawing by Durer, . ‘The Pieta’ by Michelangelo depicts Mary holding the body of Jesus. This self-portrait is by Leonardo da Vinci ( - ) who had an amazing range of interests from botany and anatomy to mathematics and art. He painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper .
One of his dreams was to be able to fly. He spent years observing birds in flight, and designed a flying machine. He signed his name ‘Leonardo da Vinci, disciple of experiment’. Painters did not have older works to use as a model.
But they, like sculptors, painted as realistically as possible. They found that a knowledge of geometry helped them understand perspective, and that by noting the changing quality of light, their pictures acquired a three- dimensional quality. The use of oil as a medium for painting also gave a greater richness of colour to paintings than before. In the colours and designs of costumes in many paintings, there is evidence of the influence of Chinese and Persian art, made available to them by the Mongols.
(see Theme ) Thus, anatomy, geometry, physics, as well as a strong sense of what was beautiful, gave a new quality to Italian art, which was to be called ‘realism’ and which continued till the nineteenth century.