|
ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
ERA
Famous artists include:
Cimabue (c.1240-1302)
Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337)
Gentile da Fabriano (1370-1427)
Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446)
Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455)
Donatello (1386-1466)
Paolo Uccello (1397-1475)
Fra Angelico (1400-55)
Tommaso Masaccio (1401-1428)
Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72)
Piero della Francesca (1420-92)
Andrea Mantegna (1430-1506)
Alessandro Botticelli (1445-1510)
Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-94)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Michelangelo (1475-1564)
Titian (1477-1576)
Raphael (1483-1520)
Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-1594)
Paolo Veronese (1528-1588)
Giambologna (1529-1608)
Caravaggio (1573-1610)
HISTORY
For an account of the evolution
of art in Italy during the 15th and
16th centuries, see:
Proto-Renaissance
(c.1300-1400)
Early Renaissance
(1400-90)
High Renaissance (1490-1530)
Mannerism (1530-1600)
Renaissance in
Florence (Medici)
Renaissance in Rome
(Papal)
Renaissance in Venice
(Colour)
LIST OF PAINTERS/SCULPTORS
For a list of artists from
the Quattrocento and
Cinquecento in Italy, see:
Early Renaissance
Artists
High Renaissance
Artists
Mannerist Artists.
GREAT EUROPEAN PAINTERS
For biographies and paintings
of the greatest artists in Europe
see: Old Masters: Top 100.
WORLD'S BEST ART
For a list of the finest artworks:
Greatest Paintings Ever
Oils, watercolours, fresco
from Giotto to postmodernism.
Greatest Sculptures Ever
Works in stone, bronze, wood
from 33,000 BCE-present.
Paintings by Renaissance artists
are in the best art museums
around the world.
|
Although we know almost nothing of his
early life, Bramante was probably trained as a painter in Urbino, near
his birthplace. At the court of Federico da Montefeltro he could have
met Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72),
Piero della Francesca (1420-92),
and, most important as an architectural influence, Francesco di Giorgio.
His first certain work, the facade painting of the Palazzo del Podesta,
Bergamo (1477), already demonstrates an interest in architecture, as well
as in perspective illusion.
A signed engraving of about 1481 contains
many elements which were to appear in his buildings in Milan, where he
was by then living, attracted, like Leonardo, to the court of Lodovico
il Moro. Leonardo's architectural drawings, the early Christian churches
of Milan, and the logical harmonies of the buildings in Urbino, were the
formative influences on Bramante's architecture. Alberti's Mantuan churches
are also reflected in Bramante's first church, S.Maria presso S.Satiro
(1482-6). During his work on this building it developed from a simple
rectangular oratory to a Latin Cross basilica with nave and aisles. Site
restrictions forced him to truncate the choir into a trompe-l'oeil backcloth,
using the perspectival skills of his painter's training. The sombre monumentality
of the nave, with its massive arch and pier system and illusionistically
coffered barrel vault, owes something to Alberti's S.Andrea.
The tribune at S.Maria delle Grazie (1493) was commissioned by Lodovico
Sforza as a huge family mausoleum. The plan is like a gigantic version
of the Old Sacristy by Brunelleschi, with semicircular apses added on
three sides. The uncluttered articulation of huge spaces foreshadows Bramante's
mature Roman works. His other Milanese work was at S.Ambrogio: it includes
the elegant Corinthian loggia of the Canonica (1492), with its bizarre
tree-trunk columns at the corners, and the Doric cloister (1497-8), whose
upper story suggests a first-hand knowledge of ancient Roman examples.
From 1488 he was consulted, as were Leonardo and Francesco di Giorgio,
about the rebuilding of the Duomo at Pavia. At Vigevano (1492) he designed
the town's central piazza, whose arcaded sides were painted with illusionistic
frescoes.
By 1499 the French occupation of the city
of Milan had forced Bramante to Rome. Taken up by the entourage of Alexander
VI, he first designed the cloister of S.Maria delia Pace. More consistently
antique than his S.Ambrogio cloisters, it retains the graceful linearity
characteristic of Urbino. The commission for the tempietto at S.Pietro
in Montorio followed. Despite the inscription dated 1502, the masterly
design of this tiny round church has often earned it a later dating. The
first Renaissance building to employ correctly the full Doric order, it
was inspired both by the column-encircled temples of Antiquity and by
Francesco di Giorgio's architectural drawings. Bramante's "House
of Raphael" (Palazzo Caprini, now destroyed) probably also dates
from before 1505. Built in the new street leading to the Vatican, it provided
a perfect model for the small palaces needed by the expanding papal bureaucracy.
Its sequence of rusticated ground floor with shops and applied Classical
orders on the first floor influenced domestic architecture up to the 20th
century, as did its innovatory use of stucco-covered brick.
|
