Illusions of Perfection - Thoughts on Approaching the High Renaissance

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The last roots of the art of the West post waded into the Renaissance and gave us a lesson on the necessity and limits of defining historical periods. Click for a link. In reality, Italy was fragmented so the Renaissance was more localized than collective. And the changes historians fix on weren't happening in the same areas of knowledge at the same time - even within one of these little polities. There are some general developments that do trickle out into Europe, but in different ways in different places.

  

Consider these two statements:

 

 

 

 

 

The Renaissance is the pivot to modernity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is no Renaissance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The frustrating thing about periodiziation is that both are true. There is a section of the timeline where secular transcendence becomes the central pillar of Western culture. And it does correspond to the timeframe associated with the Renaissance. Periods are what let us see the big patterns on the macro scale. This makes them necessary for any sort of general history because there is just too much material to manage otherwise. The Band does it as standard operating procedure.

 

Here’s the catch. We may need divisions and categories for comprehensive global histories, but we don’t need these ones.

 

 

 

Honorius Augustodunensis, Christ and his Church, title piece to his illustrated commentary on the Song of Songs, around 1170

 

Medieval theologians developed different historical period structures - click for a brief list. This picture introduces a 12th century reading of Augustine's historical epochs: ante legem (before the law); sub lege (under the law); sub gratia (under grace); sub antichristo (under the anti-Christ). We mentioned Augustine's epochs in an earlier post.

The Church is shown as the bride of Christ on two levels - Ecclesia (the Church) in the New Jerusalem, and as a personification of the physical Church in this world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The divisions that are used are choices based on the landmarks events that best align with current priorities and values. The history is real, but what it means and the things that matter are subjective.

This adds morality to chronology

 

It also closes off alternative possibilities. The Band often notices things that should be obvious just by thinking about how mainstream historical data points relate to each other outside the standard timeline.

 

 

 

That’s how powerful periodization is - it’s like a shunting yard for possible understandings. It offers the illusion of freedom of movement, but the field is preset.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So periods are inherently subjective and imprecise and necessary. A good analogy is the relation between individual and population in statistics, only with hindsight commonalities instead of mathematical operations as the link. They’re related, but either/or in terms of usefulness. In both cases, pretending one is applicable to the other leads to problems.

 

As happens when historians take period commonalities and transmute them into hard rules for individual things.  

 

 

Like measuring historically significance by signs of Progress!  

 

Really. What could go wrong with this projection? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When we look more closely – inside the period – we see that areas like humanism and art have their own localized culturally-specific ideas arising from unique circumstances and talents.

 

 

This was the summary graphic from the last post. We chose three cultural areas and visualized change by shifting shades within any one paradigm and colors when the paradigm changes. It isn't precise, but what matters is that it captures that change isn't instant and moves at different speeds in different domains.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We do need to mention the talent. We're  looking for connections between the Renaissance and Modernity, but they are really different. And talent may be the biggest difference of all. At worst it's second - behind public morality.

 

Globalists hate talking about talent because it disproves their core lies. It’s not evenly distributed – it’s why most places never have much lasting impact on art or literature. But when it clumps in one place… look out. New possibilities appear at a rapid pace that echo out through time and space. It does transform, but less “everything changed” than a diffusion of new ideas.

 

 

 

Leonardo da Vinci and workshop, Virgin of the Rocks, between circa 1491 and 1499 and 1506 to 1508, oil on poplar wood, National Gallery, London

 

Leonardo was an unreal genius who revolutionized Western painting. Consider the dates on this one. The hard, linear styles of the 15th-century Renaissance are replaced with a radically new understanding of light, shadow, and texture. The blurred colors, careful anatomy, misty background depths, and realistic plants mix fantasy and reality. 

It doesn't look Classical. But it is a perfect solution to the problem of idealizing the real that was central to Renaissance classicism. Unlike sculpture, the classical in Renaissance painting doesn't look at all like ancient art.

 

 It's not just the beauty of the smooth, blended shading of the hair and faces. The compositional arrangement also has this unearthly almost geometric perfection. 
 
Just look at the three hands. It's the precise order and control that takes Leonardo's radical realism and elevates it to a higher plane.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The talent supports the secular transcendence by offering real examples of skill and innovation that blow commentators away. It lends itself to hyperbole, and that fit right in with the effusive humanist writing style of the time. We already saw the impact the five talents in the last post had. The High Renaissance guys are even more miraculous. 

 Raphael, The Parnassus, 1509–1511, fresco, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City

 

 

The Band can’t answer this question, but we do wonder how much “authority” in the art of the West just came from wildly overwrought claims taken as matter of fact. 

It’s one thing to say…

 

A long excerpt from the opening to Vasari's life of Michelangelo gives a good taste of his bombastic style and pro-Florence, pro-Michelangelo bias

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vasari’s gonna Vasari, but it’s another thing entirely to use that as the basis of a systematic theory of art.
 

But we’ve also learned that it doesn’t matter what “is logical” if it’s what the narrative engineers want – they just send claims through the official channels and ignore objections. At least Vasari was fluffing artists that were actually good. The path to Art! swerves through unsubstantiated declarations on the way to incoherence and atavism. Things like:

 

 

 

 

There is a “perfection” that is never clearly defined but 

A)    exists
B)    is identifiable with almost no visible evidence after centuries
C)    is embodied by my buddy

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So what is the big artistic change? 

 

We saw how an area of cultural activity that we can call art really got started in the Middle Ages. Not picture-making - that's way older than writing. But certain kinds of prestigious pictures and the clients, professionals, and first glimpses of secular transcendence attached to them. This comes into its own during the International Gothic that overlaps the Renaissance timeline. Check the Art of the West link above for more on that.

 

 

 

Detail of the construction of the tower of Babel from Chronique de la Bouquechardière, Rouen, 3rd quarter of the 15th century, Harley 4376, f. 206v. 

 

A lot of International Gothic goes into the Renaissance, and the two periods share an interest in ideal beauty and realism. The initial differences are more discursive than anything else - the rhetoric of antiquity and humanist Progress! that we see in Vasari.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The important change in the Renaissance then isn’t an actual interest in reviving “antiquity” – whatever that chameleon concept is - in a historical reenactment way. Ancient culture is just a non-Christian alternative that Trojan Horses human authority into metaphysical and theological matters. It’s the path to secular transcendence and ontological inversion. Click for an older post on the change.

Artistically, the important Renaissance development is the move from an organically-developing elite medieval art to a self-consciously theoretical one. What this means in real terms is that actually human authorities start recognizing “art” as a distinct thing with it’s own defining characteristics. Art becomes a thing to think about qua art.

 

 

Michelangelo, Creation of Adam, 1509-1512, fresco, Sistine Chapel

Belvedere Torso, 1st century BC or AD, marble, Vatican Museums

 

When Michelangelo studied ancient statues like the Belvedere Torso and incorporated their lessons into his work, he was doing more than representing a story. He was using an “ancient model” for inspiration. Note how he doesn’t just copy the twist of the hips and the anatomy – creative adaptation.

The paradox of Renaissance creativity is looking back to move forward. Their classical sources did have a sort of logos that wasn’t necessarily hostile to Christian Logos. But it confuses human and divine authority.
 

 

 

 

 

This introduces an element of “end in itself” to the idea of art – at least conceptually. That had always been there to a degree. Style and tradition are things that pertain to how the representation is made and not what it depicts.

But this is different from positing the existence of an abstract thing called “art” that ontologically preexists the works of art that make it up. Sort of like a Platonic form, but without the reasoning. Systematic theorizing is new, even if it's based on something as absurd as “Michelangelo’s awesome”.

Note – the theorizing and proclaiming around art has always been retarded. The difference is that the Renaissance was pumping up the quality of its art and Modernity is tearing it down.
 

 

 

Titian, The Rape of Europa, between 1560 and 1562, oil on canvas, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
 

Florentine vs. Venetian art is generalized as design or drawing vs. color. Titian exemplifies the liquid light and vivid color of the Venetian side.

 

The popularity of mythological rapes is a window into the psyche of the patron classes. Look past the subject to how Titian turns the scene and atmosphere into a mist of light and color. 

 

 

 

When Florentine partisans attack Titian's poor anatomical design or Venetians the bloodless stiffness of Michelangelo, they aren’t talking about the story or subject of the images. Those are consistent on both sides since both are Italian Christians. The difference is in the art.

Titian, Malchiostro Annunciation, 1519-1520, oil on panel, Treviso Cathedral

Here’s an earlier Titian, where his brilliance with light and color in the background clashes with the rigid, linear, Florentine perspective design.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the Annunciation or Malchiostro Chapel in Treviso Cathedral with Titian’s altarpiece and frescos by Pordenone.  Worth a look at what these interiors were like.

 

 

This self-awareness isn’t Art! Because it still puts talent, quality, and representation at the center. Neither the Florentines nor Venetians denied the obvious skills of their rivals – they just claimed that they were better. But creating art as a thing in itself is a necessary precondition for Art! to appear.

 

 

We aren’t even going to attempt to overview Renaissance art – it’s way too big a topic with too many highways and byways. Legitimate researchers have been piling up material for centuries, with countless amounts of nonsense woven in.

 

 

 

It’s not hard to look up a general summary of Renaissance art on-line. As far as we can tell, the general history – the main works and names – isn’t too converged. We want to understand where Art! came from, and on that scale too much granularity is distracting. 

Here are a couple of decent summaries. Click for the first; click for the second. 

 

Click for an incredible clearinghouse of Renaissance art links and images.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Martin Mottet, The Archivist, 2018, digital art


Minutely-focused academic research isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it has proven to be a fatal distraction from slow-rolling institutional catastrophe. 

 

The reality is that if you want history to be part of your culture, you need single-minded gnomes mining the evidence and piling up data. But they have to be able to trust that the system they’re working in is equally oriented towards truth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The integrity of individual historians is always an issue – as it is with any researcher whose career advancement is linked to his findings. That’s individual malfeasance within a just system. It’s the message that media has pounded home for decades – there’s bad apples, but catch them out and the system will serve justice. It’s also a lie, intended to train passive acceptance and misdirect blame.

What we are talking about is systematic corruption and inversion. Our institutions are lost to secular transcendence – projected vanity and wishes – meaning they have no real anchor in the truth. How do we know this? By the fruits. Just look at the history. There was nothing to even slow the rapid degeneration into globalist lies.

 

 

 

Getting meta with a reference to the recent Dazed and Confused post. Post-Enlightenment institutions are like the macro version of the Pickfords. Without any substance or grounding in truth there is no moral authority to support the hollow pieties. In either case.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But lacking moral authority doesn’t mean there isn’t a “morality”. Some order is always imposed. Call it Morality! Manipulated herd preference cut off from truth and based in will and solipsism. And high-minded Enlightenment secular transcendence becomes slack-jawed SJW atavism in a smooth easy glide.

 

The legitimate researchers that orient towards the truth are almost all specialists. One place where dedication to the truth is possible is with diligent research methods and accurate recounting of specific findings. These individuals also tend to be highly interested and self-motivated. Like the historian with a childhood interest in knights that winds up poring through archives for a book on medieval smithing. The problem is on the discursive level - from Postmodern theory-huffing to administrative bloat.

 

 

Art and Theory Book 

 

The table of contents in this book is typical. We chose it because it makes the path from theory if art to Art! really explicit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s why the Band uses the term the art of the West. It isn’t designed to confuse and corrode through obscure references and nonsense claims.

The art of the West refers to a divergent path where techne, representation, and cultural expression never left. Where the narrative considers truth and beauty in engaging and thought-provoking ways that celebrate skill and creativity. That are aspirational - not by creating the fiction that any 'tard can be an "artist" if a liar gives them money. But by showing what they human spirit can accomplish when aligned with Logos. Where this page of degenerative lies is utter irrelevant...

 

 

 

 Consider these two studies of light from the early 20th century. One is an expensive and important prop in the Tate's cultural offensive. The other belongs to the art of the West. You can see the difference. And like a good witch test, the difference you see is revealing. 

Sydney Laurence, Northern Lights, 20th century, oil on canvas, private

 

 

 

Winifred Nicholson, Moonlight and Lamplight, 1937, oil on canvas, Tate London

The museum page incldes a long description of this trash and the artist, but doesn't even attempt to explain why it would sully a hall of culture. They can't. All they have is their fake world of discourse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The point is that what shines through is a choice.

Same as it ever was.

 

 

 

 

We didn’t dive into the arts of the West posts out of a masochist impulse to wallow in the debasement. There’s no shortage of black-pilling mental cripples doing that. Because it’s easy. Anyone who sees through the web of lies at all can do it. We are uncovering the inversion to find what’s right – the glimpses of logos that map a real tradition and return it for the future.

Consider how the Band has avoided the trap of masticating cultural – or personal – victimhood. We attack the lies with rancor to punch through thick webs of programming and deception. But then we point towards Truth in a fallen world as best we can. Sharing reasoning so that readers see that moral reasoning is something you have to do for yourself. Not follow our dicta – no matter how clever we may appear. And our posts are filled with beauty.
 

 

 

We’ve shared hundreds – probably thousands – of images of every kind, from the dawn of man to the latest wonders. And no shortage of fine quotes. 

 

There aren’t many places to get an eye-popping digital creation...

 

Carl Friedrich Seiffert, The Blue Grotto of Capri, 1860, oil on canvas, private

...introducing a forgotten 19th-century one. 

 

With a thought for the chromatic harmony.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If interested, here’s a basic intro to digital art from a few years ago for readers unfamiliar with the medium. The Band’s take is that it’s just another medium, although the semiotic structures are different in ways that need thought. The tone reflects the subcultures with the tech savvy to be comfortable with the tools. This should expand in time. 

 

And the black-pillers monomaniacal doom-peddling servents of the prince of this world? Simply reading the Band exposes them for the cowardly liars and frauds that they are. That is...

 

 

That said, the art landscape once you hit the beginnings of modernity is so inverted that the kinds of simple internet searches that we use to trace the Renaissance don’t even show artists like this exist. 

 

 

Ivan Shishkin, Autumn Landscape, late 19th century, oil on canvas

This painting is a miracle of techne and natural logos. Painted at a time when the official timelines tell us “art” just turned to garbage hackwork for no reason at all. Other than “modernity”. We feel dumber for just typing it out.

Shishkin is one of the Band’s favorite artists and as good a landscape painter as anyone. Now, go find him in a general art history book or website. We’ll just continue.

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Put another way, the journey to the Armory Show of 1913 does expose Art!. But it also exposes art. And picks up a lot of beauty along the way.

There isn’t anything wrong with theorizing when looking for abstract patterns in observations. It’s pretending that those rise to the level of definitive certainty.

Consider the Band’s definition of the arts of the West as technical skill plus deeper truth. Techne always has a kind of theoretical dimension – it’s whatever the standard operating procedures are. Renaissance workshops trained apprentices in standard methods, including designing figures. The painter Perugino – best known as Raphael’s primary teacher – is a good example of repeating figures because his shop didn’t make any effort to conceal it. 

 

 

Perugino, The Delivery of the Keys, fresco, 1481–1482, Sistine Chapel, Rome

 

 

Perugino’s best-known painting is probably this fresco depicting the Petrine Succession from the Sistine Chapel. Click for the Catholic inferences in postulating this doctrine. In this one scene, you can see the repetition of figures. Check out his other work and they keep repeating. Perugino was a good artist with a pleasing and graceful style, but he had a huge workshop that cranked out paintings with a lot of stock elements.

But house styles and technical procedure are material-level characteristics. They are finite, contingent, arbitrary, and subjective like all human activity. Perugino’s method let him meet the demand of being Italy’s most desired artist for a while and made him a lot of money. But it limited his creative development, so whether it was “better” or “worse” depends on priorities
 

 

Raphael, School of Athens, 1509-11, fresco, Vatican Museum

 

 

His apprentice Raphael went on to manage a bigger workshop with more demand while maintaining epochal-level creativity. But he was also a vastly superior artist – so again, circumstantial.

Ditto art forms. There is no inherent advantage to a mosaic over a painting or vice versa. Just a bunch of circumstantial considerations from the conditions of the room to the preferences of the client. Leading to a circumstantially-determined preference - like the Venetian use of huge oil paintings instead of frescos for their wall because dampness made painted plaster impractical long-term. No theoretical shorthand changes this.
 
 

Sala del Maggior Consiglio in the Palazzo Ducale, Venice, paintings by Paolo Veronese, after 1577

Oil paintings set in gilded wooden frames resist dampness much better than painted plaster. They are also easy to move in case of flooding. 

 

 

The absolute abstract component of the arts of the West is the deeper truth – what the Greeks called episteme and the Band associates with Logos. And if we are ontologically coherent, abstract absolute means [not material level] by necessity. Art is a hybrid “place” where epistemic immaterials are imperfectly represented in material form. 

 

This is completely different from "theory" because it is external and precedent to the material creations. Theory is a parasitic dependency that comes to take the place of truth or beauty through lies and inversion. 

 

This graphic visualizes the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical in the arts of the West. 

 

Techne is skilled craft. This is where the subjective comes in, because it's a material practice based on customs and expectations that vary by time and place.

Episteme is the opposite - it refers to higher abstract principles. These are the objective metaphysical ideals that are timeless.

Phronesis is the coming together of the two - the higher objective principles of episteme expressed in the subjective material processes of techne. 

 

Click for the post where this appeared. 
 

 

 

Pretending that abstract truths can be replaced by the ephemeral subjective opinions of “theoretical” windbags and atavists is the same empty self-deification we see in every secular transcendent Flatland.

 

 

A central myth of Modernism is that art is autonomous. It isn’t. Art! claims to be, but it can claim pretty much anything because it’s all lies. The Band has blown out the autonomy garbage in an earlier post – what matters here is that autonomous is defined as creation having no purpose external to itself. 

 

As if this just appeared for no reason at all...

 

The Stanza della Segnatura showing Raphael’s School of Athens and Parnassus frescos, 1508-1511, Vatican Museum

 

 

Maybe someone left a can primordial soup open. Or lightning struck a stack of paint cans...

 

Seriously though, consider for a moment, how stupid that is. Seriously. Really think about the impossibility of purely purposeless artistic creation. Now stop and think what it means for a “revered expert” to base a binding theory of art on. We aren’t being pedantic. Just as there’s no exaggeration when we refer to modernist thought as retarded. It’s metaphorical in that the individual modernist might not have a diagnosed mental deficiency, but the description of stupidity level is literally precise. We suspect that this actually gives the theory a form of defence. Like it’s so stupid that the huffers subconsciously can’t believe it and skip past rather than face the cognitive dissonance. That’s why we’re insisting on this pause.
 

And once you’ve actually thought about just how stupid the idea of autonomy is as an artistic principle, then think about its universal acceptance across high culture. What does that say about the people you’re supposed to accept as cultural authorities..?

 

 

Jean Delville, The Idol of Perversity, 1891, graphite on paper. Guggenheim Museum, New York

The tl; dr version is that the cultural degeneration and inversion is metaphysical. 

 

The Band is unsure about the details, but this article from the New Yorker - of all unreliable sources - details things about modernism that the summaries happily glide over. 

 

This trash must be autonomous enough. Suggesting that autonomy probably doesn't mean exactly what the atavistic sloganeering claimed. The way globalists lie and twist words constantly is so tedious. Any viable institutions in the world to come must be utterly intolerant of dishonesty and ruthless in smoking out non-producers and poseurs.
 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ignore the gushing tone in the linked New Yorker article – it is a beast system mouthpiece and hive of posturing sub-mediocrities and contemptible liars. Go beyond the common patterns we’ve noticed in high and occult cultures. And consider what it means that the cultural degradation of Modernism and the moral depravity of the occult are directly linked.  

 

Jan Toorop, The New Generation (De Jonge Generatie), 1892, oil on canvas, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

 

Like an abandoned child surrounded by amorphous perversities in an ugly, abstract style...

 

Modernist freedom makes a lot more sense when you add the qualifier "to wallow in unchecked depravity".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The problem is the same as with so many satanic inversions. Autonomy doesn’t have to be possible for corrupt institutions to exclude selected topics in its name. Any form of Christian Western national culture or Logos or technical skill were banished as violations of autonomous art. When the real purpose was separating art from its age-old role of expressing culture and replacing it with putrescence. 

 

And this means that the actual history of modern art confirms what the Band had noticed from looking at patterns in the occult and roots of the West posts...

 

 

 

We should note that rigorous autonomy is a modernist thing. One of the markers of the change from Modern to Postmodern in Art! is losing the autonomy myth and engaging with culture “critically”. Y’all know the rest.

 

 

Jeff Koons, New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Red, Brown, New Shelton Wet/Dry 10 Gallon Displaced Doubledecker, 1981–7, 4 vacuum cleaners, Perspex and fluorescent lights,  Tate and National Galleries of Scotland

 

According to the site, this trash laundered money for the National Galleries of Scotland, the Tate, the National Heritage Memorial Fund, and the Art Fund 2008. 

 

It's funny how Postmodern art is supposed to be about the ideas, and yet the ideas are always pedestrian to the point of boring. Supposedly these are "highly conceptual artworks", "gleaming seductively" as they "explored the way our fantasies and desires are transferred on to ordinary objects". 

 

Really. The contrast between the inane prose and retarded subject is so extreme as to seem like a joke. It isn't. Their discourse is that stupid.

 

 

There’s no techne. Nor is there any logos - certainly nothing that would justify high prices or notoriety.  Just satanic inversion clogging the arteries of culture

 

A consistently good sign of alignment with truth is when the patterns you observe keep holding up. Like the parallel between the occult and modern cultural atavism. Now consider this inversion -

 

 

We based our working definition of art on the way the Greek terms lined up with the epistemology and ontology of vertical logos. Click for the post. If we update the techne + episteme = phronesis formula for the Christian West, it looks like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Consider the techne part in the modern era. The technical skill. The Modernist attack on skill was as vitriolic as letting the most sociopathic gammas rampage through a sports Hall of Fame would be. Which is sort of what it was. Even the materials of art were chewed up and shredded. It’s hard to do justice to the breezy psychopathy that drips from the pustulent maws of beast system shills.

Take this freak:

 

 

 

Jean Dubuffet, Nez Long et Chaise Septembre, 1961, canvas

A darling of late Euro modernism, this sick troglodyte gives us another example of the insane contrast between the theory and the sub-human reality. Click for the link. 

 

“The diverse oeuvre of Dubuffet is a multifaceted protest against the accepted ideals of beauty and culture in Western art. He became fascinated by the creative expression of children and the mentally ill because they fail to conform to the etiquette of good taste.”

 

Its eventual destruction will be an act of cultural exorcism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is literally no place for human garbage for Dubuffet or his fluffers in any viable culture. But their moral and intellectual bankruptcy makes it easy to see the difference between the theoretical aspect of Renaissance and Modern art. That is, logos and skill.

 

 

 

Raphael, Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, 1515, oil on panel, National Gallery of Art 

 

Now look at a portrait by Raphael. He was the painter who is most responsible for taking Leonardo's innovations and transforming them into the archetypal High Renaissance idiom. Although this is only one aspect of an artist the Band considers the greatest painter of all time. 

 

Here he's come into his maturity and is using Leonardo's light, shadow and texture to paint a merchant and friend. Look at the date. Raphael wasn't a model of virtue, but he appears to have been a sincere Christian. And his vice was adult women - sainthood in a modern context. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Both are “techne” of a sort because the Dubuffet is a material thing created by someone. But they represent diametrically opposed notions of technical skill that is the techne part of the art of the West. Dubuffet is so agressively talentless that it reads as consciously opposing talent to the point of slavering hostility.

 

It works best when you put them side by side.

 

This isn't stylistic difference or the loosening of standards - it is the complete inversion of technical skill – we could call it Techne! if we wanted to go that route. And that’s the point. Modernism isn’t just different from the art of the West. It’s inverted. That always comes with a whiff of brimstone.

 

And if the techne part of the techne + episteme sentence is inverted, what about the episteme?

 

 

 

If Art! is autonomous, it can’t look up.  

 

There is no truth to represent. There’s often no representation – or representation done in a way to undermine the idea of likeness or degrade beauty. The vertical is squashed into Flatland. So instead of logos reaching up, theory – fake, idiotic, materialistic theory – spins out. Theory replaces logos as the tautological inversion of episteme – the truth in Art! is Art!. We cound call it Episteme! if we were inclined to do so.

Like so much early secular transcendence, organic reality and inverted lie coexist for a while. This is because the fake theory takes a while to actually replace logos in real artists’ practice.

 

 

 

Julius von Leypold, Wanderer in the Storm, 1835, oil on canvas, Metropolita Museim of Art

The wild irrational Romantic settings and mysterious figures – are theorietically informed. They tie into contemporary ideas. But the quality is indispensable. It would have been inconcieveable that theory would replace good painting.
 

 

 

 

 

This means that if the arts of the West = techne + episteme, then Art! = Techne! + Episteme! In other words Modernism is the total inversion if the arts of the West. 

 

The Band’s patterns are coherent. And more importantly, we can be certain that theoretical self-consciousness was the next big step towards Art! Review the two steps so far.

 

 

The Limbourg Brothers, The Meeting of the Magi, in the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry f. 51v, around 1412

Step 1 was the development of the visual arts as a distinct activity with class connotations in the Gothic period.

 

We can see this most strongly in the International Gothic period. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, around 1490, pen and ink with wash over metalpoint, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

Step 2 was the development of a self-defining theoretical self consciousness in the Renaissance.

 

Leonardo's famous drawing is another expression of Classical idealism without looking like ancient art. He is connecting the ideal human proportions to the most elemental geometric shapes.

 

 

 

 

So we need to pay attention to how theory happens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It starts as a response to technical developments in art and letters – new happenings in art filtered through new humanist ways of writing and thinking. Art was a practical development in the late Middle Ages before given definitions in the Renaissance. Brunelleschi works out perspective optically before Alberti writes it up.
 

The High Renaissance is also artist-driven innovation that is turned into a theoretical program – or theoretical programs – later. Vasari is the name that keeps coming up, but he was writing about things that had already happened. And he sucked as an artist.
 

 

Giorgio Vasari, Temptations of St. Jerome, 1541, oil on panel, Pitti Palace

Vasari is classified as a Mannerist – one of the self-conscious stylists that followed in the wake of the High Renaissance. His picture is full of quotations of canonical artists, anatomically-difficult figures, and exaggerated showy grace in a crowded, incoherent composition.

This is applied early theory, with the intent of showing off knowledge of tradion and a certain kind of inventiveness. Effectiveness as a representation is secondary. But artists that aren't that good can function in a plug-and-play motif kind of way.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the High Renaissance, it looks like artists’ theoretical self-consciousness of themselves as artists is more influential than direct theory. Meaning that the artists are approaching their work with the perspective of deliberate innovators within a canonical tradition rather than following specific theoretical rules. That’s why the humanistic content is heavier in the written commentators like Vasari than the actual paintings. The artists were applying their innovative art to the clients’ demands and the humanist stuff was filtering in more through osmosis. Eventually this will reverse and theory will go from reacting to dictating.

But to appreciate the artist-driven innovations of the High Renaissance, look at one of the leading lights of the preceding generation in Florence. Botticelli is famous for courtly humanist paintings. His Birth of Venus is one of the most famous paintings in the Western tradition and was painted for a Medici wedding.

 

 

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, 1484 until 1485, tempera on panel, Uffizi Museum, Florence

 

There’s a frozen timeless quality to this painting that makes it a good symbol of the artificial hothouse quality of late 15th-century aristocratic humanism. Note the smooth, linear quality of the forms. Botticelli seems almost Gothic at times with the grace and linearity. And not the absence of the light, shade, and textural effects seen in Leonardo and Raphael.

 

 

So what is the High Renaissance, and what did the self-conscious artists do to give the theoreticians so much raw material?

 

 

Picking up from the previous post – we saw the Renaissance is better characterized as a collection of related ideas unfolding over different timelines in different places. Here's the graphic again with the different timelines so you don't have to look back at the start of this  post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Florence was the main center of Renaissance art and culture but it wasn’t the only one. Other places contributed their own developments on their own timelines. The movement of texts, artists and humanists ensured varying degrees of interaction. On one extreme, Rome winds up supplanting Florence as the center of the mainstream of Renaissance art. On the other, Venice has a tradition that remains distinct from the rest of Italy all through the Renaissance. 

 

Continuing the demonstration of the silliness of the notion of a monolithic moment of Renaissance change, here are similar graphics of the socio-political, artistic, and humanist timelines in three other Renaissance cultural centers. We don’t go back as far in time for a couple of reasons. The changes leading into the Renaissance start in Florence so we have to look back further. We were also interested in tying into our posts on the Middle Ages. The history of the other centers is not as readily available either. So for Renaissance purposes, we’ll look from the end of the 14th century to the start of the 16th. 

 

 

The Smaller (Princely) Courts


The small princely courts that dotted northern Italy were largely swallowed up by the early 1500s, but for a century were hotbeds of refined aristocratic humanism. A lot of ideas and artists took shape in these highly mannered environments.

 

Mantua and Urbino stand out for their cultural achievements but they're far from the only ones. 

 

The courts have unique histories and characters but follow comparable timelines. They coalesce during the late 14th and early 15th centuries, flower, and are largely swallowed up by the mid-16th. During that time, a refined humanistic court culture develops with local flavors. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Art begins with the International Gothic in favor at the beginning of the 15th century, with a turn to Renaissance styles of different kinds mid century.

 

Pisanello was a distinguished early 15th -century artist who worked for a number of these courts as a painter and medal maker. He seems to capture the taste of the time - you can see the connection to the arts of the Middle Ages.

 

Pisanello, St. Eustace, 1436-1438, tempera on wood, National Gallery, London

 

The weird distribution of things in this one resembles the tapestries that were popular in medieval courts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pisanello, Madonna of the Quail, around 1420, tempera on panel, Museo di Castelvecchio, Verona

 

Then there's this masterpiece of Gothic elegance and beauty. Pure flowing lines, courtly grace, and expensive materials.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jump ahead a half century to the Ducal Palace in Mantua. Home of the noble d'Este family - who were famous for their court culture and patronage of the arts. Andrea Mantegna - one of the leading lights of the later 15th century Renaissance - spent much of his career there as court painter. His interest in the ancient world fit right in in that environment. Mantegna also had marital ties to the famous Bellini family of artists in Venice. Click for a short bio.

 

 

Andrea Mantegna, Camera degli Sposi or Camera picta (bridal or painted room), 1465-1474, fresco, Ducal Palace, Mantua

 

 

This is an influential project because of the way it creates the illusion that the walls open into fantastic settings. Using paintings to make it seem like a space is transformed will become common, but this is one of the first major examples.

Mantegna's humanist interests can be seen in the intricate stucco designs on the ceiling. These derive from new discoveries about Roman interior design. 

It includes a great picture of the duke and his court that captures the intrigue and posturing of Renaissance courtiers. The wily duke confers with his advisors while sitting with his family. On the right, the younger courtiers turn out some leg in their fancies

 

 

 

 

 

In a major artistic development, development, Mantegna applied perspective design to the ceiling to create perhaps the first illusion that the ceiling opens to the sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Much of our impression of the Renaissance courts comes from Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier. This is mix of philosophy, etiquette, culture, politics, and sociology that he began in 1508 and published 20 years later. It describes the perfect qualities to thrive in the competitive, hothouse environment of a Renaissance court. Click for a pdf of a public domain English translation.

 

Castiglione is a perfect example of how Renaissance ideas moved between contexts. As a model humanist courtier in Urbino, he was at the middle of that center of Renaissance culture and connected through correspondence with humanists in Florence and elsewhere. He was a close friend of Raphael – who grew up in the Urbino court as the orphan of a court painter and poet – and an important source of the painter’s own humanistic leanings. Eventually he winds up in the papal court of the Medici pope Leo X in Rome when he isn’t traveling on diplomatic work. Here he reconnects with a transplanted circle of Urbino humanists and Raphael himself – now the dominant figure in Roman art and close friend of the pope.

 

 

Raphael, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, 1514–1515, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum

 

Raphael's portrait is another example of the painter's brilliance in capturing not just the physical likeness but the personality. Castiglione's intelligent eyes and charming smile show a master of frame and a close friend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Castiglione shows the importance of these Renaissance courts to the larger culture and why that importance is hard to measure. It’s enough for our High Renaissance purposes to note that the papal architect Bramante as well as Raphael came from Urbino and that Leonardo spent much of his career working in Milan. Milan wasn’t a small court, but it was a courtly a ducal setting outside Florence, Rome, or Venice.

Rome is next, and it shows a very different timeline.

Papal Rome

Rome spends the first part of the 15th century recovering from the Avignon period and the schisms that followed. But once the popes have addressed the practical consequences of decades of neglect, they turn their attention to the arts. 

 

Rome just grows continually as a center of wealth, humanist studies, and art. Eventually it will supplant Florence as the first city of the Renaissance. This happens in the early 16th century, and the result is peak High Renaissance.

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 As the papal court gains wealth and prestige, it becomes a magnet for artists, eventually drawing them from Florence itself. At first they come temporarily to work. During the High Renaissance, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Bramante all live in the city.

The Sistine Chapel is a case in point. It’s most famous for Michelangelo’s 16th-century paintings, but the walls were painted by the greatest masters of the preceding generation in the 1480s. Botticelli, Perugino, Ghirlandaio, and others moved to Rome for two years to do the frescos on Pope Sixtus IV’s new palace chapel. Pope Julius II – who had Michelangelo do the ceiling – was Sixtus IV’s nephew. Note the difference between this first wave - when the artists gathered for the work then went home when it was done - and the High Renaissance artists moving to Rome. This marks Rome's replacement of Florence as the art center. Click for a link on the chapel with a focus on Botticelli.

Sistine Chapel, built 1473-1481, side wall paintings finished 1482 

When Michelangelo added the Last Judgement on the back wall in the 1540s, he picked up on the blue of the older frescos’ skies to tie everything together. 

 

 

These paintings pair scenes from the lives of Christ and Moses to make a typological link between the two Testaments. This is a standard connection going back to the beginnings of theology, but here it is extended to the papacy. This is the papal palace chapel and the doctrine of papal supremacy / Petrine succession was of central importance. Perugino’s Delivery of the Keys to St. Peter that we saw up above drives that point that home, and there are lots of other papal and Roman references that are historically odd in Bible scenes.

 

Like a Roman basilica as the setting for a Hebrew festival in the foreground of Botticelli’s Temptations of Christ. The three temptations unfold across the top of the scene with angels preparing the Eucharistic meal in the top left.  

Botticelli, Temptations of Christ, 1481-82, fresco, Sistine Chapel

 

As far as the High Renaissance goes, Rome is ground zero. It doesn’t produce innovative artists but draws them from elsewhere. And when it reaches the critical mass, the explosion changes Western culture.

 

Venice

 

 

More than any of our other contexts, Venice is the proof of a multifaceted non-monolithic Renaissance. Venetian history made them unique in Italy – an impossibly stable and wealthy state that was fiercely independent. La Serenessima got it’s name for the centuries of unbroken city government based on venerable bloodlines and an unassailable defensive position.

 

 

 

From the founding in late antiquity to the final Napoleonic conquest, Venice was an oasis of stability. Venetian humanism benefited from the sponsorship of the wealthy aristocratic merchant families that ruled the city. We saw the architecture of Palladio in an earlier post – that’s an outgrowth of Venetian humanism. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And artistically, Venice is a world treasure.

Although fairly isolated from the rest of Italy, Venice’s extensive trade networks gave them much more access to things from the rest of Europe and the Middle East. In the Middle Ages, Venice was the main conduit for Byzantine influence on Italian art. And in the Renaissance, the were early adapters of Flemish oil painting.

 

 

Giovanni Bellini, Frari Triptych or Madonna and Child with Saint Nicholas, Saint Peter, Saint Benedict and Saint Mark, 1488, oil on panel, Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, Venice

 

 

Bellini’s oil paint has a luminous quality that seems to glow. The emphasis on light and color in Venetian painting begins with the early adoption of oil paint.

 

The same light and color that would be associated with emotion by the theorists. It’s easy to see where they’re coming from when you look at Florentine art. 

 

 

In dim lighting, Bellini’s figures look like they’re really there.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The High Renaissance in Venice follows its own pattern. Giovanni Bellini dies in 1516 at the age of 86 and rules Venetian art into the turn of the 16th century. There is no equivalent figure in Florence or Rome. His logical successor would have been Giorgione – a shadowy figure who died in 1510 at around 32 – had he lived longer. Only a few of his paintings are known and they tend to be mysterious and allusive. He seems to have apprenticed with Bellini, but added in Leonardo’s experiments with light and shadow and blended oil surfaces.

 

 

 

Giorgione, The Tempest, 1508, oil on canvas, Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice

The painting most commonly shown with Georgione depicts an unknown subject. It's evocative and the textures and lighting transition Bellini into the 16th century and set a course for Venetian art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

High Renaissance Venetian art is dominated by Titian, who lives from 1488-1576. Over his long career he goes through several phases and the history of art in Venice tends to follow his lead. In the second half of the 16th century, Tinteretto and Veronese emerge to form a late Venetian Renaissance “big three” but their art remains distinct from the rest of Italy. 

Tintoretto, The Ascent to Calvary, 1565-67, oil on canvas, Scuola Grande di San Rocco, Venice

One of many paintings Tintoretto made for the Scuola di San Rocco – an important socio-religious lay organization that he belonged to. He worked fast – his style shows it – and his art is all diagonal movement, ominous shadows, and dramatic light. Another spin on the Venetian tradition of emotional color-based art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’ve considered the Renaissance as a historical pivot towards the beast system – when secular transcendence moves into official culture. It plays a slightly different version of that role when we turn our attention to the art of the West. Theoretical self-consciousness leads into everything that the world of art comes to represent over the following centuries. The ideas – design and idealism, color and emotion – become the patterns for later artists and the academies that train them.

 

 

 

Lambert Mathieu, Raphael and his Muse La Fornarina (Margherita Luti), 1846, oil on wood

Painter who tries to paint like Raphael painting Raphael and his mistress. Raphael was known as a womanizer, but Luti was his favorite for a number of years.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is the narrative building double whammy – real innovative examples of the highest order to follow and mythologized hero tales to idolize. Examples and archetypes in a single canon. The climax of Vasari’s history and the foundation of what would become the normative view of art. But with them came the ideas of Dark Ages and Progress!, secular transcendence and the birth of discourse. A culture quake of epochal proportions and the inevitable aftermath of abandoning episteme for the hand of man.

 

Thinking about High Renaissance artists reminds us of the Noldor – Tolkien’s doomed Elves who squander their immense gifts in a futile war against the Satan of their world. But for a time they are successful – so immense are their gifts that they can even stalemate the Prince of this World. For a time. 

 

 

 

Eric Velhagen, Glorfindel and the Balrog

 

Glorfindel is a perfect example. A man-like creature whose mastery of reality allows him to slay a balrog of Morgoth with a sword. Only to follow it into the abyss in victory. Hard to find a better concise metaphor for unleashing secular transcendence under the cover of talent than that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sebastian Giacobino, Glorfindel

 

But the Noldor resurrect. And in at least one case, a second chance to use his enormous prowess - this time with the benefit of hindsight. 

 

Glorfindel is a fascinating character - the return of a First Age heavyweight from the Halls of Mandos clarifies why Rivendell was such a strong place and how the Witch-King of Angmar was beaten. Internal consistency is a big part of what makes the Legendarium the literary achievement of the 20th-century.

 

 

 

The High Renaissance artists created with such invention and skill that it also seemed like material perfection of in a fallen world could be possible. For a time.

So who are these guys? The next post will attempt to consider Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian, and what they mean for Art! and the art of the West.

 

 

Raphael, Transfiguration, 1516-1520, tempera on wood, Vatican Museum