{"id":1966,"date":"2024-03-06T03:19:41","date_gmt":"2024-03-06T03:19:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/?p=1966"},"modified":"2024-03-06T03:19:41","modified_gmt":"2024-03-06T03:19:41","slug":"ar112-3-4-high-renaissance-in-the-north","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/2024\/03\/06\/ar112-3-4-high-renaissance-in-the-north\/","title":{"rendered":"AR112 – 3\/4 – High Renaissance in the North"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I thought today was really awesome, the Northern Renaissance is one of my favorite periods of art history. First, however, we finished up the Late Renaissance by discussing some of Branzino’s works as a way of discussing the important features of Late Renaissance allegory and portraiture. After that we jumped right into the Northern Renaissance, starting off with D\u00fcrer. I didn’t realize that his father was a goldsmith and that at least in a poetic sense, engraving and woodcutting were in D\u00fcrer’s blood. His prints and sketches are spectacular, and his ability to bring what is essentially chiaroscuro <\/em>to his prints through deep and shallow hatching shows his understanding of both woodcarving and the Italic artistic vocabulary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was cool to discuss how D\u00fcrer also capitalized on fears of the Last Judgement coming in the year 1500 through his Apocalypse<\/em> prints, perhaps he was the first artist-capitalist. His paintings don’t do it for me, they seem somehow blander than those of the Italian Renaissance. It was cool to learn, however, that the idea that artists should be members of the elite intelligentsia (as depicted by D\u00fcrer’s humanist pursuits and his Salvador Mundi<\/em> self-portrait) made its way to Northern Europe alongside, of course, Renaissance pictorial ideals. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was interesting to learn, however, that the Northern Renaissance saw both the influx of the Italian artistic vocabulary alongside the resurgence of local artistic traditions. We mentioned this briefly in class as it related to naturalism; specifically how the Northern artists we more concerned with faithfully depicting details of a natural scene while Italian artists were interested in how the systems of nature interacted with each other. The Isenheim Altarpiece<\/em> is a perfect example of an artist sticking to a traditional, almost Medieval, artistic style. The center panel depicts a grotesque and contorted Christ bleeding out on the cross in a bleak landscape. The suffering of Christ is at the forefront of the image, an important moral message for the intended audience of the altarpiece (i.e. those afflicted by ergotism). The gloomy and gut-wrenching scenes of the closed altarpiece are contrasted nicely with the joyous scenes of the open altarpiece, particularly the ethereal Resurrection<\/em>. The many colors that emanate from Christ’s body cast him (in his resurrected form) as a wholly heavenly being. Considering that ergotism typically causes hallucinations, I wonder what it might have been like for the patients to see such a uniquely colorful and textured altarpiece. In any case, the panel suggests a hopeful message, a reminder of the pure and holy forms the patients could assume after death. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I thought today was really awesome, the Northern Renaissance is one of my favorite periods of art history. First, however, we finished up the Late Renaissance by discussing some of Branzino’s works as a way of discussing the important features of Late Renaissance allegory and portraiture. After that we jumped right into the Northern Renaissance, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18314,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1966"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18314"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1966"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1968,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1966\/revisions\/1968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}