Medici and their importance to the Renaissance

After watching the documentary on the Medici Family it made me realize just how important they were to the birth of the Renaissance.  By employing and backing up artist that no one would dare to take a risk on, it lead to revolutionary art and ideas that helped sparked the renaissance, such as the dome Brunelleschi created along with his concept of linear perspective.  Another artist backed by the Medici family was Donatello.  His David sculpture was so revolutionary because it was the first time since ancient Roman times that anyone attempted to make a free standing bronze statue of a naked man. The statue depicts and naked man standing with his foot on the helmet of Goliath with his head inside of the helm, with a feather sticking out of the helmet caressing the inner thigh of David. Certain artist like the 2 afore mentioned Brunelleschi and Donatello, along with many others, made the Renaissance what it was.

Design Principles, how they shape the art we see.

The Rehearsal.

Flamarion Woodcut's painting from 1888.

Artist use many different techniques in order to achieve the look and feel that they want their work to portray.  One of those techniques is call asymmetrical balance.  In the Painting to the right, The Rehearsal, the artist achieves asymmetrical balance by using directional forces of the smaller forms located in the top left of the painting, and leads you to the larger forms in the bottom right.  Also by using a lot of warmer toned colors throughout this painting, when the artist has the blue it really stands out giving a nice contrast and making the painting feel like in levels out. The stairs on the left gives the painting a feel of continuity, as if the directional forces go in a circular motion by the smaller figures pointing to the larger figures, to the open area near the blue form leading you back to the foot of the stairs, up the stairs and back to the small forms continuously.  It achieves a really contrasting balance.  Another technique is the ability to make a painting feel unified. Woodcut's painting to the left utilizes different things to make this piece feel unified.  Such as the strong cool presence on one side and on the opposite side a strong warm presence with the abundance of yellow.  Also Woodcut uses the repetition of the stars from top right corner to bottom left corner to help unify this work.  And lastly, Woodcut creates a from around the picture plane using similar designs and shapes to border the image in the middle, giving this piece that last touch to solidify the unity in this piece.  Along with those techniques some artist might use scale to get a feeling or message across.  In Bobby Chiu's art below, it shows what looks to be a larger man stealing a bike from a younger and smaller child.  It gives you a sense of justice by using an overly large guard dog with huge teeth in a menacing gesture as if he will be punished by the larger being just as he was punishing the smaller child by stealing his bike.  This creates almost moral feel to it, almost to say do not pick on others smaller than you because there's always someone(or thing) bigger than you.  The dramatically large dog also creates a bit of awe as you can see the people on the outskirts looking in fright and amazement.  These are just some ways in which artist use different design principles to craft their art.

Bobby Chiu's painting.

Egypt, Rome, Greece...how they do, and don't differ.

 

Golden Mask of Tutankhamen.

After watching the online lecture I was able to get a glimpse of each societies' art and it made me notice certain things.  In the Egyptians' art style you can notice that they depict themselves as gods.  From everything such as stature of the sculptures to the various symbols they use to depict certain qualities, such as cobras crowns or cobra symbolic head piece to show who the king/Pharaoh was.  However in Greek art their work would focus on the natural beauty of the human body, because in their culture there was no form on earth more beautiful than the human body.  In the Greek art you can see the realism in proportions in regards to the human body and the great detail they chiseled the stone into.  The Romans style of art focused a great deal on individualism, showing emotions in the statues' face that was unprecedented before.  These emotions or features ranged from things such as fear, sadness, happiness, anger, old age, and pain to name just a few.  Even though Greek and Roman art draw a thin line in some aspects where they differ, the clear difference is in the values they had.  The Romans went astray from the perfect human sculptures the Greeks would make, and instead show realism in the emotion they depicted or facial expressions they showed with great detail.



Portrait bust of a man, 1st century B.C.;
Republican Roman.

The Discus Thrower.

                 But apart from how all these styles differ they share one common thing that is interesting.  When you look at all these different pieces you can get a feel of the era and setting they were made in.  When I say that I mean the conditions in which they were made under.  In Egypt, the art was monumental paying tribute to Gods or Pharaohs, and you were able to feel the sense of a hierarchy in which they lived through during those times.  Same thing goes for the Greeks, in their work they make you appreciate the human physique in a way that they did by crafting their statues with such finesse and perfection.  It really shows you how much they valued the human body in those times.  The Romans, last but not least, also give you a feel of where their values lie during those times.  The amount of detail they put into facial expressions and features really showed how the felt about individualism and the power to express it.  To see these 3 different pieces and clearly see how different they are physically makes it really intriguing to find the similarities amongst them.  What's even more amazing is how they are able to depict a time period and give us a sense of what took place during those times all through these pieces of art, at least that's my take on it after all art is subjective.  Hope you enjoyed my brief point of view on Egyptian, Greek, and Roman art.