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Art
Classical: Greeks, Etruscans & Romans (5th C. B.C.-5th C. A.D.)
The Greeks settled Sicily and southern Italy centuries before the Romans expanded south, so their art, which celebrates the perfection of proportion, balance, harmony, and form, is an integral part of Italy's heritage.
Although those early tourists to the Italian peninsula, the Etruscans, arrived with their own styles from Asia Minor, by the 6th century B.C. they were borrowing heavily from the Greeks in their sculpture (and importing thousands of Attic painted vases, which displayed the most popular and widespread painting style of ancient Greece).
Although painting was used primarily for decorative purposes in ancient Rome, bucolic frescoes (the technique of painting on wet plaster) adorned the walls of the wealthy. Rome's sculptures tended to glorify emperors and the perfect human form, often copying famous Greek originals.
Examples of art from classical eras include these:
Greek. The world's best surviving ancient Greek murals are in Paestum's museum, including the famed Tomb of the Diver frescoes. There is also some fine sculpture in the archaeological museums of Syracuse, Palermo, and Taranto, as well as numerous Roman copies of Greek originals filling just about every Italian archaeology museum from Milan to Rome to Syracuse.
Etruscan. Etruscan remains are mostly found in museums (the best in the Tuscan towns Volterra, Cortona, and Chiusi, and at Rome in the Villa Giulia and Vatican museums). Notable works include the bronze Chimera at Florence's archaeology museum, carved alabaster urns and the elongated bronze statuette Shade of the Evening in Volterra's Guarnacci museum, and terra-cotta sarcophagi covers of reclining figures in museums across Tuscany and in Rome's Villa Giulia. Some tomb paintings also survive at Tarquinia in Lazio and Chiusi in Tuscany.
Roman. Along with an army of also-ran statues and busts gracing most archaeological collections in Italy, you'll find a few standouts. In Rome, look for the marble bas-reliefs (sculptures that project slightly from a flat surface) on the Arch of Constantine, the sculpture and mosaic collections at the Museo Nazionale Romano, and the gilded equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius at the Capitoline Museums. The mosaics in the ancient villa of Sicily's Piazza Armerina are the most extensive in the world. Pompeii's Villa dei Misteri frescoes of religious rites are remarkably well preserved and expertly done. Also don't miss the Alexander mosaic from Pompeii, now at the archaeological museum in Naples.
Byzantine & Romanesque (5th-13th C.)
Artistic expression in medieval Italy was largely church-related. Because Mass was recited in Latin, images were used to communicate the Bible's most important lessons to the illiterate masses. Bas-reliefs around the churches' main doors, and wall paintings and altarpieces inside, told key tales to inspire faith in God and fear of sin (Last Judgments were favorites). Otherwise, decoration was spare -- and what existed was often destroyed, replaced, or covered as tastes changed over the centuries and cathedrals were remodeled.
The Byzantine style of painting and mosaic was very stylized and static. This iconographic tradition was imported from the eastern half of the Roman Empire centered at Byzantium (its major political outposts in Italy were Ravenna and Venice). Faces (and eyes) were almond-shaped with pointy little chins; noses were long, with a spoonlike depression at the top; and folds in robes (always blue over red) were represented by stylized cross-hatching in gold leaf.
Romanesque sculpture was more fluid but still far from naturalistic. Often wonderfully childlike in its narrative simplicity, the work frequently mixes biblical scenes with the myths and motifs of local pagan traditions that were being slowly incorporated into early medieval Christianity. Romanesque art was seen as crude in later periods; much of it was replaced or destroyed over the years; it survives mostly in scraps, as column capitals or carvings set above church doors, all across Italy.
The following are the best major examples of this era:
Ravenna. The churches of Italy's Byzantine capital are covered in stylized Byzantine mosaics, especially at San Vitale and both Sant'Appollinare in Classe and Sant'Appollinare Nuovo.
Basilica di San Marco, Venice. Venice's cathedral is a late Byzantine church of domes and an astounding number of mosaics (while the overall effect is indeed Byzantine, many of the mosaics are of various later dates).
Chiostro del Duomo di Monreale, Sicily. This hillside hamlet above Palermo houses a cathedral swathed with Byzantine mosaics inside. Its cloister columns are topped with some of the most wonderful Romanesque carved capitals in Italy.
Il Duomo, Pisa. Bonano Pisano's bronze Door of St. Ranieri (1180) on the cathedral's south side was the only door panel to survive a 16th-century fire.
Basilica San Zeno Maggiore, Verona. The 48 relief panels of the bronze doors, one of the most important pieces of Romanesque sculpture in Italy, were cast between the 9th and the 11th centuries and are flanked by strips of 12th-century stone reliefs.
Baptistery, Parma. The exterior sports a series of Romanesque allegorical friezes by Benedetto Antelami, who also carved the statues inside, while anonymous, 13th-century Romanesque artists painted frescoes on the walls.
Collegiata dei Santi Pietro e Orso, Aosta. On the edge of town, this Romanesque church preserves part of an 11th-century fresco cycle and 40 remarkable 12th-century carved column capitals in the cloisters.
International Gothic (Late 13th to Early 15th C.)
Late medieval Italian art continued to be largely ecclesiastical. Church facades and pulpits were festooned with statues and carvings. In both Gothic painting and sculpture, figures tended to be more natural than in the Romanesque (and the colors used in painting were more rich and varied) but were highly stylized and rhythmic. The figures' features and gestures are exaggerated for symbolic or emotional emphasis. In painting, late Gothic artists such as Giotto started introducing greater realism, a sense of depth, and more realistic emotion into their art -- characteristics that would later define the Renaissance.
The best examples of Gothic art include these:
Pisano Pulpits (1255-1311). Father Nicola (1200-84) and son Giovanni (1245-1320) Pisano together crafted four relief-laden pulpits in Tuscany: in Pisa's Baptistery and Duomo, and in Siena's Duomo.
Andrea Orcagna (1344-68). This painter/sculptor/architect left several examples of his work in Florence, including frescoes in Basilica di Santa Croce, the Strozzi altarpiece in Santa Maria Novella, the elaborate tabernacle in Orsanmichele, and the Loggia della Signoria, whose wide, rounded arches and simple proportions presage the Renaissance.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti (ca. 1290-ca. 1348). The most important secular painting to survive from medieval Europe, his Allegory of Good and Bad Government (1338), is a complex Gothic allegory full of details from daily Sienese life. It hangs in Siena's National Picture Gallery. (Lorenzetti also left the gorgeous Presentation at the Temple [1342] in Florence's Uffizi Gallery.)
Giotto (1266-1337). The greatest Gothic artist, Giotto lifted painting from its Byzantine funk and set it on the road to the realism and perspective of the Renaissance. His best works are fresco cycles in Assisi's Basilica di San Francesco, Padua's Chapel of the Scrovegni, and Florence's Basilica di Santa Croce. Check out his Ognissanti Maestà (1310) in the Uffizi Gallery.
Renaissance & Mannerism (Early 15th to Mid-17th C.)
From the 14th to 16th centuries, the popularity of the Humanist movement in philosophy prompted princes and powerful prelates to patronize a generation of innovative young artists. These painters, sculptors, and architects broke with static medieval traditions in pursuit of a greater degree of expressiveness and naturalism. They began using such techniques as linear perspective, as pioneered by architect Brunelleschi and sculptors Donatello and Ghiberti. The term Renaissance, or "rebirth," was only later applied to this period in Florence (the epicenter from which the movement spread to the rest of Italy and Europe).
Eventually the High Renaissance began to stagnate, producing vapid works of technical perfection but little substance. Several artists sought ways out of the downward spiral. Mannerism, the most interesting attempt, was a movement that found its muse in the extreme torsion of Michelangelo's figures -- in sculpture and painting -- and his unusual use of oranges, greens, and other nontraditional colors, most especially in the Sistine Chapel ceiling. In sculpture, Mannerism produced twisting figures in exaggerated positions.
This list of Renaissance giants merely scratches the surface of the masters that Italy produced in the 15th and 16th centuries:
Ghiberti (1378-1455). This sculptor labored for more than 50 years to complete two sets of doors, including those nicknamed "Gates of Paradise," full of relief panels for Florence's baptistery. Because his competition piece to win this commission, crafted in 1401, won for its studied naturalism and dynamic action (two traits of Renaissance art), the event marks the beginning of the period. The competition piece is now in Florence's Bargello Museum.
Donatello (ca. 1386-1466). The first full-fledged Renaissance sculptor, Donatello had a patented schiacciato technique of warping low-relief surfaces and etching backgrounds in perspective to create a sense of deep space. His bronze and marble figures are some of the most expressive and psychologically probing of the Renaissance. Among his many innovations, this unassuming artist cast the first free-standing nude (the Bargello Museum's David) since antiquity. Many of his masterpieces are in Florence's Bargello Museum, Duomo Museum, Basilica di San Lorenzo, and Palazzo Vecchio, with more in Siena's Duomo, Baptistery, and Duomo Museum.
Masaccio (1401-27). Before he died at age 27, Masaccio produced the first example of painted perspective in the Trinità fresco (1427) in Florence's Basilica di Santa Maria Novella, as well as the famous fresco cycle in Florence's Brancacci Chapel (1424-27) of Santa Maria del Carmine. His work was studied assiduously by masters such as Michelangelo.
Botticelli (1444-1510). His courtly, graceful paintings populated by languid figures have become among the most beloved of the early Renaissance. His masterpieces are The Birth of Venus (ca. 1485) and Allegory of Spring (ca. 1481), both of which are in Florence's Uffizi.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). A true Renaissance man, Leonardo dabbled his genius in a bit of everything from art to philosophy to science (on paper, he even designed machine guns and rudimentary helicopters). Little of his remarkable painting survives, however, because he often experimented with new pigment mixes that proved to lack the staying power of traditional materials. Leonardo invented such painterly effects as the fine haze of sfumato, which softens outlines and progressively blurs background details to create a sense of realism and vast distance within the painting. Unfortunately, the best example of this effect, his fresco of The Last Supper (1495-97) in Milan, is sadly deteriorated, and even the ongoing multidecade restoration is saving but a shadow of the fresco's glory. View his earlier Annunciation (1481) in Florence's Uffizi for a better-preserved example.
Raphael (1483-1520). Rightfully considered one of Western art's greatest draftsmen, Raphael produced a body of work in his 37 short years that ignited European painters for generations to come. You'll find his Madonnas and papal portraits in Florence's Uffizi and Palazzo Pitti and in Rome's National Gallery of Ancient Art. His ethereal Transfiguration (1520), which he had almost finished when he died, resides in the Vatican Museums. Also in the Vatican are perhaps his greatest works, a series of frescoed rooms (1508-20), including the School of Athens, which depicts the classical philosophers whose rediscovery spurred on the Renaissance -- the various "philosophers" are actually portraits of Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael himself, and Bramante, a contemporaneous architect.
Michelangelo (1475-1564). This heavyweight contender for world's greatest artist was a genius in sculpture, painting, architecture, and poetry. He marked the apogee of the Renaissance. A complex and difficult man, Michelangelo was intensely jealous, probably manic-depressive, and certainly homosexual. He enjoyed great fame in a life plagued by a series of never-ending projects. Many were commissioned by Pope Julius II, including the Sistine Chapel frescoes (ceiling 1508-12); Last Judgment (1535-41); and the tomb of Julius II, of which he finished only the powerful Moses (1513-15) in Rome's San Pietro in Vincoli and the Slaves (1513-16) in Florence's Galleria dell'Accademia. Others were commissioned by the Medicis, including the family tombs in Florence's Medici Chapels, which incorporate Dawn, Dusk, Day, and Night (1531-33). Michelangelo worshiped the male nude as the ultimate form and used torsion (twisting the body in one direction) or contraposto (twisting the body in contradictory directions) to bring out their musculature.
When forced against his will to paint the Sistine Chapel, he broke almost all the rules and sent painting in an entirely new direction, called Mannerism, marked by nonprimary colors, and twisting, elongated figures.
Of Michelangelo's painting, Italy has only the Sacra Famiglia (1504) in Florence's Uffizi. Of his beloved sculpture, his hometown of Florence also preserves the famous David (1502-04) in the Galleria dell'Accademia and several early pieces in the Bargello Museum and Buonarroti's House. He sculpted three Pietàs (Mary mourning the dead Christ) over his long life -- the first in Rome's St. Peter's Basilica, carved at age 25 (1500), and the second in Florence's Duomo Museum, created at age 75 (1550-53). He was still working on the oddly modern, elongated Rondanini Pietà, now in Milan's Museum of Ancient Art, when he died at age 89 (1564).
Titian (1485-1576). The father of the Venetian High Renaissance, Titian imparted to the school his love of color and tonality and an exploration of the effects of light on darkened scenes. In Venice, you'll find his works everywhere, from canvases in the Academy Galleries to altarpieces decorating churches such as Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari to his early Battle (1513) scene in the Ducal Palace's Maggior Consiglio. He also has fine works in Florence, including the Uffizi's luminous Flora (1520) and famous Venus of Urbino (1538), which has had a great influence on European art (Manet's groundbreaking Olympia [1863] referenced this image), and the Palazzo Pitti's Mary Magdalene (1548) and The Concert (1510).
Mannerist artists. Artists who took Michelangelo's ideas and ran them to their logical limits include painters Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) and his students Rosso Fiorentino (1494-1540) and Pontormo (1494-1556). All three are well represented in Florence's Uffizi Gallery and Palazzo Pitti. Il Parmigianino's Madonna of the Long Neck (1534), in the Uffizi Gallery, is exemplary of the style, starring a waifish Virgin with a grotesquely long neck and pointy head.
Sculptors fared better with the Mannerism idea, producing for the first time statues that needed to be looked at from multiple angles to be fully appreciated. A good example is Giambologna's (1529-1608) Rape of the Sabines (1583) under Florence's Loggia della Signoria.
Baroque & Rococo (Late 16th to 18th C.)
The baroque, a more theatrical and decorative take on the Renaissance, mixes a kind of super-realism based on using peasants as models and an exaggerated use of light and dark, called chiaroscuro, with compositional complexity and explosions of dynamic fury, movement, color, and figures. The even more dramatic rococo is this later baroque art gone awry, frothy and chaotic.
The baroque period produced many fine artists, but only a few true geniuses, including the following:
Caravaggio (1571-1610). Caravaggio started as a street urchin, rose to fame through the graces of a Borghese cardinal, became an honorary Knight of Malta, and ended his life on the run from murder charges in Rome. In between, he reinvented baroque painting, using peasants and commoners as models and including their earthy realism (dirty bare feet were a favorite) in his works. He added his chiaroscuro technique of playing areas of harsh light off deep, black shadows (this helped accent the deeply wrinkled faces that he loved to include). Among his masterpieces are the St. Matthew (1599) cycle in Rome's San Luigi dei Francesi, a series of paintings in Rome's Galleria Borghese, the Deposition (1604) in the Vatican Museums, and several more in Florence's Uffizi Gallery and Palazzo Pitti and in Naples's National Museum & Gallery of the Capodimonte.
Pietro da Cortona (1596-1669). This Tuscan painter moved to Rome and became the progenitor of a fluffy, pastel baroque style, which he used to decorate the ceilings of Palazzo Barberini in Rome, including the allegorical Glorification of the Reign of Urban VIII (1635), and the Palatine Gallery (1641-47) of Florence's Palazzo Pitti for the Medici.
Bernini (1598-1680). Bernini was the greatest baroque sculptor, a fantastic architect, and no mean painter. His finest sculptures are in Rome. In the Galleria Borghese are his Aeneas and Anchises (1613), Apollo and Daphne (1624), The Rape of Persephone (1621), and David (1623-24) -- his version recalls a baroque man of action rather than a Renaissance man of contemplation like Michelangelo's David. His other masterpiece is the Fountain of the Four Rivers (1651) in Piazza Navona.
Tiepolo (1696-1770). The best rococo artist, Tiepolo specialized in ceiling frescoes and canvases meant to be placed in a ceiling with frothy, cloud-filled heavens of light, angels, and pale early-morning colors. Although he painted many works for villas of the Veneto, including the sumptuous Villa Valmarana "Ai Nani" and Villa Pisani, he also spent much of his time traveling throughout Europe on long commissions (his work in Würzburg, Germany, enjoys distinction as the largest ceiling fresco in the world).
Late 18th Century to Today
After carrying the banner of artistic innovation for more than a millennium, Italy ran out of steam with the baroque, leaving countries such as France to develop the heights of neoclassicism (although Italy produced a few fine neoclassical sculptures) and the late-19th-century Impressionism (Italy had its own version, called the Macchiaioli, in Tuscany). Italy has not played an important role in late-19th- or 20th-century art, although it has produced a few great artists:
Antonio Canova (1757-1822). Italy's top neoclassical sculptor, Canova was popular for his mythological figures and Bonaparte portraits (he even painted both Napoleon and his sister Pauline as nudes). You'll find his work in Venice's Correr Civic Museum, Rome's Galleria Borghese, Florence's Palazzo Pitti, and Milan's Brera Picture Gallery.
Giovanni Fattori (1825-1908). Best of the Macchiaioli, Fattori painted battle scenes and landscapes populated by the Maremma's long-horned white cattle. His works grace Florence's Palazzo Pitti, Milan's Brera Picture Gallery, and Rome's National Gallery of Modern Art.
Amadeo Modigliani (1884-1920). A sickly boy, only moderately successful in his short lifetime, Modigliani helped reinvent the portrait in painting and sculpture after he moved to Paris in 1906. He's known for his elongated, mysterious heads and rapidly painted nudes. Check them out at Milan's Brera Picture Gallery and Rome's National Gallery of Modern Art.
Futurist artists. In 1909, Italian artists living in Paris made a spirited attempt to take the artistic initiative back into Italian hands, but what the futurist movement's Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) came up with was similar to cubism (a painting style that depicted objects from all points of view at once) with an element of movement. Examples of his work can be seen in Milan's Brera Picture Gallery and Rome's National Gallery of Modern Art. Gino Severini (1883-1966) contributed a sophisticated take on color that rubbed off on the core cubists as well; you can view his works in Milan's Civic Gallery of Modern Art and Rome's National Gallery of Modern Art.
Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). De Chirico founded freaky Pittura Metafisica (Metaphysical Painting), a forerunner of Surrealism wherein figures and objects are stripped of their usual meaning through odd juxtapositions, warped perspective, unnatural shadows, and other bizarre effects and a general spatial emptiness. Look for them at Milan's Brera Picture Gallery and Rome's National Gallery of Modern Art and Collection of Modern Religious Art in the Vatican Museums.
Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964). In the painting of his eerily minimalist, highly modeled, quasi-monochrome still lifes, Morandi was influenced by Pittura Metafisica. His paintings decorate Bologna's Palazzo Comunale, where an entire section is devoted to him; Milan's Brera Picture Gallery; and Rome's National Gallery of Modern Art and Collection of Modern Religious Art in the Vatican Museums.
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