Italy Secondaria di secondo grado – classe 4ª Art history (liceo artistico, musicale e coreutico)

1. 15th century to Impressionism

Renaissance · 17th–18th centuries · 19th century

• Renaissance Art (c. 1400–1600) – Renaissance art began in Florence around 1400 and spread across Italy and northern Europe until about 1600. Inspired by humanism and by ancient Greek and Roman art, artists used linear perspective, correct proportion and anatomy, light and shade (chiaroscuro, sfumato) and, increasingly, oil paint. Rich patrons such as the Medici, the popes and city guilds paid for the work. The period is usually divided into the Early Renaissance, the High Renaissance (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael), the Northern Renaissance (van Eyck, Dürer, Bruegel) and Mannerism.
• The Baroque: Art in Motion (c. 1600–1750) – Baroque is the European style of about 1600 to 1750 in painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature. It grew in Rome after the Reformation, when the Catholic Church and kings used art to move and impress people. Its marks are motion, contrast and emotion: diagonals, dramatic light (chiaroscuro and tenebrism), curving walls and domes, gold and illusion ceilings, music with a basso continuo and many weaving voices, and writing full of contrasts, surprising metaphors and the theme of passing time. Key names: Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Borromini, Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, Góngora, Donne. Classicism answered it with order, reason and calm.
• Impressionism – Impressionism was an art movement that began in France in the 1860s–1870s. Painters such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt painted outdoors, quickly, to catch the changing effects of light and the atmosphere of one moment. They used bright, pure colours placed side by side in visible brushstrokes, coloured shadows and scenes of modern everyday life. Their first group show in Paris in 1874 was mocked by critics, who took the name from Monet's painting 'Impression, Sunrise'. Impressionism opened the way to Post-Impressionism (Seurat, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin) and modern art, and the word was also used for music (Debussy) and literature.