A new Renaissance?

The great burgeoning of intellectual life, the Renaissance, which exploded in late 13th- century Northern Italy, resulted from a
philosophical shift, a rift that was eventually to separate religion and science. The new philosophy, humanism, sprang from the idea that
the only way to know about the world is by direct experience. It rejected sterile medieval received wisdom for a new-found spirit of
sceptical enquiry. From this came the scientific method, the rediscovery of the Classical age, and new ways of thinking about the relation between God and man, free will, and individuality.

In painting, this manifested itself as a move away from the flat Byzantine image to a more naturalistic, three-dimensional, style in which the artist attempted to depict something of the character and emotions of the figures they portrayed. We know something of the artists who were working at this time from Giorgio Vasari’s monumental Lives of the Artists. Writing in the mid-16th century, during the zenith of the high Renaissance, Vasari argued that the revolution underpinning western art began in Florence with Giotto.

On the face of it, this seems uncontroversial. Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua, commissioned by the Scrovegni family and
executed between 1304 and 1306, are remarkable enough. However, it is arguably with the altarpiece for the Florentine Church of the Ognissanti, finished about 1310, that he first achieves the realism we associate with the Renaissance. Here we see a Madonna sculpted in
light, her underlying shape revealed, rather than covered, by her clothing, the epitome of full-breasted motherhood, who gazes directly at us with all-knowing tranquillity. Her immediacy was probably too much for the commissioners of this work, for within a few years it had been replaced by a more traditional polyptych.

The Ognissanti altarpiece is now in the Galleria degli Uffizi (Florence), where it sits between two altarpieces with the same subject matter, by Duccio and Cimabue (Giotto’s teacher), done in the last few years of the 13th century. These other works are scarcely less pleasing, but the juxtaposition starkly emphasises Giotto’s innovations. The early Renaissance was fuelled by rich patrons. Two such were the bankers Bardi and Peruzzi who commissioned chapels decorated by Giotto in Santa Croce in Florence. Here, his originality becomes more explicit. In the ‘Trial by Fire’, a fresco in the Bardi chapel produced sometime between 1315 and 1320, the dynamic of the characters tells
a story with great force and economy. Muslim leaders, challenged to a test of their faith, slink away shamefaced, despite the imperious
command of the sultan, while St Francis steps calmly forward into the flames. That the Santa Croce frescoes were studied and drawn by
artists of the stature of Michelangelo and Raphael is sure testimony to their greatness.