Renesance

The word renaissance means rebirth or revival, and the idea of such a rebirth had gained ground in italy ever since the time of Giotto.



Giotto had been exalted in this way as a master who had led to a true revival of art, by this, people meant that his art was as good as that of the famous masters whose og Greece and Rome.


The idea of a revival was closely connected in the minds of the Italians with the idea of rebirt of „the grandeer that was Rome“.


The period between the classical age, to which they hoped was merely a sad interlude, „the time between.“


We now know that these ideas of the Italians had little basic in fact. They where,, at best, a crude and much simplified picture of the actual course of events. We have seen that some seven houndred years separated the Goths from the rise of the art that we now call Gothic.


We also know taht revival of art, after shock and trumoil of the Dark ages came gradually and taht the Gothic period itself sow this revival getting into its full stride.


The Italians of the fourteenth century belived taht art, science and scholarship had big power in the classical period, but ll these thing had been almost destroyed by the northen barbarians. And so, the Italians hoped for new era, which could bring out everythig this back.


In no city was this feeling of confidence and hope more intense than in the wealthy merchant sity of Florence, the city of Dante and of Giotto.


It was there, in the first decades of the fifteenth centur, that a group of artists deliberately set out to cerate a new art and to break with the ideas of the past.


The leader of this group of young Florentine artists was an architect, Filippo Brunelleschi.


Brunelleschi was employed on the completion of the cathedral of Florence. It was Gothic cathedral, and Brunelleschi had fully mastered the technical inventions, which formed part of the Gothic tradition.


Florentines wished to have their cathedral crowned by a mighty dome, but no artist was able to span, the immense spce between the pillars on which the dome was to rest, till Brunelleschi devised a methode of accomplishing this.


What he aimed at was the creation aof a new way of building, in which the forms of classical architecture were freely used to create new model of harmony and beauty.


He only wanted to use the elements from old style to new building.


What remains most astonishing in Brunelleschi’s achivement in the fact that he actually succeded in making his program come true, in the other word, Brunelleschi wanted to created the architecture of a new era, he certainly succeded.


Then came the period of the great discoveries, when Italian srtists turned to mathematics to study the laws of perspective, and to anatomy to study the build of the human body.


At last, the artist was free.