There are several movements throughout history whose intention was to evoke the greatness of the old masters of the Renaissance, whether they are the names of giants like Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael, or those who experimented with painting before them and laid the foundations of the movement from the beginning of the Quattrocento, such as Massaccio, Mantegna, Botticelli, among others.

This is why you may have come across paintings that easily look like a Renaissance work but do not belong to that movement.

The Renaissance has various characteristics that make it up and make it unique, but sometimes it is not easy to identify them and differentiate them from other movements, so we want to share a few bases and notions that can help when looking at a painting and not feel confused. whether it belongs to the Renaissance or not.

Characteristics

First, we must remember that the spirit of the times is under the ideological influences of Humanism and there is a conscious intention to evoke Greco-Roman antiquity. The study of the human body is very important, since it is not only the center of humanism, but the aesthetic is found in the proportional, canons arise that indicate the correct measurements of the human body and complying with these makes it beautiful. However, ideal beauty did not only consist of measurements, appearances also counted, youth and refined features were well seen, as well as facial features that resemble the physique of the ancients, such as the Greek profile.

The human body was certainly the center of everything, but it was not everything. The relationship of the human with his environment and the measures that this represented began to be studied. In the Renaissance, nature and the position of the human in it were also studied. There was a search to seek a "harmonious environment", where the studied nature is in its rightful place, together with the existing architecture and the human being in the correct proportions, not only the relationship of measurements and distances in their own body, but also in balance with everything around him.

Even with Humanism moving the great minds of the time, the Church continued to be the most powerful institution, especially economically, an advantage that allowed it to be one of the pillars in the patronage of art. Therefore, the themes in Renaissance painting vary between sacred and pagan art, with a large number of paintings that vary between portraiture, Greco-Roman mythology, allegories and, of course, representations of biblical passages. In the latter, triangular compositions were widely used, although compositions based on elementary geometric figures (triangle, rectangle and circle) abounded in Renaissance painting regardless of the theme.

Compositional Elements

As we already mentioned, geometric compositions were common and among those, the triangular one was the most used in sacred art, this because they were aware of the harmony that it provided to the work and the meaning that the number 3 carried, directly related to the Holy Trinity. However, this does not mean that religious paintings used only the triangular composition, nor that the other figures were only for pagan art.

A very important element that began to be studied in the Renaissance was perspective. In "The treatise on painting" (1632), Leonardo da Vinci explained -among various topics- about types of perspectives. First, it defines perspective as the science that studies the lines of vision, linear perspective includes the linear construction of bodies; atmospheric perspective observes the behavior and blurring of colors according to their distances; and finally, the diminishing perspective is the one that studies the distortion of bodies according to their position and distance.

In other words, linear perspective is the one we know that is made up of the horizon line where the view is and a vanishing point where the lines of perspective converge, giving us the notion of depth, even though the work is in a flat surface.

Atmospheric perspective makes objects look far or near depending on their sharpness and color, some examples of its application would be the blurred backgrounds found in "La Gioconda" (1503) and Leonardo's "Virgin of the Rocks".

Possibly the best example of diminishing perspective is foreshortening. It consists of the distortion of the lines that make up a figure and make it appear bulky and in a resting position, giving an idea of ​​the depth of the object without it being represented completely frontally, like the body of Christ in Mantegna's painting , or the arm on which Adam leans to reach God.

The Renaissance is one of the most famous movements in the history of art, known for the enormous production of works, the great ingenuity of its most important characters and the various styles that they managed even among contemporaries. Possibly this last characteristic is one of the main reasons why various works that do not belong to this period are often confused. However, experimentation and the search for an expression were objectives that had not been presented in previous movements such as the Byzantine or Romanesque.

Therefore, the true characteristic that can encompass the large number of styles and works in the movement would be experimentation as such. They were still studying the body, the perspective, the techniques and the color, despite the great mastery that we observed in their results, they were still learning things that had not been done before.

Sources: The History of Art, Gombrich. The treatise on painting, Da Vinci. Art History: The Renaissance, Folio.