Arts & Culture - Introduction
Art (with a specific focus in this section on painting and sculpture) was an omnipresent element of Early Modern European culture. The term ‘Renaissance’ (‘rebirth’ in Italian), coined in 1550 to describe the artist Michelangelo, came to more generally signify Europe’s transition from the medieval to modern era. Because the Renaissance was a cultural movement, different parts of Europe experienced its effects at different periods and with different mediums—painting in Italy in the fifteenth century, literature in sixteenth-century England, and architecture in seventeenth-century Scandinavia. Despite this multi-century span there were some universal qualities. Greater distinctions were made between art (made by figures considered to be geniuses and specifying work produced in the ‘major’ areas of painting, sculpture, and architecture) and craft (made by everyone else and in ‘minor’ fields like furniture-making, smithing, and needlework) (Wiesner-Hanks, 135). Alongside these divisions came class-centric distinctions of ‘high’ and ‘low’. High culture was bankrolled by the elites and confined to urban hubs like Amsterdam and Rome. The work celebrated in these circles was overwhelmingly made by white men who operated out of workshops that stipulated years of formal training (Wiesner-Hanks, 163). Few women—and only those born into the gentry—were able to work creatively (Wiesner-Hanks, 165).
Renaissance artists became concerned with developing techniques that would allow them to accurately capture the human form and the physical world. These included innovations in the rendering of spatial depth, perspective, anatomical proportion, and the effect of light on different surfaces. The goal was the production of works that emphasized balance and aesthetic harmony. (Wiesner-Hanks, 160-1). While the Renaissance was deeply influenced by Europe’s classical past, it was also affected by growing contact with Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Natural goods (and non-white representatives) of these places began to feature in European artwork, with the goal of highlighting their patron’s worldly exoticism (Wiesner-Hanks, 136).
In the seventeenth century the austere tranquility that characterized Renaissance art slowly gave way to a style known as ‘baroque’. Baroque art was characterized by its ornate, dynamic, large-scale sensibility, emphasizing passion and the evocation of feeling over pleasing symmetry and anatomical exactitude. Spearheaded by the papacy and Jesuit communities in Rome in the late sixteenth century, baroque art was intended to give the Church a more grandiose, arresting public image. The conceit was quickly adopted by European rulers, who erected grand palaces and commissioned showy portraits of themselves as divinely-appointed warriors. Painters like Michelangelo de Caravaggio developed styles such as ‘chiaroscuro’ and ‘tenebrism’ to create works that were dynamically lit, emotionally tense, and unnaturally, dramatically exaggerated. ‘Rococo’ architecture, sharing baroque’s extravagant flair, swept through France, Germany, and Austria; Italy and England remained more wary, continuing to draw from Neoclassicism (Wiesner-Hanks, 419). These changes were coupled with a rise in commercialism pioneered by the art dealer and gallery, democratizing access to art. By the eighteenth century, middle-class Europeans were able to buy reproductions of their favorite works (Wiesner-Hanks, 414-16).
Despite this shift towards artistic individualism and accessibility, it is important to remember that the great throughline of art production in Early Modern Europe was its exclusivity to wealthy patrons. Religious institutions, the aristocracy, and rulers were the primary patrons of the arts, with control over even the most celebrated creative geniuses (Wiesner-Hanks, 162). The themes of Early European artwork—Biblical scenes, noble leaders, and epic battles—reflect the preoccupations of their financiers.
