Concerning Painting; Considerations Theoretical and Historical

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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE CULMINATION OF THE RENAISSANCE Just at the end of the fifteenth century, after two hundred years of delightful if incomplete creation or of strenuous study of nature and of technic, the art of the Italian Renaissance reached a sudden and brilliant maturity. For a brief period it produced a series of supreme masterpieces. Then, everywhere but in Venice, that decline began which has continued until now. Venice maintained the supremacy of Italian art until nearly the end of the six- teenth century, but with the beginning of the seventeenth the leadership in art passed definitely to the races of the North. The suddenness of the change from an art still more or less primitive to the full- blown art of the high Renaissance, and the briefness of the period of splendor, may be best shown by a few dates. The first picture of the new and fully matured style, Leonardo's Last Supper, was probably painted in 1497. Within fifteen years, that is, by 1512, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the frescos of the Camera della Segnatura had been completed, and when Raphael died, in 1520, the decline had already begun. In 1505 Raphael, then just beginning to break away from the method of Perugino and to establish his own artistic personality, had begun a fresco of The Trinity with Saints and Monks in San Severo at Perugia. He left it unfinished, and the lower part of it was painted, after his death, by Perugino himself, still practising with diminished power the old manner from which Raphael had so entirely freed himself. Even Cor- reggio, the youngest and the most revolutionary of the giants of the high Renaissance, who transformed painting beyond the dreams of Michelangelo or Raphael, had completed his work and died in 1534. Yet Lorenzo da Credi, Leonardo's fellow pupil in Verrocch...