Original subtitles

Your lecture is Professor William Kloss.

Professor Kloss is an independent art historian and lecturer

for the Smithsonian Institution's Seminar and Travel Program.

He has delivered hundreds of courses and lectures around the world

on a range of European and American art

to such prestigious universities and institutions

as the University of Virginia,

the Art Institute of Chicago,

and Sotheby's Institute.

These lectures are titled

Great Artists of the Italian Renaissance, Part 1.

Good afternoon.

And welcome to this course on the Great Artists of the Italian Renaissance.

My name is Bill Kloss,

and it will be my distinct pleasure

to share many of the great artistic achievements of the Renaissance with you.

You may read a more complete statement of the scope of these lectures

in the course guidebook,

but a few words are in order here.

This course of 36 lectures

introduces the art of the Italian Renaissance,

the epoch that was the genesis of the next 500 years of Western art.

This survey will extend from about 1400 to about 1520.

It therefore covers the art historical periods

commonly called the Early Renaissance and the High Renaissance.

The focus will be on Central and Northern Italy,

with Central Italy considered first.

Instead of integrating the artists of North and South,

I decided to make clear that the art of the Italian Renaissance

was the birthplace of the Renaissance

and the location of most of its defining moments and monuments.

No later Western art can be discussed without reference to the Italian Renaissance,

its rediscovery of the achievements of classical antiquity

and its own artistic inventions.

Above all, a canon of beauty was established.

With many variations, that served artists for centuries.

Humanism, which may be defined as an ideal synthesis of human intelligence,

dignity, and spiritual vigor,

was the basis of that canon.

Most of the lectures are on individual artists,

presented in roughly chronological order,

and the emphasis will be on the style,

and content of their paintings and sculptures.

Essential elements of the political, social, and intellectual milieu

in which the artist worked

will be introduced throughout the lectures,

but this is not primarily a course on those aspects.

This is an artist-centered approach.

That said, this first lecture will include

some essential historical background.

You are looking at a map of the Italian Renaissance,

a map of Italy,

a map which was published in 1631,

but which stands quite well for the period of the earlier period of the Renaissance,

which we are discussing.

And I just wanted to point out, in this familiar boot of Italy,

three locations.

One of them, Rome, on the Tiber, quite near the coast of the sea,

which on this side, the west side, is called the Tyrrhenian Sea,

and in on the Tiber, you have the city of Rome.

The second is Florence, where we will spend so much of our time.

Florence is on the Arno.

The Arno begins near Pisa, which once was a seaport,

and continues all the way into the city of Florence,

toward the middle of the peninsula.

And finally, Venice, which we will turn to in particular later in the course,

but I will locate it for you now, up here in this area,

just as one makes the turn in the direction of Turkey.

I should point out something very interesting, by the way.

Just as an indicator, as an indicator of the importance of Venice,

the mercantile importance of Venice,

its importance in European affairs during the Renaissance,

this area, this body of water which we know as the Adriatic,

is called on this map the Gulf of Venice.

That speaks volumes, I think.

Renaissance means rebirth.

It is the name given to a major period of European civilization.

It is not primarily a style name, though it's often used that way.

Italy is the first and principal location of the Renaissance.

Indeed, for most people, the historical period that begins

and bears this name is virtually synonymous with Italy.

That is because we are speaking of the rebirth

of the ancient past of Greece and Rome,

and because the Italian peninsula contains and contained

abundant physical evidence of the Roman Empire.

An awareness of the classical past had never entirely vanished.

I am showing you a painting from the middle of the 18th century

by the artist Panini, who specialized in such fanciful

and picturesque views of Roman ruins.

The ruins that you see here were not all found together,

and these, in this case, he's only showing us three ruins or monuments,

and sometimes he shows many more,

and he feels quite at liberty to arrange them as he wishes,

to gather them from various parts of Rome in order to make the best picture.

These were, in a sense, tourist pictures sold to travelers to Italy

who wanted to take home a nice, compact reference of the things,

of some of the things which they had seen.

In this particular painting, which is called Peasants Among Roman Ruins,

he shows a temple in the foreground.

It is a circular temple, which were fairly common in ancient Rome.

A circular temple which I'm not sure I can identify,

but in any event, this round temple has something built within it.

There would have been a cella or interior room originally.

Frequently, these temples were converted into churches during the Renaissance,

particularly during the 16th century.

But in that conversion, they were often saved.

They might have been torn down completely had it not been for their reuse,

their imaginative reuse.

In the distance is either an arch or a gateway to the city,

which you see quite clearly in three of its tiers,

and it too has been moved to this pictorial spot by the artist.

In the center is the one very recognized,

recognizable object, and it is an equestrian statue.

It is a statue of Marcus Aurelius, the emperor,

and that is the statue which never was where you see it now,

but has been on the Capitoline Hill for a very long time

and is still there except in a copy.

It's been moved into a museum to protect it,

and a copy stands on the Capitoline in its place.

We will have occasion to make reference to the statue of Marcus,

Marcus Aurelius later when we discuss two of the great

bronze equestrian monuments of the Renaissance

by artists who certainly were aware of this ancient example.

Even before the modern sense of history,

this awareness of a glorious past of political and cultural unity

that had been ended by invasions of Goths and Vandals

was part of the collective consciousness in Italy,

at least among the educated classes.

The memory of the unified political world

and the single language of the Roman Empire

was also waiting to be made real again.

The period between the Roman Empire and the Renaissance

soon came to be called simply the Middle Ages,

and its artistic legacy was disparaged as Gothic.

We use the word in a positive sense,

but of course it derived from the Goths,

the barbarian invaders,

and was not intended to be a complementary word

when applied to art and architecture.

This introductory lecture is intended to examine

the more complex reality of Italian cultural development

during the 14th century.

We must not forget Dante and Petrarch,

the great Italian poets of the period.

Dante was born in 1265, he died in 1321,

and Petrarch, the younger, was born in 1304

and lived until 1374.

The two figures are essential in understanding

the cultural situation of Italy during their lives.

I show you an image of Dante,

which is in the Cathedral of Florence.

It is by an artist named Domenico di Michelino

and was painted about 1465.

It shows Dante explaining or expounding upon

his divine comedy, his great literary creation,

the long poem.

And I shouldn't leave you to wonder

what all these objects and buildings and so forth

were around him.

I should explain them to you a bit.

To the right, over the wall,

is the city of Florence itself,

dominated by the dome of the cathedral,

about which we will have a look.

We'll have occasion to talk at some length.

In the background,

we have a pyramid or cone

with concentric circles.

This represents the seven circles of purgatory.

They lead up to paradise at the top.

On the left, we have the Inferno,

Dante's Inferno or Hell.

At the left, which is an inverted cone,

beginning here and burrowing down

in nine circles leading to the center of the earth.

Both Dante and Petrarch were exiled from Florence.

I should point out that exile

was the usual fate of Florentines

who fell from power or fell from favor.

They were, in other words,

people who at the moment belonged

to the wrong political party,

were on the wrong side.

And it is greatly ironic

that both Dante and Petrarch,

two of the greatest of Florentines,

spent their lives, their adult lives

and their creative years in exile.

To these two poets,

the linguistic and therefore the cultural unity

of Italy owes an enormous debt.

Dante, in his Divine Comedy,

has been said to have invented Italian

as a major written language,

to which Petrarch's sonnets also greatly contributed.

You must understand that while Italian

was the spoken language,

the language of the intellectuals,

the language of books was Latin

up until that point.

And it is Dante and Petrarch

who make Latin,

who replace Latin,

to a certain extent,

with Italian

as the written language,

the modern language.

Petrarch, and I show you

a portrait of him

by a northern artist,

a Netherlandish artist,

whose name was Eustace of Ghent,

who was invited to come to Italy

to the city-state of Urbino

in the late 1470s,

where, for the Duke of Urbino,

he painted a series of famous men

to line the walls of the famous

Studiolo or Little Stud,

the study of the Duke,

a room which we will look at later in the course.

Petrarch also worked

for the Italian political unity,

aspired to by Colla di Rienzi.

Colla di Rienzi

was born about 1313

and died in 1354.

He raised his own army

and his troops expelled the nobles

from Rome in 1348.

It was a popular uprising,

in other words.

He then,

and this is what is extraordinary

about Rienzi,

he invited representatives

from the many city-states of Italy

to come to Rome

to discuss unification.

And while the effort failed,

obviously,

it was not to succeed for 500 years,

while it failed,

it nonetheless reinforced

the sense of Italian cultural unity

at the time.

Humanism,

a philosophical,

literary,

and artistic ideal

went hand in hand

with this rebirth.

Humanism emphasized the dignity

and potential of man

and it inspired secular studies

and the creation of art

that reflected the forms and ideas

of the classical world.

I don't want you to think,

because it would be mistaken,

to think that this is simply an equation

of humanism with secularism.

That is not so.

Because even though Petrarch offered

Platonic thought,

that is to say,

ideas borrowed from the Greek writer Plato,

which had been translated

and published in Renaissance Italy,

even though Petrarch offered

Platonic thought as an alternative

to the Christian synthesis

of faith and reason,

which we know by the term scholasticism,

Renaissance society remained

permeated with religion.

By the way,

the fact that Latin was the language

of the Christian church

and that the church was centered in Rome

is another reason

that the Renaissance occurred in Italy

rather than somewhere else in Europe.

By common agreement,

the Renaissance began

near the start of the 15th century

and continued until about

the third decade of the 16th century.

It did not arise only in one place,

yet it was in Florence

that it took deepest root.

The rediscovery and translation

of ancient texts

also fed this revival,

and there was also

a slowly developing sense of history

in the modern sense,

in our modern sense.

We sometimes speak of a proto-Renaissance,

of a period or moment

which seemed to anticipate the Renaissance,

and that moment in art

came in the person of Giotto di Bondone,

an artist born about 1266

who died in 1337,

most famous,

one of the most famous artists

of the 14th century in Italy.

Giotto worked in a number of places.

He worked in Assisi

at the famous shrine of St. Francis.

He worked in Florence.

He may have worked in Rome,

but his crowning achievement

is the fresco cycle

in the Arena Chapel in Padua,

near Venice in the north,

which he painted about 1305.

But first,

in order to understand

Giotto's innovations,

we must look at the prevailing

late Gothic style in painting.

One of the greatest painters

in that style

was named Duccio,

D-U-C-C-I-O,

from Siena,

southwest of Florence.

Here is his Lamentation.

It is a painting,

a relatively small painting,

done between 1308 and 1311

as part of a very large altarpiece

known as the Majesty,

the Maestà,

which consisted of

a very large seated Madonna and child,

flanked by many small scenes

with narratives of the life of Christ.

Because taste changes,

that Majesty, the Maestà,

was removed in the 18th century

from its place on the high altar,

put in a side chapel

where they didn't have to look at it

all the time.

And then, because it had paintings

on front and back,

they cut it down,

cut the front and the back,

apart,

so they could display both sides

against the walls of the chapel.

The next step was, of course,

to sell off parts of it

when they needed money.

And so small panels are found

in various museums in the world,

though the largest part

of the Maestà

still remains in Siena.

I am showing you the Lamentation

over the death of Christ,

over the dead Christ

from the Maestà,

and it is a very extraordinary

and beautiful work.

As you see,

it has a gold background,

which has been much rubbed,

but that gold ground

is typical of the treatment

that Duccio and most artists

of his period

gave the background

of their paintings.

The tomb or sepulchre

is in front,

the body of Christ

being deposited in it,

and Duccio tells the tale

with great feeling,

great feeling.

He has the figures all bending,

all leaning,

beautiful, beautiful range

of colors, by the way,

of the costumes,

all these heads leaning

toward the focal point

of the head of the Madonna

as she presses her face

against the head of her son.

The head of Mary Magdalene above

with her arms upraised in grief

is also in that position,

and the two figures to the left,

including John the Evangelist,

lean in to the picture,

helping and expressing their grief.

And then there's

the landscape element.

It's a, it's a toy mountain,

if you will,

but my goodness,

what an effective one,

this sliding diagonal down

to the point of greatest importance

in the painting.

It is a painting

that is deeply felt,

and I wouldn't want you

to think that Duccio,

pardon me,

was anything except

a great painter,

but he's a very different painter

than Giotto,

or, but better,

Giotto is a very different painter

than he is.

Here is Giotto's Lamentation

in the Arena Chapel,

about 1305.

It's a painting

that's a fresco,

so it's very large

instead of quite small,

but that really isn't the point,

because just as Duccio

could paint larger,

so could Giotto paint smaller.

In painting,

Giotto evolved

a powerful human-centered art

and style in contrast,

in contrast to the prevailing

late Gothic style

that we saw in, in Duccio.

In some ways,

this is very similar,

and let me discuss it

for just a moment.

He too uses that sliding

rock, that diagonal

that moves down.

Here, not so much

a toy mountain, though.

It is really a wall of rock

and much more credible,

and it slides down

from upper right,

where it is capped

by a barren tree,

quite significant

in the sense of this loss,

of this death,

and it slides down,

interrupted only

by the figure

of John the Evangelist,

who stands with both arms

swept back behind him,

and provides a great emotional

as well as physical

impulse toward the continuation

of this diagonal

toward the head of Christ

and the head of the Madonna.

There are more figures

because it's a larger painting,

and we have figures

standing to the left

as well as to the right.

There are also the figures,

these two remarkable,

anonymous, if you will,

figures in the foreground.

We don't see their faces

is what I mean by anonymous.

We don't know who they are.

They're large blocks of figures.

They, they protect,

they guard,

they frame the heart

of this painting.

They are the epitome

of the simplicity,

the clarity,

the powerful form,

the deeply felt emotion

that Giotto brings

to his forceful narration.

There is one other thing

that needs to be pointed out,

and that is in contrast

to this,

to the weight,

the absolute weight

and bulk of the figures below

and their, their stasis,

their seriousness

in this painting

in the sky above,

we have angels

who in their emotion

are weeping and wailing

and diving and rising

and extraordinary,

extraordinary activity

of, of extroverted emotion,

a very different matter

than what we see below,

a beautiful contrast.

I should say that Giotto's work

is a matter of cumulative power.

His space is strictly delimited

to a shallow stage

and the blue background

does not provide an illusion

of the sky,

only a kind of shorthand

for sky.

As I said, the Renaissance,

or as I may have said,

the Renaissance might have begun

right here.

But even while Giotto's influence

was continuing to develop,

it was cut short

only a decade after his death

by one of the great catastrophes

of recorded history,

the Black Death,

the plague,

which struck Florence in 1347.

And remained there

for a two-year period.

The physical decimation

of the population

forced a spiritual crisis.

The Black Death,

which had recurrent episodes

up until the end of the century

and beyond,

led to profound gloom

throughout Europe

because it was not just in Italy.

And this despair translated

into intense piety

in all classes of society.

As a result,

the Renaissance was put on hold.

Art, on the whole,

regressed to a severely medieval,

even Byzantine, style

for most of the second half

of the century.

Perhaps the leading artist

in Florence who reflected

this harsh, potent style

was Andrea Orcagna,

who was a painter,

a sculptor,

and an architect.

Still, although the character

of the art that was produced

changed,

artistic activity and patronage

continued unabated.

Here is a famous altarpiece

by Orcagna.

It is the Strozzi Altar,

commissioned by a member

of the Strozzi family.

In 1354,

it was completed in 1357.

It is in the church,

which we will mention many times

in this course,

the Church of Santa Maria Novella.

I show it to you

because instantly

the contrast is clear.

The narration,

narration is suppressed

in this painting.

We have instead

a figure of the enthroned Christ

in a kind of mandolin,

an almond-shaped halo,

suspended in the air,

and saints on both sides.

There is some little interaction

between the nearest kneeling figures

and the figure of Christ.

But otherwise,

the saints are kept

within their own spaces,

their own niches,

as it were,

and against the gold ground.

The gold ground,

which we were used to in Duccio,

but which Giotto had done without,

recurs, returns here

in this post-plague era.

And we have a reversion

to a medieval, medieval style.

I want to point out,

before letting this image

of the entire altarpiece go,

the panels below.

We'll encounter these many times,

and I should just say

that this is called a predella,

and it is the panel

at the foot of the altarpiece

where smaller paintings

are often mounted,

and they are usually

narrative paintings.

The center of this

I wanted you to look at

a little more closely

just to see the staring eyes

of the figure of Christ

in this painting.

It has the feeling

of a last judgment.

It has a tremendously

overwhelming aura.

The humanistic art of Giotto

and his followers

had been replaced by a severe art

which emphasized guilt

and the need to repent,

and in which mysticism

and the authority of the church

both offered hope.

Of course, many artists

also perished in the plague,

which further cut short

Giotto's influence.

In Pisa,

in the cloistered burial ground

called the Campo Santo,

the Holy Field,

a fresco called

The Triumph of Death

was painted in the middle

of the 14th century,

and it sums up

the prevailing pessimism.

It's badly damaged,

but I show you details

from the right

and then from the left.

On the right-hand side

of the fresco,

you have a group of figures

that recall Boccaccio's

Decameron,

that wonderful story

written right after the plague,

in which Boccaccio describes

how a group of aristocratic

young people left Florence

to gather together

in a rural retreat

in order to escape the plague,

and in order to pass the time there,

they told stories.

One hundred of them.

And those stories

were gathered and published,

as it were,

in the famous Decameron.

Here we see,

on the right side,

a group of these ladies

and gentlemen,

all of them quite aristocratic,

against a kind of

tapestry background.

The trees

and the floral elements,

which are over all of this,

suggest very much tapestries

from the late Middle Ages.

And in a way,

fresco is a kind of substitute

for tapestry

in many cases.

So you have here

playing music,

singing,

talking,

telling stories.

And while this is not meant

to be the Decameron,

it is certainly very like

Boccaccio's tale.

On the other side,

we have something

quite different and shocking.

We have some horsemen,

a group of riders,

who have approached

and are suddenly stopped

in their tracks

by three coffins.

The shock and the stench

of death simply,

simply arrested

their forward movement.

Even though this area

is very damaged

in the lower coffins,

generally in these situations,

we show,

we see figures of all,

from all levels of society

in those coffins,

perhaps a cleric

and a ruler of some sort.

But every class of society

was stricken by the plague.

Wonderful, wonderful details,

the way the horses stretch,

this horse stretches.

Its nose forward,

its head forward at the,

toward the coffins.

The figures themselves,

particularly this one,

who takes a handkerchief

from his pocket

and covers his face with it

to cut the stench of death.

We don't know who made

the painting, by the way.

Usually, he's still just given

the pseudonym

Master of the Triumph of Death.

Finally, let me conclude

by showing you a few images

of Florence,

where we will spend

so much time.

Here is an 18th-century engraving.

But what it shows

could have been seen at any time

during the course of the Renaissance

in Florence,

because we have a religious festival

in Piazza della Signoria,

the piazza of the signores,

of the lords who ruled Florence.

We have on the left-hand side

the town hall,

the Palazzo Vecchio.

Straight ahead,

the loggia,

often called the Loggia dei Lanzi,

of the lances or lancers,

where the guards

were stationed,

and then a marvelous open space,

which was frequently used

for processions

and often used

for executions as well.

The Palazzo Vecchio itself

is seen here,

a remarkable building

because it was built

not only remarkable

because it's extraordinarily

handsome and powerful,

but it was built in 10 years,

an amazingly short time

for such a mammoth building,

built between 1299 and 1310.

Town hall hardly covers its significance

because it is a symbol of power.

That great tower became,

throughout Italy,

in town after town,

the symbol of power.

And earlier,

before this course begins,

in a sense,

many of these cities had towers

on all of the palaces of the city,

dozens of them.

It bristled with towers.

Then, as power was centralized,

towers were removed.

To the right,

in this,

you also see the open loggia.

I show you the interior

of Orsanmichele.

Orsanmichele,

built in the middle

of the 14th century,

is a building to which we'll return.

It was first an open-air grain market.

Then the loggias were closed

and a guild church and hall

was built in here.

It was under the control

of the Florentine mercantile guilds.

And it's a very critical

artistic site,

because they commissioned

many works of art

for the exterior in particular.

As you look at it,

by the way,

the painting on the right-hand side

is by Andrea Orcagna.

Again, it is an enthroned Madonna.

And I show you a view of Florence,

a view of Florence

which includes the cathedral

on the left,

the Palazzo Vecchio

on the far right,

and in between,

this building which rises up

above the buildings around it

but is lower than the cathedral

or the Palazzo Vecchio,

we have Orsanmichele.

In coming lectures,

we will begin a closer study

of the Renaissance,

beginning next time

with the development

of the Renaissance

from the late Gothic period.

Thank you for your attention.