Italian vs Northern Renaissance Art

Italian Renaissance vs. Northern Renaissance Italian Renaissance The Triumph of Galatea Raphael (1512) Northern Renaissance The Marriage Feast at Cana Hieronymus Bosch (after 1550) From the fourteenth century to the seventeenth century, a cultural movement spread through Europe known as the Renaissance, where new ideas on literature, science, and art emerged. However, as we can see in The Triumph of Galatea, from the Italian Renaissance, and The Marriage Feast at Cana, from the Northern Renaissance, the ideas and techniques on each movement developed differently. The Triumph of Galatea is a fresco made by Raphael in 1512 during the Italian Renaissance. Embellished with a mix of soft and vivid colors, the painting depicts a mythological scene of Galatea, a Greek sea nymph. She is standing in a shell looking delighted at the sky while being drawn by fierce dolphins. To her left, a Triton is embracing a different sea nymph with a seahorse behind them, and to her right, a centaur embraced by another nymph. Cupids pointing with their loved arrow are shown also in the scene, along with other mythical creatures blowing trumpets. Everyone in the painting is naked exhibiting every detail of their beauty. In contrast, The Marriage Feast at Cana by Hieronymus Bosch was painted during the Northern Renaissance period. The Marriage Feast at Cana is an oil painting that captures a religious theme, the first miracle of Christ in the wedding of peasants at Cana. The warm and dark tones were used to depict a wedding celebration at a middle-class home. The people are gathered around an L-shaped table sharing their thoughts. There is a small man in front of the wedding couple, raising a golden cup and waving his hand. While the guests enjoy the feast, they are servants who carry a swan and a boar’s head as the main dishes; another servant at the lower right corner is filling jars with water. Finally, two musicians are playing bagpipes above the people. The details found on these paintings differ from each other as a result of the different artistic movements established in Europe. During the 15th century, Italy revived the classical values on art and science from the Greco-Roman culture. Artists from this decade idealized Greek gods, and as we can see in The Triumph of Galatea illustration, painters used Greek myths about them as inspiration for their work. Raphael based this painting on Galatea’s apotheosis, the elevation of her soul upon her death to become a glorified goodness. This is the perfect example of how artists portraited ideal artworks with heroic mythological scenes. The humanism movement during these centuries gave way to evaluate the human anatomy better, and as a result, nudity was more common on many art pieces, such as on The Triumph of Galatea. In Northern Europe, on the contrary, artists show more interest in the study of early Christian manuscripts. Bosch followed this guideline on The Marriage Feast at Cana where he based his painting on the biblical story of John 2:1-12 where Christ’s first miracle was made. In John 2:112, it is detailed that Christ was invited to the wedding at Cana. The spouses run out of wine, and Christ as his gift, used the water and turned it into wine. The men in the right corner of the table raising his hand and the servant filling the jars are evidence of this gospel in Bosch’s painting. Not only that but also the Northern region depicts a more realistic image of their arts compared to Italy. The marriage feast at Cana is an example of the firsts artworks that in detail illustrate common middle-class people in their everyday life, this is known as genre painting. It is evident that even if the Italian and Northern Renaissance movement happened at the same time, the ideas established in the paints vary Other remarkable differences between these two art pieces are the techniques and materials used while being created. As we can see on the soft, pastel, water-based pigments used on The Triumph of Galatea, the fresco technique was common during the Italian Renaissance on murals. Also, the use of light and shades give the optical illusion to a more realistic painting, like the ones used under the dolphin and the cupid in the sea. At the same time, in Northern Europe, the most common painting technique was oil, which gave the impression of dark and warm tones on the illustrations in wood panels. The Marriage Feast at Cana uses dark, warm tones full of small details. Midterm Renaissance Writing Assignment Reflection Checklist: Complete your assignment. Fill this checklist out and turn it in with your assignment. You can simply answer Yes or No, or feel free to make any other comments. Just attach it to the bottom of the Word document on which you wrote your assignment. If you have met all of these expectations, you can probably expect a good grade. If you are missing aspects, you can expect to have points taken off. 1. Did I follow ALL of the instructions carefully? YES 2. Did I choose paintings from the text? ( You are not supposed to do that.) NO, I doublechecked and none of them were from the text. 3. Did I choose paintings from the proper eras? YES, both are from the 15th century. 4. Are my descriptions about the art the result of my original observations? YES 5. That is, you did not simply copy, paraphrase, or summarize from an outside source. 6. Did I write my document in Word? YES 7. Did I employ proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation, or do I have a lot of errors? YES, I had help from the tutoring center to check my grammar. 8. Did I write a MINIMUM of 500 words? YES 9. Do my paragraphs have excellent content, or do they have a lot of filler? (Filler would be rewriting the instructions, making vague, general statements about art, etc.) YES, I tried to write as much useful content as I can relate to the Renaissance period and the paintings. 10. Since plagiarism will result in an automatic zero, did I avoid plagiarism? (That means no cutting and pasting, paraphrasing, summarizing, or changing a few words.) YES 11. Did I view my Unicheck report and make any necessary changes before submitting my final document? YES, I used Unicheck one time, and I got a 0% of plagiarizing. However, I was not able to use it free again, so I used two different plagiarized checkers and receive 0% again. 12. Does my work demonstrate that I understand the differences between the Italian and Northern Renaissance? YES, I hope so. (Again, just paraphrasing something you found in the book, or the Internet does not demonstrate that YOU know the difference.)