Painters Swimming Against the Renaissance
The Grammar of Sacred Art Part 4: Lorenzo Monaco and Pinturicchio
Last month, we started a systematic examination of the development of western art using the lens of what artists and art writers call “the elements of art,” the seven components of all two dimensional visual art. We agreed that almost from the earliest time, from the establishment of what we now call the “Byzantine” in Constantinople up to the end of the Gothic, the element of Line predominated in sacred art over Shape, Form, Value, Space, Colour and Texture.
We left the story at the threshold, explaining that Byzantine art was not intended to be “realistic” in the modern naturalistic sense and that when we skip ahead, we find that Leonardo da Vinci, that brilliant but professionally unreliable exemplar of the Italian High Renaissance, deliberately and consciously eschewed Line because it does not appear in nature. (Of course, he was right, it doesn’t).
But we know that reality never tidily conforms to historical analysts’ categories. If Leonardo and other Renaissance painters rejected Line for illusionistic Form, did everyone else simply follow the trend, for the same reasons? Did the older visual language disappear overnight? Did anyone try to develop a synthesis? For more than a century, artists across Italy continued to preserve, adapt and defend the linear grammar of sacred art, even while the new fashion for artistic and philosophical naturalism was sweeping through Florentine elite circles. Some of the most interesting painters of the fifteenth century were those who quietly resisted the current.
The previous paid post explained why modelling and illusionistic form became increasingly predominant after Giotto, and how that affected the nature of Christian art. In today’s follow-up paid post, we’ll talk more about the broader scene, how some painters, very much aware of the theoretical or philosophical implications, rejected these trends and carried the Tradition forward, adapting and developing it along the way.
Lorenzo Monaco, a Camaldolese monk, and the Umbrian painter we know as Pinturicchio, deliberately maintained the earlier traditions of linearity, symbolism and abstraction, while carefully adopting and blending elements of naturalism.
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