Influence of Humanism and Renaissance Italian Art

Influence of Humanism on Italian Art

During the Italian Renaissance , humanism played an important role in

influencing the artist of that time in their paintings and what they drew. The definition of

humanism is the denial of any power or moral value superior to that of humanity; the

rejection of religion in favor of a belief in the advancement of humanity by its own

efforts. This means that many of the philosophers, scientists, and artists of that time

started to reject the ideas of the church. Previously almost all pictures had to do with

religion but this changed and is shown in two works in the Italian Renaissance. They are

The School of Athens, by Raphael, and in The Last Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci.

Taking a first glimpse of The School of Athens by Raphael, you will see that there

is humanism everywhere. You can tell that it was planned carefully, and portrayed

something meaningful to the artist. In the painting The School of Athens you can notice

an extremely dominant theme: Humanism. The artist, Raphael, shows a thirst and

eagerness for knowledge that is displayed everywhere in the painting. This gives us a

glimpse of what society was back in the Renaissance. Judging by the painting, it was

mainly revolving around education and advancement. In The School of Athens, Raphael

paints people learning from, debating against and simply ignore one another. Each

individual illustrates a point about society in the Renaissance. Similar to the theme and

the setting of the painting, these interactions mostly have to do with knowledge and

understanding, as the school would not be a place of social life back then. Both the

theme of and people in the painting are included in the realism of a painting to show a

society, which is used effectively in The School of Athens by Raphael.

In The Last Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo also uses humanism

although it has to do somewhat with religion. In the painting, there is immense amounts

of symmetry in this painting. This was important to humanism because everything was

supposed to be balanced. Also man's perfection was a big part in the renaissance, and a

body is symmetrical. So some symmetry in The Last Supper was, on either side of Jesus

was a group of six people, then in those groups of people each was split into two other

groups, all very even and symmetrical. There was also four panels on each side of the

walls. Another characteristic of humanism art was real emotions. Every single person in

this painting( besides Jesus, who was left out for obvious reasons) is not smiling. They

are giving real emotions. Humanism art was all about emotions, and being real. All the

people in the painting seem concerned or anxious, all real emotions, they are not just

happy all the time. Like what was stated before, artist of the time wanted to show how

real people in the paintings were. All the people have shaded in feature which give them

the look of real people.

As you can see, by these two works and also by many others, there much much

humanism involved. In almost every painting, the artists drew more life like pictures and

people showing the expressions of their faces and the society they had lived in at that

time. You can see this in the two examples that I showed. Both of them had similar

aspects because both had realistic people in them, and both pictures showed expressions

on the peoples faces.