Art and the Pursuit of Nature

My Art and Culture class has been moving through the history of Italian art for the last five weeks and looking at how it changed over time. Out of context one picture may look much like another, but on a spectrum the changes incurred throughout late Middle Ages and Renaissance in Italian art are amazing. Egyptian art remained exactly the same for about 3,000 years. Eastern art also remained the same for a very long time (the history buff in me wishes I could quote exactly how long—I’ll get back to you on that). But Italian art blossomed.

In about three centuries artists were able to go from entirely two-dimensional looking works of art to paintings that seemed completely 3-D. This evolution was most evident in the paintings we saw at the Galleria degli Uffizi Firenze (which I also wrote about yesterday).

We take art that seems three dimensional for granted now days. The creation of photography and film has allowed us to capture life as accurately as possible and it is no longer necessary to do so by hand through painting. But in the Middle Ages no such luxuries were available.

Medieval people were deeply religious, and it was this religious consciousness that helped them to grow as artists. They knew that God became Man in the form of Jesus Christ, thus elevating man and giving him new dignity, and it was this perfection that was achieved in Jesus Christ that they were attempting to grasp in their art. This is also what caused them to try are represent nature more and more accurately, hence the 3-D ideas that permeated early Renaissance art.

We take 3-D for granted because everything around us is 3-D. We often try to reverse this trend of replicating nature, especially in abstract and modern art. It was so humbling to think about the artists of the Renaissance, trying to capture things that had never been captured before. We saw one of the first paintings to ever have shadows. Wouldn’t that be so amazing to be the first person to think of painting something with a shadow? And isn’t that something we take for granted now? It is these historic and artistic details that make a semester like this—in Italy, studying art—so worthwhile, not only because it helps us to see what has led to the world that we live in, but also because it reminds us that there is more to life than meets the eye, and that every part of our lives is just the culmination of the lives of so many that came before us.

Peace.