Post #8- Lecture- Renaissance

In this week's lecture, we talked about modern painting and abstract art. To start off, we talked about the Renaissance Era which e was the period in Europe, especially Italy, in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, when there was a new interest in art, literature, science, learning, and philosophy, a really interesting thing about Renaissance is that it was considered the bridge between the Middle Ages and Modern history. During this time, the term Humanism (a belief in self, human worth, and individual dignity) became popular, and due to this, the Roman Catholic Church also began to lose its power. We then talked about a lot of different art styles that were born during that period, such as Byzantine art (which characteristics were almost completely in tune with the religious realm), Early Renaissance Art (where they used a lot of gold, and a really amazing and hard painting technique called fresco, a painting done rapidly in watercolor on wet plaster on a wall or ceiling so that the colors penetrate the plaster and become fixed as it dries), Linear Perspective, Camera Obscura (the natural optical phenomenon that occurs when an image of a scene is projected through a small hole and appears on the wall opposite the opening as an inverted image), and the grid. We also talked about the High Renaissance, and how by the end of the 15th century, Rome had displaced Florence as the principal center of three great masters of the High Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci (Creator of La Gioconda), Michelangelo (creator of the 'David' and 'Pieta' sculptures), and Raphael (best known for his Madonnas and his large figure compositions in the Vatican). Lastly, we talked about Modernism, which in the fine arts, the late 19th to mid-20th century was a break from the past and the search for new forms of expression. Here we can find really important art styles such as Impressionism (developed by Claude Monet and other Paris-based artists from the early 1860s, where their style of painting has a sketchy and unfinished look, capturing a sense of immediacy), Fauvism, Abstract expressionism, Cubism, Abstract Art, Symbolism, and Post-Impressionism ( where the artists continue using vivid colors, a thick application of paint and real-life subject matter, but were more inclined to emphasize geometric forms, distort forms for an expressive effect and use unnatural and seemingly random colors. Dominated by the immense personalities, such as Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne, Georges Seurat, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the Post-impressionism artists took different approaches and continued building on the advances of the previous art).