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Green Highlight: Definition
Pink Highlight: Important Name
Orange highlight: Information about that person
Bold: Important information
Humanism: A key intellectual movement of the Renaissance, based on the study of the classics. Includes a focus on humans rather than gods.
The Classics: The literature of ancient Greece and Rome
Francesco Petrarch: The Father of Italian Renaissance humanism
Cicero: His works were used as a model of prose.
Virgil: His works were used as a model of poetry.
Prose: Written or spoken language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure.
14th century humanism: intellectualism = solitude
15th century humanism: intellectualism = active civics
Byzantine scholars: Provided knowledge of Ancient Greek language
Islamic scholars: Transmitted Ancient Greek culture
14-15th centuries, works of Dante Alighieri and Christine de Pizan made vernacular literature popular.
Dante Alighieri: Wrote the Divine Comedy in his Florence vernacular.
Christine de Pizan: Italian, lived in France + wrote in French. Wrote works defending women:
The Book of the City of Ladies: Early 1400s, says that women could attend schools as well as men, for they were not inferior.
The humanist movement caused education to become more secular from the 1400s to the 1500s.
Secular: Non-religious
Liberal studies were at the core of humanist schools.
Liberal Studies: History, ethics, public speaking, grammar, logic, poetry, mathematics, astronomy, and music. The basis of today’s liberal arts.
Core: Center; the part of something that is central to it.
Liberal education was to encourage people to be virtuous and wise, and have the rhetorical skills to convince others to join them.
Humanist education focuses on creating well-rounded citizens, not great scholars.
Humanist edcation involved physical education as well as mental education. Students were taught:
Johannes Gutenberg: Popularized moveable type, spreading typing presses and beginning the printing of books across Europe
Many Renaissance artists painted the human body, representing their human-based worldview.
Tommaso di Giovanni (Masaccio): First Renaissance artist. Used perspective to make frescoes in a realistic style.
Perspective: Artistic techniques used to give the effect of three-dimensional depth to two-dimensional surfaces.
Fresco: Painting done on fresh, wet plaster with water-based paints
Style: A distinctive quality or form
Two major developments in artistic style during the Renaissance:
Donatello: Studied Greek and Roman statues, made realistic marble figure of Saint George
Filippo Brunelleschi: Designed San Lorenzo church in Florence; designed for humans, not gods. Rediscovered linear-perspective construction (an artistic technique), helping Renaissance artists create realistic imagery.
Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance man; artist, scientist, inventor, visionary; mastered realistic paintings (dissected human bodies to understand them). Tried to make perfect forms of humans, but couldn’t make them look realistic.
Raphael Sanzio: At age 25, one of Italy’s best painters. Known for his madonnas. In them, he achieved a beauty ideal far above human standards. Also well known for his frescoes in the Vatican Palace.
Madonnas: Paintings of Mary, the mother of Jesus.
Michelangelo Buonarroti: A painter, sculptor, and architect. Painted the Sistine Chapel, depicting an ideal human with perfect proportions; supposedly divine beauty. Note: Michelangelo was gay and couldn’t draw women for shit.
Circumstance: A determining condition; state of affairs
Large walls in Italian churches enabled fresco painting to flourish.
Campin: Early Flemish master of painting, used shadows and tiny details to portray reality
Jan van Eyck: Perfected the technique of oil painting.
He used his oil paints to make striking realism. He did NOT use perspective though, he simply drew what he saw.
Albrecht Dürer: German artist who made two trips to Italy and learn the Italians’ laws of perspective. Tried to achieve a beauty ideal, using small details in his works rather than rejecting them like most northern artists did.