POST 8: LECTURE – RENAISSANCE MODERN AND ABSTRACT ART

Week One of Lecture:

    This week we learned about the renaissance era as paintings and development. Paintings in the Byzantine era started out flat with no dimension. This gave a non realistic impression, and little creativity. When it comes to the Renaissance era, the paintings are darker in color because they add black for depth (chiaroscuro). The paintings all are religious contexts, and they are more realistic because of Brunelleschi's theory on multi point perspectives, which allows the subjects of the paintings to have more movement. Additionally, other artists such as Ghiberti, made other rules of this era regarding sculptures, and splitting them into two to create more realistic sculptures. This era also had set up celebrity painters, such as Michaelangelo, DaVinci, Donatello, and Raphael, for lifelong (and posthumous) fame. Their work created the Renaissance era for what it was, and can still be viewed in places like the Sistine Chapel and the Louvre.

Week Two of Lecture:

    The second week was a continuation of the lecture. The Renaissance era set up the foundation for many other eras, which we learned about this week. First was the French Impressionist era, which is brighter, has more texture, and more saturated. This era was one of the first to not include religious figures as the main subject of the paintings, but rather random people. Claude Monet was a main painter in this era, and he is known for his paintings of nature. Another era we talked about was the Post Impressionist. This has artists such as Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gaugin. Again, there is saturation of colors, but in this case it is all unnatural colors/distortions/texture to describe the emotions of the subject or artist rather than a natural color palette. Some other eras we learned about this week were Fauvism, where Henri Matisse had no rhythm within his work, for it included any color and large brush strokes. Another era was Cubism, with Pablo Picasso's geometric paintings. His subjects and backgrounds were fragmented figures put back together again, and they all had deeper meanings which reflected his inner self (similar to Post Impressionist). Surrealism is a category of artwork that includes figures and objects that relatively has no meaning when separated, but when combined, it makes a piece of art.