Daniel Lopez

CH 202
Lesson 1 Written Assignment
What is the significance of Fra Savonarola? What impact does he have on
the general trends of the Italian Renaissance?
Fra Savonarola was definitely a pioneer in setting and upholding some of the
original morals that eventually became a central theme in playing the Devils
advocate of some of the development of these morals. For example, Savonarola
saw some of the deviations from the Church as moral decay as he was promoted
and seen as a prophet of his time. In this criticisms of his, he condemned worldly
pleasures and the affinity for the arts. He even had plans to rid finally create a new
Jerusalem (by exploiting the French invasion) and make an emotional attack on the
new secular and humanist spirit. However anti-secular and anti-humanist his ideals
might have been, he definitely stirred commotion in the sense that the newfound
secular and humanist ideals were even more brandished and sought after from the
daily man. The Church eventually caught sight of his inverse doings and tortured
and hanged hum, were Savonarola lost all his credibility by shouting that his
prophesies were lies. His heresy and reflection of the Florentines feelings of the
time indirectly pushed the willpower of the humanist movement.
How do the two sculptures of David (13.1 and 13.14) differ and what does
this difference reveal about the artistic aims of each sculptor?
When Donatello was sculpting his version of David, I could be argued that a truer
Biblical version of the figure never left his head. The resulting sculpture ended up
having a young David with a face that is arguably arrogant as he rests his head on a
defeated face. Here, the sculpture also depicted a naked young boy as here, the
nudeness symbolized an openness to god. In Michelangelos David, however, most
of the intent was to depict David as an epic hero. For example, a young man with a
strong athletic build resting on a hyper-realistic tree trunk; and it is this
hyperrealism that made the nude body symbolize an affinity for the human body
and by extension of the time a humanist movement.
What are the two kinds of perspectives used in painting and why are they
important?
Linear perspective, which was spearheaded and pioneered by Brunelleschi, is what
now has become the staple in representing three dimensional objects on a two
dimensional piece of paper. This does not appreciate the relative sizes of things as
they are, but rather as they see as to be, which is the same as humans the world.
This includes making parallel lines vanish to three vanishing points (one for each
three dimensional axis) to make subjects closer to the observers eye more relative
larger by parallax. The other form of perspective is aerial perspective, which is now
thought of as orthogonal perspective where the relative sizes of objects in the
scene, which was ignored in linear, physical perspective, are directly dictate the
actual sizes of the objects, whichever the angle of the scene. This is one is also

very important, because nowadays, blueprints and constructional instructions with

drawings must use relative sizing for materials and construction thereof.
What is mannerism and what does its development reveal about later
artistic and cultural values in Renaissance Italy?
Towards the tail end of the classical style of Italian art, mannerism was starting to
be foreshadowed in Michelangelos depiction of David, as it had a slightly larger
head upper torso (which was due to its distance to the common viewer from the
floor). Mannerism was the tendency to start to leave the realistic depictions of
biblical figures and others, and starting to go towards discord and chaos in its
paintings. Analogously, the flux of virtues mirrored this change; as the Protestant
Reformation and the sack of Rome brought a lot of imbalance to the political,
economic and social spheres of the regions. Much like discord and instability took
over the harmony and simplicity in the arts, these spheres took many hits with the
historic changes that were happening.