The Renaissance art portrayed a symbolic language with a means of communicating

social, spiritual and political values. It depicted a return to nature, which influenced the field of
painting and a return to antiquity that determined the trends in architecture. The emancipation
of man and the focus on the dignity of man created an atmosphere of intellectual freedom and
individual expression; allowing architects, sculptors and painters to indulge in sweeping,
independent inner expressions revealing the hidden mysteries of the soul with craze of classics
and the love of beauty. While subject matter from the Bible was still commonly employed, it was
frequently infused with nonreligious themes.

Giotto displayed human emotions in narrative details in his Massacre of the Innocents,
the Monument of Truth, the Lamentations, the Betrayal of Christ and the Death of Saint Francis.
Ghiberti presented stories from the New and Old Testaments on the bronze doors of a baptistery
in Florence with a more realistic relationship between figures and landscapes, which has been
described ‘as the Doors of Paradise’ by Michelangelo. Masaccio in his art of the Expulsion of
Adam and Eve from the Garden, records the shame and guilt felt by the individuals. Sandro
Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Springtime was a Neoplatonic symbolism of truth, beauty and
humanity.

However, the greatest of the Florentine artists, Leonardo da Vinci, was like a naturalist,
basing his work on his own detailed observations of a blade of grass, the wing of a bird, a
waterfall exemplified in his masterpiece the Virgin of the Rocks. His Last Supper shows a serene
Christ and portrays the mingled emotions of surprise, horror, and guilt revealed in the faces of
the disciples as they gradually perceive the meaning of their master’s statement. His Mona Lisa
reflects a similar interest in the varied moods of the human soul. The painters of the Venetian
School most prominent being Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione and Titian, appealed primarily to the
senses rather than to the mind.

They delighted in painting idyllic landscapes and gorgeous symphonies of colour, varying
from the natural beauty of Venetian sunsets and the shimmering silver of lagoons in the
moonlight to the artificial splendour of sparkling jewels, richly coloured satins and velvets, and
gorgeous palaces. Their portraits were of the rich and the powerful. However, among the
eminent painters Raphael and Michelangelo, must be given more than passing attention.
Raphael portrayed the members of the human species as temperate, wise, and dignified beings
and cultivated a much more symbolical or allegorical approach. Raphael’s Disputa symbolized
the dialectical relationship between the church in heaven and the church on earth.

In a worldly setting against a brilliant sky, theologians debate the meaning of the
Eucharist, while in the clouds above, saints and the Trinity repose in the possession of a holy
mystery. His School of Athens is an allegorically representation of the conflict, with Plato
pointing upward to emphasize the spiritual basis of his world of ideas, while Aristotle gestures
toward the earth to exemplify his belief that concepts or ideas are inseparably linked with their
material embodiments. Raphael is noted also for his portraits and Madonnas with a softness and
warmth that seemed to endow them with a sweetness and piety. Michelangelo was an idealist
who embraced Neoplatonism as a philosophy, was more concerned with expressing enduring,
abstract truths.
 At the center of all of his paintings is the human figure, always powerful, colossal, and
magnificent, which makes him the supreme Renaissance artist. The panels on the Sistine Chapel
depict scenes from the book of Genesis, including God Dividing the Light from Darkness, The
Creation of Adam and the Flood exemplify his commitment to classical Greek aesthetic
principles of harmony, solidity, and dignified restraint. Correspondingly, all exude as well a
sense of sublime affirmation regarding Creation and the heroic qualities of mankind. However,
in the enormous Last Judgment, a fresco done for the Sistine Chapel’s altar wall, Michelangelo
repudiated classical restraint and substituted a style that emphasized tension and distortion in
order to communicate the older man’s pessimistic conception of a humanity wracked by fear
and bowed by guilt.

In the realm of sculpture, Italian sculptors for the first time carved freestanding statues
‘in the round’. Donatello introduced a new vigorous note of individualism in his statue of David
triumphant over the body of the slain Goliath, established a precedent of glorifying the life-size
nude and also in the subject’s posture of resting his weight on one leg. Further, his equestrian
statue of Gattamelata in addition to drawing very heavily on the legacy of antiquity,
immortalized the earthly accomplishments of a contemporary secular hero. However, the
greatest sculptor, Michelangelo, as in his painting, in sculpture followed a course from
classicism to anticlassicism.

He decided to make his own David heroic rather than merely graceful and hence
conceived his nude in the purest, well-proportioned Greek terms. However, in a work such as
the Moses, he began to explore the use of anatomical distortion to create effects of emotional
intensity. Michelangelo experimented ever more with exaggerated stylistic mannerisms for the
purpose of communicating moods of brooding pensiveness or outright pathos, which
culminated in the Descent from the Cross, a depiction of the Virgin Mary grieving over the body
of the dead Christ. In the field of architecture, it was the Romanesque which provided the
inspiration to the Italian Renaissance.

The result was an architecture based on the cruciform floor plan of transept and nave
and embodying the decorative features of the column and arch, or the column and lintel, the
colonnade, and frequently the dome. Horizontal lines predominated and though many of the
buildings were churches, the ideals they expressed were the secular ones of joy in this life and
pride in human achievement. Renaissance architecture also emphasized harmony and
proportion because Italian builders, under the influence of Neoplatonism, concluded that
perfect proportions in man reflect the harmony of the universe, and that therefore, the parts of a
building should be related to each other and to the whole in the same way as the parts of the
human body.

Equally impressive are the artfully proportioned aristocratic country houses of the
northern Italian architect Andrea Palladio. The northern European Renaissance architects
combined elements of the late medieval French flamboyant Gothic style with an up-to-date
emphasis on classical horizontality to produce some of the most impressively distinctive
architectural landmarks ever constructed in France. Pierre Lescot the French architect hewed
closely to the classicism of Italian Renaissance masters in constructing a facade that emphasized
classical pilasters and pediments. Albrecht Durer, a German, mastered Italian Renaissance
techniques of proportion, perspective, and modeling.

In sculptor, however, his nudes are seldom lacking their fig leaves. In his paintings the
serenely radiant St. Jerome, Knight, Death, and Devil offers a stirring visual depiction of
Erasmus’s ideal Christian knight, and his Four Apostles intones a solemn hymn to the dignity
and penetrating insight of Durer’s favorite New Testament authors. His unfinished portrait of
Erasmus was completed by Hans Holbein, who also captured Sir Thomas More. These two
portraits depict that Renaissance culture’s greater commitment to recapturing the essence of
human individuality created the environment in which Holbein was able to make Erasmus and
More come to life.