Renaissance Concept, Architectural Principles, And Art Style

The dissertation briefly discusses the works on Renaissance art by three famous art historians in the 20th century, Panofsky, Wittkower and Hellmut Wohl. The subjects of chapters 1 and 2 of Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art by Panofsky deal with the questions as to whether there was such a thing as the Renaissance and , if so, in what manner it different from the mediaeval revivals, especially those of the Carolingian renovatio and that of the twelfth century. The content of the third chapter concerned with Italian Trecento painting and its impact on the rest of Europe, especially the innovations brought about by Giotto and Duccio. The last chapter discusses the development of classicism and naturalism in sculpture and architecture as well as in painting, and emphasizes the relationships between Italian and Netherlandish art during the period, stresses the influence of humanist learning and of the Platonist movement.Rudolf Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism shows the meaning of classical trends of thought for those architects of the Renaissance who had close ties with humanist circles, especially the two greatest theorists of the periods, Alberti and Palladio. The work is consisted of three parts, the first part discusses Alberti's program of the centrally planned church and its symbolic significance. The second one introduces the educational environment and the influences of humanist Trissino and Barbaro on his architectural style and theory, and illustrates his architectural principles by analyzing the planning of his villas, palaces and public buildings. In the last part, Wittkower generally researches the problem of harmonic proportion in Renaissance architecture.In The Aesthetics of Italian Renaissance Art: A Reconsideration of Style, Hellmut Wohl redefines style in Italian Renaissance art and emphasizes the decoration and ornamentation of Renaissance art, discusses the background of the writing; the problem of defining style in the art of the quattrocento; the relationship between the principle of ornateness in painting and the ornate style in the classical theory of rhetoric; the implications of the principle of relief in the ornate classical style and in Renaissance painting as a whole; the developments of the ornate classical style from 1470s to 1520s; the other materials and the Renaissance types of ornament; the transformations of the principles of omateness between the early quattrocento and the later cinquecento. These works will help us to understand the Renaissance art in different viewpoints.