ROOT/Renaissance Overview/High Renaissance
The High Renaissance
The art of the High Renaissance, favored a general, unified effect of painting or
architectural composition. This thereby increased the dramatic force and physical presence
of a work of art, and gathered its energies in order to form a controlled equilibrium.
Because the essential characteristic of High Renaissance art was its unity--a balance
achieved as a matter of intuition which was beyond the reach of rational knowledge or
technical skill--the High Renaissance style was destined to break up as soon as emphasis
was shifted to favor any one element in the composition as opposed to the balance.
The High Renaissance style lasted for only a brief period (c.1495-1520) and was created by
a few artists of genius, among them Leonardo da Vinci, Donato Bramante, Michelangelo,
Raphael, and Titian. Leonardo da Vinci's unfinished Adoration of the Magi (1481; Uffizi
Gallery, Florence) is regarded as a landmark of unified pictorial composition, later
realized fully in his fresco The Last Supper (1495-97; Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan). Leonardo is considered the ideal Renaissance thinker, engaged as
he was in experiments of all kinds and having brought to his art a spirit of restless
inquiry that sought to discover the laws governing diverse natural phenomena. In a
different way, Michelangelo has come to typify the
artist endowed with inexplicable, solitary genius. His universal talents are exemplified
by the tomb of Julius II (c.1510-15), San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome; the Medici Chapel
(1519-34), Florence; the Sistine Ceiling (1508-12) and Last Judgment (1536-41), Rome; and
the cupola of Saint Peter's Basilica (begun 1546)--works that represent major and
inimitable accomplishments in the separate fields of sculpture, painting, and
architecture. Raphael, a man of very different temperament, evoked, in paintings
of Madonnas and in frescoes, not overwhelming forces but sublime harmony and lyric,
graceful beauty.
Related Reading
Early Renaissance
Late Renaissance
Overview