ITALIAN RENAISSANCE ART

Taranaki Daily News, 20 January 1930, Page 3

ITALIAN RENAISSANCE ART

CHRISTIAN INFLUENCES AT WORK. LECTURE BY PROFESSOR ADAMS. The wonders of the “Christian Art of the Italian Renaissance” were displayed in an interesting lantern lecture given by Professor T. D. Adams at the teachers' summer school at New Plymouth last night. Beginning with the mosaics of the Middle Ages the lecturer illustrated their formalism and symmetry from the Cathedral of Monreale at Palermo. He then showed how Cimabue, who was at first a mosaicist, chafing at the purely symmetrical, decorative methods, began deliberately, though very cautiously, to sacrifice symmetry in the interests of naturalism. Tho renaissance was now at hand, and life became the theme. It was the dawn of a new era for art, and a >l3llOll greater advance was made at the very beginning of the century by Giotto. The individuality and human feeling of his figures gave real dramatic vigour to his work. The astonishing young Massaccio, who died at the age of 26, carried this movement of realism still further, making naturalism his aim, till the conservative religious feeling found, a representative in Fra Angelico, a deeply spiritual monk who was also a gifted painter. His ethereally spiritual work was a protest against the naturalistic movement, but it .was doomed to be ineffective, the main stream of realistic development moving strongly on through Fra Filippo Lippi and others till the great age of Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael and Michelangelo was reached. 'The bronze doors of the Baptistery at Florence showed an interesting development in sculpture. The rival styles of tlie popular Ghiberti on the . one hand and the disappointed Brunelleschi on the other were illustrated, this was in the fifteenth century. Brunelleschi was a realist, thinking solely of the action, aiid relegating grace of form completely to the background. Ghiberti, on the other hand, did not really enter into the heart of a story, but was greatly concerned about the grace of his pattern.' He ’ had been aptly called an apostle of grace. He seemed to violate the character of the bronze in which he worked; yet Michelangelo himself on seeing Ghiberti’s bronze doors in the Baptistery at Florence had said that they were fit to be the gates of Paradise. It . was perhaps yet another example of genius transgressing the canons of an art with impunity. Leonardo do Vinci, the magician of the Renaissance, doubtless thought of himself primarily as a scientist, and it was unfortunate. that this bent of his induced him to make every' one of his works of. art an experiment in some new scientific process; for in the whole Renaissance . period there was no one with his power of psychological analysis or his exquisitely artistic imagination. His great masterpiece, “The Last Supper/’ which had suffered so seriously because of the unsuitability of the medium he used, was explained and analysed in detail. A specific contribution that he bad made was in bringing the Madonna out of her ecclesiastical setting, placing her in the green fields, and making her smile. This tradition was carried on and modified by Raphael. The great glory of St. Teter’s in Rome was Michaelangelo’s sculptural group, “Pieta." This and his “David,” which he made from a rejected block of marble as a demonstration of his skill, proved beyond cavil his mastery of technique. But the supremely great achievement of this master sculptor was the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The lecture ended with a detailed examination and appreciation of the story of the creation of the world as the artist had interpreted it on the ceiling, together with the attendant figures of the prophets. A hearty vote of thanks to Professor Adams was given at the conclusion of the lecture.