The invention of the photograph during the last half of the 19^th Century put painters in a challenging position, essentially destroyed the Realism movement in the art world simply because in a realistic sense a painter could not compete with a camera. But at the same time, and because of early photography´s inability to add color and deal with lighting issues, a new paradigm in the art world began to grow: Impressionism. The impressionist appellation actually came from a derogatory nickname given to the movement by a Conservative art critic after Claude Monet produced his classic, “Impression: Sunrise” and, much to the critics chagrin the movement embraced the name and developed the motto that the human eye, working with the human spirit, could render a much more accurate picture. Impressionists recognized that while improved cameras would be able to capture much more physical detail, no matter how advanced the technology became it could not match the human eye in capturing the spirit of the moment. The blending of light, movement and feeling were at the core of Impressionistic art and artists attempted to capture their personal visual sensations of an object, while sometimes ignoring the actual image of the object in front of them.

Impressionists artists believe that details would be best rendered by doing a very fast oil painting and that this style would best remove any intellectual preconceptions that the artist had, giving the art a nearly childlike innocence and naivete that was absent in all other styles, but especially in the naturalistic and realistic styles of painting. Some of the most well-known artists in history came from this period. In France Eduard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Pierre Auguste Renoir, led the movement and in the United States it was John Singer Sargent, Francis Coates Jones, and Mary Cassatt. The style became so popular that even now, nearly a century and a half after its conception, organizations are offering scholarships, such as the CGC Scholarships offered by the New York Botanical Gardens and which is based on the work of Monet.

The original Impressionist movement had only just begun however when Georges-Pierre Seurat and Henry Edmund Cross began to reconsider some of its fundamentals. Their objections were mostly based on the lack of permanence in their art. But while this led to what became known as Neo-Impressionism and made a fundamental shift in the direction of the art, it only differed in two basic aspects. Figures in these paintings were much better defined the the entire composition was much more conservative. Rapid rejection and reform, became known as pointillism or confetti-ism and was founded on the idea that touches of color side by side was the best way to present an image. The artists understood, well before the twin aspects of our brain were understood by science, that the human brain would automatically blend the colors in order to make sense of the image. Other artists, such as Paul Signac, Theodoor van Rysselberghe, Georges-Pierre Seurat and Henry Edmond Cross quickly joined the new movement.

Like most periods of art, the Romantic period ended with a whimper rather than a bang. By the beginning of the 20^th century however, the Age of Realism in art had begun in earnest and Romanticism had been soundly rejected for this new and exciting style. While the Greeks had dabbled with realism nearly three-thousand years before, they had worked exclusively with perfecting the human form. Modern Realism on the other hand seeks to bring the observable world into clear and uncluttered focus. The world was in the beginnings of one of the largest and fastest development periods in human history and art became sweep up into the scientific wave as had much of the rest of the Western world.

Realism never tried to idealize. Instead of copying past methods it sought to simply capture the image, render a completely accurate picture of the models, whether human or still. The hard of a Realist thought that both Classicism and Romanticism were far too artificial, too staged to appeal to the essential human spirit and that Baroque and Neoclassicism were obscene.

Realism in art can almost exclusively seen in paintings. Very little sculpting and no architecture came from the period, all the work then being done in older styles of art. The form started just after the French Revolution in mid century but grew in both France and England with equal fervor. The French were experiencing their first years of Democracy and the English had had enough of Victorian Imperialism. In France Realism was led by artists such as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins and Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas. This group was highly focused on the different aspects of life and regularly threw centuries old rules of artistic design out the window in the search for realistic portrayals of real life. The Barbizon School, which taught French landscape painters from 1840-1850 was based on the art of these masters and was attended by such art luminaries as Jean-Francois Millet and Camille Corot. The School was actually a retreat used by French artists and because of the natural surroundings, quickly became sought after by Realists.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, opened in 1848 and not ended until the 1890´s was the first real “avant-garde” movement in art history. This group wanted to move back in time, instead of forward, and apply modern principles when depicting the natural world. They wanted pureness in representation and contested that post Raphael art allowed to much of the artists own ideals of what the image looked like instead of its reality. The group had two interesting traits. The first is that they required intense accuracy in their art. They used real, instead of remembered or imagined, landscapes for models and concentrated in being very precise in attention to color and every minute detail. At the same time the English movement adhered faithfully to a tradition established by Hogarth years before of taking a high moral approach to their work.

The first American school of landscape painting was the Hudson River School and although the school was only active for 35 years, (1835-1870), it was attended by some of the most prominent artists of the period, like George Innes, George Caleb Bingham, Thomas Moran and Martin Johnson Heade. But besides being the Alma Mater of such luminaries, the Hudson River School also acted as one of the focal points of a new period in Art: The Romantic period. Romanticism was the perfect choice for an age in which new freedoms were just being discovered. Not only freedoms in politics but also freedom to make many more personal decisions. There are many in the United States that claim that the country is a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles, by Christian leaders. But the fact is that those leaders were almost exclusively secularists who had no problem with religion but distrusted the Church and who made their feelings clear in all of their writings. America was not the first nation to experiment with democracy, the Greeks had practiced it more than 3,000 years ago. They were the first nation in nearly 1,500 years to begin to separate government and religion.

Romanticism gave artists the freedom to speak of matters of the heart in their paintings and sculptures. The art for promoted such unusual ideas as individualism, irrationalism, subjectivism, raw emotion and vivid imagination, emotions that take control and sweet the artist away. The style refused definition for a long time because it favored the blending of many different styles in order to create a completely new style. In much the same way that Renaissance artists were fascinated by nature but in a much more revolutionary. Much like the social movement toward individual freedom, Romanticism was immediately against the established order, both social and religious. Much more interested in human nature than human form, Romantic artists presented images depicting ethnic cultures, remote and mysterious places, even occult subjects were for the first time appearing in Western Art. The life styles of artists changed somewhat however. Previously being a good artist was on of the best jobs to have. But the new age, disappearance of “nobility” and lessening influence of the Church, the first “starving artists” were born. But now, in some of the finer shops, tattoo artists are using styles from both the Romantic and Gothic periods to create some truly beautiful artwork.

The term “Romanticism” was first coined by the poets and critics August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, from Germany, They originally used the term to describe the entire social movement sweeping the Western world but it soon became applied exclusively to the new style of art. These two mistakenly believed that his movement was essentially a Christian one, despite its clearly secular nature and the fact that the Church fought each of these social changes. They might have been correct however if they thought that the movement was inspired, not because of a return to Christian principles, but from a flight away from Christian intolerance.

Last week we talked about the beginnings of the movement away from the showiness of the ostentatious Baroque and decorative Rococo periods and the move away from exclusively religious art that began in the Lowlands of Europe, Belgium and the Netherlands. This trend began to spread across Europe and into the Americas from the mid-eighteenth and lasted until the early nineteenth centuries and is known as the Neoclassical period. One of the main reasons was the general public´s reaction to the opulence championed by Royalty on the Continent during the mass movements toward democratic societies. Another reason was the rediscovery of ruins at Herculaneum and Pompeii in the mid 1700´s and the publication of Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Art by art historian Johann Winckelmann. These factors led to a powerful revival of Classical Antiquity that lasted nearly two centuries.

The earlier, but previously unrecognized art of such men as Nicolas Poussin, who specialized in classical history paintings and Claude Lorrain´s famous landscapes, became the inspiration for a new wave in realism for artists long after these artists deaths. The movement actually began as an architectural movement because of the plethora of Classical Roman buildings in Rome. This fact placed the real beginnings of the movement back into the heart of Italy, the home of the original Renaissance. There is really no particular year or event that can be clearly seen as the defining beginning of the Romantic and Neoclassical periods.

The movement developed a much more serious and unemotional flavor than had ever been seen in the art world. Reflecting the heroic styles from the Greeks and Republican Romans, using plain and somber colors instead of bright pastel colors, with only a few highlights was the general theme of this artistic style. The art tried to promote the ethical “superiority” of antique art, which celebrated moral narratives like self-sacrifice and self-denial. Both sculpture and paintings dropped the theatrical and whimsical earlier styles and was a great deal more organized, emphasizing theme and linear design rather than the effects of light, which by this time were much better understood, color and atmosphere. Simply comparing the art of Masters like sculptor John Flaxman, Henry Fuseli and William Blake with the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Dante Alighieri and others will demonstrate the huge influence artists from the Classical Period had on this period.

The 16^th Century saw the opening of one of the longest continuous wars in human history, the Dutch 80 Year War, which was a revolt against Spanish Control over the Low Countries. It was toward the end of this interminable war that the Dutch Golden Age of Painting began and because of the influence of Dutch painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer the art world began its next important period. The Dutch Golden Age began during the Middle of the Baroque period. The reasons for the Dutch dominance in art during this period are many. The break with the traditional conservative and very Catholic Spanish control, especially since the Spanish Inquisition was still going on in some locations, led to a complete restructuring of Dutch society and Dutch art was one of the first areas to feel the changes. There are a number of easy scholarships that allow students to study the period in depth.

Dutch art of the period is considered Baroque but in reality many of the aspects of the Baroque style, such as the love of splendor and idealization, are missing, making this style part of the Baroque period but separate from it, being fascinated more with realism that with pomp and grandeur. This mini-period lasted from about 1628 until the French invaded the Low Lands in 1672 and it was during this period that the concept of “genres”.

The Calvinists took over the religious aspects of Dutch life during this period and, unlike the Vatican, banned religious painting inside the Churches. While religious paintings were permitted in homes the fact was the most people could not afford them and very few religious paintings were produced during this period, the artists preferring to concentrate on scenes from real life, landscapes, peasant life, animals, flowers, and maritime paintings. This was also the period when the “Hierarchy of Genres”, which held that some styles were better than others and this drove painters to want to produce work that would last through the ages. Keep in mind that the greats like Da Vinci, who only painted for money to finance is inventions, and Michelangelo, who painted out of piety, were not concerned as much about money and fame in art as they were about mechanics and religion.

With one notable exception, The Young Bull (Paulus Potter 1647), which was huge ( Nearly 10 foot wide) most paintings of the period were relatively small, and the only really large paintings were usually family group portraits. Wall painting had been common for literally thousands, of not tens of thousands of years, but during this period the practice essentially ended in Europe. Walls were decorated with hanging paintings, which were painted on either canvas or wooden panels and some artists even painted over many surviving Golden Age paintings with new subjects, a practice which began because new frames and canvases were expensive. There was also very little sculpture done during this period and was usually only commissioned for tomb monuments or for decoration of public buildings or areas.

The battle began when the Catholic Church announced a “counter” Reformation in the late 1550´s and began to use art to influence people´s opinion of the Church. The commissioned many pieces that were biblically correct and visually stunning, reaching people on a nearly visceral level. The Church used Masters like Bernini and Rubens to create dramatic paintings using revolutionary techniques like casting certain figures, who are standing in deep shadow, in bright but soft illumination. While Renaissance art was highly stylized, Baroque was much earthier and realistic. For the first time artists painted about live on the streets instead of in the palaces and the masses flocked to this art. Artists like Rembrandt, Vermeer ruled the art world in northeastern Europe and Caravaggio ruled the south. New scientific discoveries, brought on by the Renaissance and the work of men like Da Vinci and Galileo were rapidly changing the way people looked at the world. Dozens of new trade routes, with both Asia and the newly discovered Americas, with thriving colonies, had produced an entirely new form of art.

Art was only purchased by the privileged monied classes for most of history. But now that the economy had begun to create a thriving middle class, more careers in education, eventually leading up to medical advances until we now have jobs like astronauts and careers in software engineering opened up as more people could pay for school and educational levels increased, artists began to produce on a much faster scale and Baroque went through many changes through the years.

The Baroque Style, which we will study for the next several articles, is an “absolutist” style. Baroque is all about exaggeration, colossal sculptures, movement and a great deal of emotion. Like the misshapen pearl it is both more and less than it should be. We can see the influence of this period in other periods, like Gothic, surrealism, Art Deco, and many others. But the period was torn by war and religious conflict, each event which had its own influence on the period and we will explore each of these events and discuss how they changed what might have been.

The last several articles have concentrated on the art of the High Renaissance, with emphasis on Da Vinci and Michelangelo. While we must move on to the next stage, Mannerism, we continue to welcome questions about any of our previous articles. The term “mannerism” has been used in many different contexts in the art world, the most common is when it is applied to the art that flowed out of Italy and much of Europe in the nearly 60 years following the High Renaissance. The style is said to have started around 1520, when many of the great Masters, like Michelangelo and Da Vinci were still alive, and lasted until about 1580, or the beginning of the Baroque Period. While the main branch of Mannerism, which originated in Florence and Rome, was over by 1580 the style continued well into the 17^th century in the rest of Europe, especially in Germany, where it finally fizzled out in favor of Gothic art in the early 1800´s. A teaching career in art history specializing in this period can be fascinating.

The term “mannerism” can be traced to the Italian word maniera and loosely means manner or style. The word however can be used as a noun or adjective, as in “he has style”. But the flexibility of the word causes some confusion when it is used to describe an entire period in art history. Some people use the term to describe the lifestyle of the artist and some use it to describe their work style. When we are talking about Mannerism however we are talking about the style of art, not a specific artist. There are a number of artists who contributed heavily to the Age of Mannerism whoever and we will address each in later articles.

The style of mannerism features, when compared to the Renaissance, many art concepts that were quite revolutionary. The style uses things like a collapsed perspective or precariously balanced poses to put the viewer off balance and elongated forms and irrational settings to keep them there. While classic styles evoked expressions of wonder, art done in a mannerist style evoked shock and adventure, a mystery that few could resist. A more recent example of this phenomenon can be seen with the development of rock music in the late 1950´s and 1960´s, replacing the use of the orchestra and adding electronics to create a sense of excitement overload.

Many of the early mannerist artists were students of students of the Masters, like Michelangelo and Raphael and Da Vinci. These students had the temerity to add style techniques from pre classical times and Hellenistic styles to the classical techniques developed by the Masters. Originally these artists were referred to as anti-classical. The contrasts continued of course. Classical art featured the natural and mannerist favored the artificial and extreme.

But the term “la maniera” was not meant to be a complement. Artists of the time were seen to be rebels and their art was seen by many writers of the time as offensive to the masterpieces of men like Da Vinci and Raphael. But while they were using the term to describe particular artists, the term has been used to describe the period for over a century.

The title of Renaissance Man is usually attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo most certainly shared that pedestal with him. In our last article we mentioned that Da Vinci, while being responsible for some of history´s greatest works of art, was not an artist of passion. Da Vinci created works of art so that he would have money to fund his real passions: Science and engineering. Michelangelo on the other hand, was a man of deep passions and was an artist to his soul. He was an engineer and innovator as well, but only in ways that related to his heart. His inspiring St. Peter´s Basilica for instance was merely a decorative housing for his artwork, as his work in the Sistine Chapel´s Alter Wall and ceiling demonstrates. His fresco work is was especially prized by the Church in Rome and the Vatican still holds a great amount of this one artists work.

While the largest part of his work was inspired by Christian images there were a number of pieces, even some ordered by Church Cardinals, such as the statues Hercules and Bacchus. Even his most famous work in marble, David, was not produced to glorify the Church or Christianity but was instead meant to symbolize the freedom of Florence after the oppressive rule of Girolamo Savonarola, a monk sent by Rome to try to squash the Renaissance. But it was Michelangelo´s work on the Sistine Chapel that shines down on us from history and many people do not know that this entire job was created as a way to embarrass the great man.

Michelangelo had been invited to Rome by Pope Julius III in order to design the Popes Tomb. But the great artist Raphael had already been working in the city for some years and did most of his work for the Church. Michelangelo´s presence was seen as a threat by Raphael, who was seen as the master of fresco painting, and he wanted Michelangelo to fail in a spectacular way. Michelangelo was quite unfamiliar with fresco painting and Raphael lobbied to have him do the ceiling and alter wall in the chapel. But Michelangelo would not be humiliated. The original order was for a scene featuring the Apostles but the Master decided that this was not good enough, instead painting not only the creation scene, in three parts, but the genealogy of Christ, upon which the entire Christian Church was founded.

A pharmacy technician from Idaho or bank clerk from Miami, vacationing in Rome and visiting the Vatican, cannot possibly understand the vicious political in-fighting among the many artists and Michelangelo himself found many of his works being called being called “sacrilegious”, simply because he featured a great deal of nudity. There are a few “weird” scholarships that will allow students of history to study the politics of the time and allow them to get a better understanding of when these great works were created.

Many of the artists of the time were either homosexual or bi sexual and much of Michelangelo´s work reflects that this was very probably the case with him as well. The problem with identifying the Master´s sexual orientation is that his personal habits probably drove away any potential lovers, male or female. Completely obsessed with his art, Michelangelo´s personal habits were atrocious and he was seen my many in Rome and Florence as an obscene man. But the fact is that this artist, by working extensively for the Vatican, ensured that both his work and his writings would survive for study today.

While there are may online colleges that have classes studying the art of Da Vinci, anyone who wants to understand Leonardo Da Vinci the artist must first understand the times in which this most intelligent of men lived in. Born in 1452 in the tiny village of Da Vinci, Leonardo was handed the prospect of a future of servitude. While he was the son of a wealthy merchant, he was also illegitimate and in Catholic controlled Italy of the 15^th Century his father simply was forbade from claiming him. The times were always perilous because the Italian peninsula was in a state of constant warfare. The young Leonardo was possessed by an enormous curiosity and wandered the countryside as a child studying nature. One story tells of the boy buying small birds in the local marketplace to study and then releasing them because he felt bad about depriving them of their freedom.

Da Vinci may have released the birds but before he did he sketched them all and studied the drawings. Da Vinci, during his entire life, was much more fascinated by mechanics than he was by art. He practiced his art at first to have drawings of objects and actions for study and later in life to earn a living, not out of love for art. But mechanics at the time were not respected and certainly not the mechanical efforts of a young boy. His drawings and natural artistic talent were respected however and he soon found himself sponsored to enter the prestigious studio of Andrea Verochio and it was not long before the Master recognized the enormous talent of the 14 year old Da Vinci. His first major collaborations were on the Baptism of Christ and the Annunciation and it was during this period that observers noticed how well he could paint expressions. In all of his paintings you can see the feelings of the models and this was something that no other artist up to that period. There are a few grad school scholarships for history that will allow students of the Renaissance to study his early years in much more detail.

We must remember that this was a time well before artists like Rembrandt and Picasso, both of whom had the lessons of Da Vinci to build on. Da Vinci´s innovations in painting made the art we have today possible. His figures were soft and not abruptly drawn as all of the previous figures and when he had backgrounds he developed the technique of “Sfumattoo”, which allowed the artist to slightly blur the background as a contrast to the figure. His studies in human anatomy made the highly lifelike figures to take on a life of their own and still have a natural look, a problem that had plagued the ancient Greeks for centuries.

There has possibly never been a person who so intimately understood his own humanness than Leonardo Da Vinci. When most people think about Da Vinci however, the first thing that always comes to mind is his art work, especially his paintings. Images of the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper can be seen all over the world today and even many of his sculptures are fairly well known. What many people do not know about this man however is that Leonardo did not have a real passion for his art. Da Vinci was not an artist who created with his heart. He was a scientist who created with his brain, using mechanical principles.

Young Leonardo was born without much chance of creating a real future but while he was physically beautiful he was also blessed by an almost unnatural inquisitiveness and intelligence. Leonardo the child spent much of his time studying everything from birds in flight to the muscle movements of humans and animals. His original drawings were his efforts to record what he saw for later study. While he was born into a Christian culture and even lived inside the Vatican, during the period that both Michelangelo and Raphael were working there on commissions, his writings and work suggested that he had deep questions about the apparent contradictions between biblical teachings and his observations of nature. To his young mind there was a lot more God in Nature than Nature in God.

Da Vinci was an engineer and scientist at heart. All of this later works, with the possible exception of the Mona Lisa, he completed simply to afford him the financial opportunity to design his true loves: Machines of war.

Da Vinci spent his entire independent career seeking clients who would pay him for innovative designs. The first tanks, built in World War I, we built around a Da Vinci design made in the 15^th Century. But he would design anything for money and worked directly for some of the most powerful people in Europe. We must keep in mind that the very idea of a “bastard” son of a merchant who would live in the Vatican as an honored guest and die in the arms of the King of France is simply astounding and a testament to the monumental power of the man.

But Da Vinci had a sense of humor as well and we can see signs of it in art more than anywhere else. In Dan Brown´s book “Da Vinci Code” he puts Leonardo into the middle centuries long conspiracy. While there is a tremendous about of symbolism, even some Pagan symbolism, in his art, it is more likely that he put it there out of a sense of irony or his vast sense of humor. In his painting “John the Baptist” he used Satai, one of his pupils and lifetime friend, as the model. The ironic, and humorous, part of this was Da Vinci´s name for Satai was “Little Devil”.

This period is one of the most important in the history of art. The men who worked during this period were arguably among the finest thinkers in human history. For that reason we will cover some of the Greatest Masters who lived during this period in great depth. The next few articles will concentrate exclusively on the life and works of Leonardo Da Vinci. If you are in an online masters program it might be a good idea to save these links because we will be presenting some hard to find material.