SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER AND RECEIVE A 10% DISCOUNT ON YOUR NEXT PURCHASE BY EMAIL

Navigating through styles, terms, and authors: a brief guide to modern art

Navigating through styles, terms, and authors: a brief guide to modern art

diecimila martiri pontormo
diecimila martiri pontormo

Navigating through movements, terms, and artists can be complicated, especially when dealing with periods far removed from our own. This is also the case with modern art. Adding to the complexity is the fact that, contrary to common belief, modern art does not coincide with the era commonly defined as modern and contemporary (starting from the late 19th century). Instead, it covers the period from the second half of the 15th century onward.
And it is this period that we address in our brief guide to modern art styles, focusing particularly on Italy.

The precursors: gothic and late gothic style

To understand what happens during the period we’ve outlined, it’s necessary to take a step back a few years. Before the Renaissance – but also during it, as history is always fluid – Western Europe was united by a style known as Gothic (from the 12th century) and then Late Gothic or International Gothic (from the 1300s to the first half of the 15th century). The movement, born in France, spread to other countries, with various interpretations. Architectural works were the first demonstration of this new taste: churches and cathedrals in France soared upwards with majestic structures lightened by large colored windows. In Italy, however, some remnants of Romanesque style remained, with less lofty buildings decorated mainly with white, red, and green marbles. A remarkable example is Giotto’s Campanile (ca. 1267-1337) and the structure of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, both in Piazza del Duomo in Florence.

annunciazione simone martini
Annunciazione e i Santi Ansano e Massima, Simone Martini

Painters and sculptors focused mainly on religious themes, also influenced by the events of their time, such as the terrible Black Death of the mid-14th century. Gold-leaf panels with biblical subjects, like the Annunciazione by Simone Martini (1333) in the Uffizi, or adorned with increasingly detailed decorations, graceful and delicate figures, as in the Adorazione dei Magi (1423) by Gentile da Fabriano also in the Uffizi, are among the main works of this long period. Gothic statues, aligned on either side of the portals, are often characterized by the S-curve of the body, serene expressions, and faces that almost seem mass-produced.
A new approach will come with Giotto, who introduces an evident expressive naturalism in painting and the search for a more realistic and concrete spatial arrangement. Lorenzo Ghiberti, a sculptor and architect active between the Gothic and Renaissance, will do the same. However, the absolute protagonist of this new era will be his fierce rival: Filippo Brunelleschi.

adorazione dei magi gentile da fabriano
Adorazione dei Magi, Gentile da Fabriano

The Renaissance: the age of renewal

Renaissance means rebirth, renewal, revolution: and that’s what it was. A revolution that originated in Florence, a prosperous mercantile city animated by the liveliest intellects of the time, engaged in rediscovering and enhancing classical works and texts. Filippo Brunelleschi was among the first men of the Renaissance. Inspired by the ruins and palaces of ancient Rome, he developed a new way of constructing and decorating buildings, as still demonstrated today by the Istituto degli Innocenti in Piazza Santissima Annunziata (1419-1445) or the phenomenal cupola del Duomo in Florence (1420-1436).

He is also credited with inventing linear perspective, first applied by Masaccio in the fresco of the Trinità in Santa Maria Novella. What struck viewers who saw it for the first time – used as they were to the elegant but static representations typical of the Gothic – was the optical illusion created by the space behind Christ. A background no longer flat but realistic, with a foreshortened barrel vault that seems to extend deeply behind the group. A pictorial revolution that had enormous success. Masaccio also adds a new physicality to the figures: no longer graceful and uniform, but full and massive, with the gesture of the Virgin indicating the Son confirming their verisimilitude.

trinità masaccio
Trinità, Masaccio

In sculpture, Donatello broke with previous tradition first. His San Giorgio (1415-1416 ca., initially destined for one of the external niches of the church of Orsanmichele and now at the Museo del Bargello in Florence) is proof of this. The Saint is represented as a resolute knight, firmly planted on the ground but tense as he scans the horizon: a novelty compared to the inexpressive refinement of the Middle Ages.

san giorgio donatello
San Giorgio, Donatello

The high Renaissance and the 16th century

The innovations of the Masters of the Early Renaissance were welcomed and carried forward by many artists across the peninsula and beyond. For instance, the exercise of the new perspective technique, sometimes exaggerated, can be seen in the works of Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca, and Andrea Mantegna. While the search for a balance between naturalism and beauty is evident in the works of Antonio Pollaiolo and, above all, Sandro Botticelli. His Primavera, as well as Venere, happily demonstrate the precise intention to reconcile Renaissance achievements with new compositional harmony and a dense symbolic and allegorical content.

But it is with Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Raffaello Sanzio that the evolution begun at the end of the 14th century is completed, reaching incredible heights. “Nothing in nature did not arouse his curiosity and stimulate his ingenuity”: writes E.H. Gombrich of Leonardo, a brilliant artist, a skilled musician, and an engineer ahead of his time. Only a few of his works remain, mostly incomplete (such as the Adorazione dei Magi in the Uffizi), but all confirm his great ability to make his subjects come alive, with penetrating looks, credible gestures, and real emotions. Sfumato is one of his great inventions, still used in painting, contributing to his imperishable fame.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, twenty-three years younger but over forty more long-lived, marked the art of the 16th century just as significantly, excelling in all arts: architecture, painting, and sculpture. The human body and its poses, including the most daring, will be the main subject of his investigation with masterful and powerful results that still amaze today. Plasticity and power are the distinctive traits of a tireless production always brimming with new inventions and solutions: see, for example, the frescoes on the Cappella Sistina ceiling in Rome, the David at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, and the Pietà Rondanini at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan.
Raffaello’s work, though more delicate, is no less powerful, being a perfect synthesis of formal beauty and natural vividness: a characteristic that earned him renowned commissions in Florence and Rome. Not an easy task, given that the young Urbinate had to measure himself against excellent contemporaries.

During the same period as Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raffaello, another painter emerged on the Italian and international scene with a style we now recognize as typically northern, indeed Venetian: Tiziano Vecellio. Heir to Giorgione’s teachings, Tiziano overturned the primacy of drawing – typical of the Florentine school – to give space to color: it is with color that the painter from Cadore rendered light, atmosphere, and flesh. His portraits became famous and highly sought after.

Are you interested in articles like this?

Sign up for the newsletter to receive updates and insights from BeCulture!

Mannerism and the difficult comparison with the great masters

After Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raffaello, and Tiziano, what more can an artist do? What other goals of form and composition are there to achieve? This is probably what the students and successors of the great Renaissance Masters wondered. Many resolved the issue by imitating and exaggerating their insights, for instance, reproducing Buonarroti’s contortions in increasingly sinuous figures (the famous figura serpentinata) or vigorous ones, almost to the point of ridicule. A tendency that 18th century critics labeled with the derogatory term Maniera, meaning painting done “in the manner of” someone else without achieving the same results.

However, what was considered a period of poor inventiveness has been reevaluated thanks to works later recognized as of the highest level, anticipating another important period: the Baroque. Sculptures like those of Benvenuto Cellini or Giambologna show how the artists of the second half of the 16th century were driven by the precise intention to create new and impressive works that expressed their personality and extraordinary skills.

Among the pioneers of Florentine mannerist painting, we cannot fail to mention Jacopo Carducci, known as Pontormo, who, from the 1520s, dedicated himself to studying Michelangelo’s anatomies, imitating and even attempting to surpass the great Master. His I diecimila martiri. San Maurizio e il massacro della legione tebana (1528-1530), now in the Galleria Palatina of Palazzo Pitti, is part of this journey toward new ways of depicting the human body and its arrangement in the painting’s space.
Subverting the given order, even explicitly contradicting the predecessors’ achievements in form and composition, was also the basis of Giulio Romano’s frescoes and Parmigianino’s paintings. His Madonna dal collo lungo (1534-1540), now in the Uffizi, exemplifies this tension towards new, unnatural, unconventional effects, worthy of admiration for this very reason. Breaking with the recent past was a courageous gesture that translated into works often very complex to decipher, rich in cultured citations and enigmas, or amusing and grotesque, like Nano Morgante by Bronzino.

madonna col bambino e angeli madonna dal collo lungo parmigianino
Madonna dal collo lungo, Parmigianino

The Baroque: the leading role of the catholic church in Rome

Even the term Baroque was used for the first time at the end of the 18th century to describe, once again pejoratively, the style that characterized the 17th and 18th centuries. The Church was crucial in spreading Baroque, using it as a propaganda tool against the rampant forms of Protestantism and heresy. This propaganda expressed itself in majestic and richly decorated works that made skilled use of light and space, also resorting to perspective illusions and great theatricality. Everything within ecclesiastical buildings was meant to amaze the faithful, persuading them of the Church’s power not through a single detail but through the overall vision.

Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio, is one of the best-known exponents of this new style, and his paintings, all played on the contrast between light and shadow, are the ultimate expression of the feeling of this time: a manifest emotionality, sometimes even judged excessive or inappropriate by his contemporaries.
Francesco Borromini and Gian Lorenzo Bernini were both Baroque architects and sculptors, as well as fierce rivals. Bernini captured the spirit of Baroque in works of great impact like the Estasi di Santa Teresa (in Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome). The mystic rapture of the Saint is depicted with unprecedented and masterful intensity, involving not only the expression on her face but the entire composition.

estasi santa teresa gian lorenzo bernini
Estasi di Santa Teresa, Gian Lorenzo Bernini

But as often happens in art and history, what is denied by one era comes back in the next, revived by generations of artists eager to assert a new vision of the world.
Thus, towards the end of the 18th century, the Baroque in decline, gave way to Neoclassicism, marked by new formal rigor and renewed attention to classical forms, lasting until the first half of the 19th century. A glance at Antonio Canova’s sculptures, such as the Venere Italica in Palazzo Pitti, reveals the difference from Bernini’s intentions. Harmony, balance, and explicit reference to Hellenistic sculpture permeate Canova’s work, which appears orderly, composed, very distant from the emotional exuberance expressed by Bernini.

venere italica canova
Venere Italica, Canova

With this, our journey through the main styles and masterpieces of modern art concludes. Now we leave it to you to explore museum halls and art city streets in search of the evidence of what we have seen together: bon voyage!

Shopping Cart

Get your 10% discount code now

Subscribe to our newsletter and receive a discount on your next purchase via email.

bearound-logo