A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

Renaissance Art 71

A section of Michelangelo's fresco, The Creation of Many on the ceiling of the Sistine

Chapel, the Vatican, showing God banishing Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

High Renaissance Style

During the period of the High Renaissance (1490-1530), the city-states of

Italy lost much of their economic and political vitality, confronting French

invasion and then Spanish domination. In the midst of economic decline

as well as internecine political warfare, artists no longer enjoyed the lavish

patronage of wealthy patrician families. Instead, the Church became their

patron.

The papacy inspired the monumentalism of the High Renaissance.

Besieged in the first two decades of the sixteenth century by denunciations

of the sale of indulgences—the purchase of the remission of some punish­

ment in Purgatory for ones sins or for those of some family member—the

papacy sought to assert its authority and image (see Chapter 3). Papal

commissions in Rome were one attempt to recover public confidence and

made possible the artistic achievements of the High Renaissance. Follow­

ing excavations beginning in the 1470s that heightened interest in the

ancient Roman Empire, Raphael himself oversaw the reconstruction of

Rome and personally supervised excavations of the Roman Forum. Influ­

enced by and more dependent on the Church, the canvases of the painters

of the High Renaissance became even larger as they became less con­

cerned with rational order and more with achieving a powerful visual

response in their viewers.

Some humanists now began to claim that the papacy was the heir to the

glories of classical Rome. Popes took names that echoed the Roman

Empire. Julius II (pope 1503-1513) ordered a medal struck that read