A group of Michelangelo’s artists from central and southern Italy, Tribolo, Bandinelli, Montorsoli, Ammannati, Dall’Opera, Benvenuto Cellini, Vincenzo Danti, Caccavello and Naccherino, find correspondences with the Michelangelo’sists in Lombardy and Emilia, Prospero Clemente, the two Lions, the Della Porta family, while the Venetian Michelangeloists are headed by Iacopo Sansovino: Alessandro Vittoria, Girolamo Campagna, Danese Cattaneo, Tiziano Aspetti and later Lombardo.
Giambologna arrives, who in marble reduces Michelangelo’s forms to pure academy, while in bronze he finds futuristic forms and pictorial realism. It was then that the pictorial style emerged from the mannerism of Landini, Tacca, Mochi, Francavilla. To break the coldness of the sculptors inspired by classic ideals, or even imitators of past forms, we listened to the sensations of which humanity is enriched by the work of color and light. The Baroque came to save art, to look for a new reason for life in subtleties, oddities, even sentimentality.
In painting, Florence, through the work of Leonardo da Vinci, took on a new impetus to conquer a new synthesis. The linear perspective was no longer enough, and the area was added to it. The human figure was no longer enough, and everything in nature became an object of art. The form had to bend to the effects of light, and the details with more rigor than before subordinate themselves to the whole. Almost shy in the face of all the conquests of his intellect, Leonardo took refuge in the shadows of twilight to feel the poetry of life in the delicacy of a shade of white and black. Less refined, less intellectual, with a gigantic passion, Michelangelo took the plastic of human images to the extreme consequences, and in those impressed so much torment, so much pain, to make it the symbol of the political and civil tragedy that was affecting all of Italy. He was the epic cantor of a people of giants, whose ruin he believed had come.
Among these came Raffaello da Urbino, speaking in a subtle voice about Peruginesque delicacies, and immediately assimilated their best conquests from the Florentines. He used it to reveal his sublime grace, a gift of God, and to distribute it in that social life of courtly humanism, of which the chronicle can be read in the Cortegiano del Castiglione. The Italian race received some of its most refined sublimations from Raphael, and yet he has passed over the centuries as a symbol of Italianity.
Close to him, Antonio da Correggio, reconnected to the art of Ferrara and Leonardo, imagined Ariosto graces for every occasion, with that ease which by now allowed a perfect organization of pictorial means.
According to collegesanduniversitiesinusa, the complete knowledge of the Florentine and Flemish discoveries of the fifteenth century, the new synthesis of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, the ideal of monumentality that the now unveiled ancient Rome insinuated, the blissful ease with which all this was assimilated and multiplied, gave the impression that perfection had been achieved, to which individual whim could be added, as a condiment.
It was therefore natural that the taste was quickly corrupted and that the claimed perfection resulted in an intellectual scheme hindering the imagination.
Venice was an exception. The politicians regarded her as the refuge of Italian freedom; to her looked at painting to start the modern taste in Europe.
In Venice, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, a new way of seeing the world developed. The aim is to exalt the woman. But the exaltation extends from the woman to the landscape, to the sunsets and storms, and yet it rises: from sensual it becomes cosmic. You are not interested in scientific research as in Florence; what matters is the enjoyment of nature.
The first creator of this vision was Giorgione: and his love dream is one of the most captivating among those in the history of art. With a few works he managed to free the Venetian taste from the prejudice of the Florentine form and to draw a new form of the relationship between color and light and shadow. At the same time he freed painting from subjects coming from outside; he painted “pictorial fantasies”, first conquering modern art the right to identify its own visual impression and the treated theme.
Titian started from Giorgione and, through his long life, he came to create with a freedom of touch, with a vivacity of improvisation, which will rarely be equaled then, never surpassed. He substituted Giorgione’s dream with the ideal of dignity, magnificence, religious and civil decorum of imperial life, which was felt then in Italy, also under Spanish influence. In addition to some of his contemporaries, Lotto and Palma and Bonifazio, the two greats who closed the heroic period of Venetian art developed Venetian art: Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese: the first who manages to bend to the needs of tone, not just the form , but also the drama of Michelangelo; the second that broadens the field of tonal vision, with a sensitivity that is all the more extended the more indifferent to the dramatic life. Between the two greats,
On the Veneto-Lombard borders, where the Giorgione art of Romanino flourished, Savoldo, Moretto, Moroni increased the vigor of the Lombard stock due to the indirect Venetian influence.
