Page 101 - Art In The Age Of Exploration (Great Section on Chinese Art Ming Dynasty)

ning — the expansive piazza flanked by proper-
ties along a single building line, the wide roads,
and the open loggias — provide a convincing
setting for the participants in the human drama.
The real climax of these painted civic dramas
occurred not in Florence but in Venice, where
painters and their patrons developed a large-
scale form of art in which the demands of reli-
gious narrative and triumphant civic ritual are
conjoined within panoramas of the teeming life
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of the city It is with images of the maritime,
mercantile city-stage of Venice that we arrive at
one of the stepping-off points for the actual
exploration of the world. The city has become
a stage designed and depicted through the
fig. 8. Masolino, Healing of the Cripple and Raising of Tabitha. c. 1427, fresco. Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria
del Carmine, Florence rational mastery of techniques for the mensura-
tion and control of space. On this stage a rich
human story is acted out, involving the cere-
monies of civic business, the insinuation of
religious ritual into everyday life, and the
imperatives of expanding commercial and
imperial concerns. Of course, Venice, mistress
of the established eastern Mediterranean trad-
ing routes, did not herself sponsor the new voy-
ages south to India and west to the Americas,
but the type of commercial organization the city
had pioneered was a prerequisite for the forma-
tion of the Portuguese and Spanish maritime
empires. In this commercially oriented urban
environment, abstract mathematics and practical
techniques go hand-in-hand. Perhaps it is worth
remembering that Luca Pacioli, the intellectual
author of On Divine Proportion, the book on
fig. 9. Vittore Carpaccio, Reception of the Ambassadors (Legend of St. Ursula), c. 1496-1498, oil on canvas. the "abstract" beauty of geometry, also played a
Gallerie deirAccademia, Venice seminal role in the codification and dissemina-
tion of one of the practical necessities of Euro-
are those Brunelleschi is most likely to have these links do not on their own explain the pean commercial expansion —double-entry
used in achieving the perspectival projection of invention and development of perspective bookkeeping. 28
the Palazzo Vecchio and Baptistery onto the flat within the art of painting. Brunelleschi's preco-
surfaces of his two demonstration paintings. cious townscapes could have remained as visual
Although it is likely that the techniques of sur- curiosities, given that purely topographical rep-
veying—rather than the map-making methods resentations were not required of painters in THE HUMAN BODY:
of Ptolemy, as has sometimes been suggested — the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. His NEW ANATOMIES AND OLD IDEALS
provided the direct means for Brunelleschi's invention could be taken up — and even, I The portrayal of the human body, naked or
achievement, the nature of his skills exhibits a believe, conceived — only within an art whose semi-naked, assumed a central role in the ambi-
deep affinity with those pioneers who were new functions made the basic techniques for the tions of major artists in northern and southern
reviving Ptolemaic techniques for the charting depiction of realistic space relevant to the needs Europe during the Renaissance. By 1500 a
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of the heavens and earth. It may even be that of both painters and their audiences. The new German artist like Durer felt compelled to
charting land and sky presupposed the control kind of narrative art, pioneered by Giotto and master the portrayal of the nude, just like his
of space on a smaller scale, that the rational his successors, was immediate, accessible, Italian contemporaries, such as Leonardo. Not
mastery of local space in the man-made envi- human, and even anecdotal. It was further since classical antiquity had artists accorded
ronment is a prerequisite for the systematic developed in the 1420$ by Masaccio and Maso- such significance to the beauty, corporeal pres-
exploration of spaces lying beyond man's imme- lino in their frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, ence, and expressive power of the unadorned
diate visual compass. Such a thesis is strongly which depicted solid, highly individualized human form. Although the art of ancient Rome
supported by Jacopo de' Barbaras remarkable human actors placed within convincingly played a conspicuous part in firing the ambi-
View of Venice (cat. 151), in which the system- characterized spaces that make direct reference tions of Renaissance artists, the formal and
atic description of the city in space positively to the urban environment. Most striking in this emotional range of images of the human body
invites speculation as to what lies beyond. respect is the large fresco that portrays Saint around 1500 far exceeded anything achieved in
However close were the links between per- Peter healing a cripple and raising Tabitha, in antiquity. Renaissance representations of the
spective and the new conceptions of civic space, which key elements in contemporary city plan- body in a variety of private and institutional

100 CIRCA 1492