Influence of Humanism and Renaissance Italian Art

During the Italian Renaissance , humanism played an important role ininfluencing the artist of that age in their word pictures and what they drew. The definition ofhumanism is the denial of any power or moral value superior to that of humanity therejection of religion in favor of a touch in the advancement of humanity by its ownefforts. This means that many of the philosophers, scientists, and artists of that timestarted to reject the ideas of the church. Previously almost all pictures had to do withreligion only this changed and is shown in two works in the Italian Renaissance. They areThe School of Athens, by Raphael, and in The Last Supper, by da Vinci da Vinci.Taking a starting signal glimpse of The School of Athens by Raphael, you will see that thereis humanism everywhere. You can tell that it was planned carefully, and portrayedsomething meaningful to the artist. In the painting The School of Athens you can noticean extremely dominant theme Humanism. The artist, Raphael, s hows a thirstandeagerness for knowledge that is displayed everywhere in the painting. This gives us aglimpse of what society was back in the Renaissance. Judging by the painting, it wasmainly revolving around education and advancement. In The School of Athens, Raphaelpaints people learning from, debating against and simply geld one another.Eachindividual illustrates a point about society in the Renaissance. Similar to the theme andthe setting of the painting, these interactions mostly have to do with knowledge andunderstanding, as the school would not be a place of social manners back then. Both thetheme of and people in the painting are include in the realism of a painting to show asociety, which is used effectively in The School of Athens by Raphael.In The Last Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo also uses humanismalthough it has to do somewhat with religion. In the painting, there is immense amountsof symmetry in this painting. This was important to humanism because everythi ng wassupposed to be balanced. Also mans perfection was a big part in the renaissance, and abody is symmetrical. So some symmetry in The Last Supper was, on both side of Jesuswas a group of six people, then in those groups of people each was split into two othergroups, all very plain and symmetrical. There was also four panels on each side of thewalls.Another characteristic of humanism art was real emotions. Every single person inthis painting( in addition Jesus, who was left out for obvious reasons) is not smiling. Theyare giving real emotions. Humanism art was all about emotions, and being real. All thepeople in the painting seem concerned or anxious, all real emotions, they are not justhappy all the time. Like what was stated before, artist of the time wanted to show howreal people in the paintings were. All the people have shaded in feature which give themthe look of real people.As you can see, by these two works and also by many others, there much muchhumanism involved. In a lmost every painting, the artists drew more life like pictures andpeople showing the expressions of their faces and the society they had lived in at thattime. You can see this in the two examples that I showed. Both of them had similaraspects because both had real people in them, and both pictures showed expressionson the peoples faces.