Although each artist of the Renaissance had his own personal style, certain common themes were used by all. The slideshow below illustrates some of those themes.Why do you think these themes were important? Are they still important in art today?
Beauty
Individualism
The Human as Divine
Perspective
For Renaissance artists, the human body represented the greatest of God's creations. Botticelli's painting The Birth of Venus shows the Greek goddess as a symbol of human beauty surrounded by nature.
During the Renaissance, artists began to draw portraits of real men and women, not just idealized saints. The most famous of these portraits, the Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci, shows the subject as a distinct individual. The subject's features and expression seem to be unique to her, part of an individual personality--not just a type of person, but an actual person.
If the human body was the highest of God's creations, as the humanists of the Renaissance believed, then divine power could be expressed by painting human beings realistically. The famous statue of David by Michelangelo conveys both a human and a divine presence. David is realistic except for the enlarged right hand, as if it represents the hand of God.
Renaissance artists used perspective to give their human figures a "real" place in a three-dimensional world. The illusion of depth created realism. Figures became rounded and active, rather than flat and static. They seemed able to move of their own free will rather than occupying a narrow slot assigned to them by some higher power. This plate taken from Ghiberti's bronze doors, known as the Gates of Paradise, shows the lines on the tiled floor converging into a "vanishing point" to establish perspective.
