Arte: Time to revisit the art of the Renaissance

In recent years the Renaissance has been misremembered as rulebound and staid. It's time we looked again

Posted by Jonathan Jones

Thursday 22 January 2009 11.54 GMT

Now that our illusions are ended, now we know that ours is not a golden age, perhaps we should become less arrogant towards the past. In visual art, the last few years have seen a stunning complacency take hold. Art fairs were so groovy, the art they sold so sellable that old, dull art - such as that of the Renaissance - never looked, in some eyes, older or duller. But perhaps it's time to take solace, inspiration and hope from art history's true golden age.

In 1348 the black death shattered Europe's health and wealth. After the cataclysm, with its population halved, the continent began - unexpectedly - to prosper. Italian merchants were doing well enough by the 15th century to lavish money on art and architecture. They also sponsored a rediscovery of Greek and Latin antiquity that inspired and liberated artists in paradoxically original ways. As medieval men tried to emulate the ancient greats, they created art fresher, more alive, more imaginative than anything that survives from the ancient world. By the early 1500s Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael were bringing this new art to an almost unimaginable pitch of excellence. The Renaissance spread through Europe, even reaching London in the person of Hans Holbein.

In modern times, the Renaissance has been caricatured as everything modern art is purportedly not: rulebound, disciplined, grounded in nature and sheer skill. According to fashion and taste, it is either lauded or decried for these qualities. Of course, for the majority of people who do actually respond quite naturally to the power of a Raphael Madonna, it has always been worthy of awe. But the Renaissance has been misrepresented and misremembered. It was not a safe, staid time of unquestioned authority, nor is it to blame for what bad Victorian artists did in its name.

In reality, the Renaissance was an age of radical invention, incredible openness to new perceptions, disturbing thoughts. It was the age of Dürer's Melencolia and Michelangelo's Laurentian Library - the age of Hamlet. Far from setting out rules that everyone must follow, Renaissance artists laid down challenges that younger artists set out to beat. No sooner had Leonardo and Raphael established a truly monumental classical grace in painting than artists set out to disrupt it - and the first to do so were its creators: insidious subversion darkens Leonardo's art and even Raphael started to shake up his system in his last works. As for Michelangelo, he followed no rules at all.

His art is pure will. In its wake came artists who delighted in the plain weird. If you think Renaissance art is tame, please, when you have time, do one thing. Go to London's National Gallery and look at Bronzino's perverse Allegory with Venus and Cupid. The strangeness and sensuality of this painting contains everything I love about the Renaissance.

From the depths of 2009, we could do worse that turn our eyes to its shining light.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/jan/22/revisit-art-renaissance