I’ve been researching about the Florentine Renaissance for the past weeks for a comparative lecture on classical and modern movements in western art history. While studying, I remembered writing a paper on the parallelisms and differences between Romanesque and Baroque sculptures for a theory class in art school. For some reason, I’ve always been enamored by Romanesque art and the function that it served in ecclesiastical architecture during the Middle Ages. I found the schematized and fantastical depiction of the human figure to be enigmatic and interesting. The artworks were fitting relics to the zeitgeist of their time. The pursuit for answers to the universal questions of life during the medieval times was a severe shift in focus from the expansionist battle cry of the Roman Empire.
Human representation during the Middle Ages
I developed a curiosity over the Renaissance primarily because of the way the artists of the quattrocento contradicted medieval ways of painting and seeing. If Medieval sculptures which depicted nature and humanity without individuality and personality were subordinate to architecture, human representation and spatial depiction during the Renaissance saw a rebirth of naturalistic representation. This stark contrast shows of a kind of movement throughout Europe during those times. Southern Europe, on one hand, reveled in the invention of linear perspective and the emergence of mathematics as a tool to understand nature. Popular examples of which are Paolo Uccello’s Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino unseats Bernardino della Ciarda at the Battle of San Romano, a work which depicts, with subtle humor, horses dying in perspective; and Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of the Christ. On the other hand, Northern Europe saw the development of a technique that unified mathematical observation and human experience – fine examples of which can be seen in the works of Jan van Eyck.
Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino unseats Bernardino della Ciarda at the Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello
In the south, particularly in Florence, humanism took center stage as the common battle cry of artists. Even those who adhered to irreconcilably divergent persuasions, particularly Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli, produced works that celebrated the humanistic ethos of their era.
Speaking of Leonardo and Botticelli, these two masters simply couldn’t get enough of disparaging one another.
Alleged self-portrait of Sandro Botticelli
Botticelli did not quite share the aesthetic preferences of Leonardo as he chose to conspicuously delineate the outlines and elongate the proportions of his human figures. Adhering to Marsilio Ficino’s neo-Platonist philosophic view about the importance of beauty as an aesthetic objective, he opted to prettify the facial attributes of his mythological subjects. In fact, manifestations of his philosophic and stylistic inclinations can be seen in his seminal works The Birth of Venus and La Primavera. Botticelli’s partiality to the beautiful explains the highly ornate and colorful character of his frescos. His body of work expressed the humanistic chest-thumping pride of Florentine Renaissance by divorcing itself from the art espoused by the established church. Botticelli departed from the aesthetic norm on two levels: first, he portrayed mythological themes from classical antiquity, and second, he veered away from strict naturalistic representation advocated by painter Cennino Cennini.
Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci
Since Leonardo considered painting to be the ‘daughter of nature’, there was no way that he would acknowledge Botticelli’s assertions. For him, artists must not idealize nature nor depart from it given that the world can be scientifically measured and recorded in precise terms. In an obvious attempt to glorify the use of value (light and shade) over line and color, Leonardo slammed Botticelli by saying that the neo-Platonist artist painted ‘very sorry landscapes’. He even cleverly went around Ficino’s emphasis on the beautiful and the ideal by using his famed sfumato technique in painting the ‘soul’ of his subjects. For him, artists who ought to paint the beautiful may do so in accordance to the laws set by nature. The Mona Lisa, his most famous painting, masterfully illustrates the genius of Leonardo in capturing the enigma and transience of human expression.
The golden regalia (detail on upper left portion of image), a four-kilogram halter made of intricately woven gold strands, is the only one of its kind in the world.
Being an Asian audience of western art, I always ask myself about the happenings in the Orient during the quattrocento. Southern Europe may boast of a Florentine Renaissance that saw the emergence of the likes of Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphael and Masaccio among others, but Asia, particularly the Philippines, may boast of a rich cultural heritage that produced the finest golden treasures that predated the quattrocento by at least 400 years. The four-kilogram golden halter made from intricately woven golden strands featured in the Crossroads of Civilizations exhibition at the Ayala Museum among hundreds of other golden objects gave me a glimpse of a sophisticated society that produced exquisite works of art that could possibly rival the masterpieces of Europe in terms of craftsmanship and sheer beauty. I may never know the names of the goldsmiths who had woven in their masterpieces a clue about the identity of my precolonial forefathers nor know of the intense rivalries among the master artists and craftsmen of our precolonial history; I am nevertheless immensely proud of our priceless precolonial jewelry that could possibly give the Mona Lisa a run for her money.
~Speck Tackle
I love notebooks with crisp paper and very thin boil point pens–writing down notes becomes a pleasure. I love the smell of new books–it signals a journey of discovering a new world. I love newly cooked jasmine rice–anything paired with it tastes fantastic. I love waking up to a cool morning, with the sound of birds on the window sill chirping the dawn away. I love the sunlight on my face at 8am in the morning–it reminds me that the day is a new day with all the possibilities. The list goes on and on. 
