3 - The Renaissance & Hieronymus Bosch

Basilica of San Marco, Venice. Photo and Quotes from
Renaissance - Andrew Graham-Dixon
ISBN - 0-563-38396-8

One of  the most iconic artistic monuments made before the Renaissance movement started is the Basilica of San Marco, located in Venice. The onion-domed masterpiece was built in the late eleventh century and now well restored still 'remains a fundamentally Eastern church, a Hagia Sophia on the fringes of the Adriatic' Sea.

www.nomadicheart.com

Robyn Vincent

The inside of the Basilica is stunningly beautiful, with consideration to detail everywhere you look, 'a kind of cave or grotto dedicated to the overwhelming of the senses.' Under your feet is a very detailed patterned floor, and above and all around is artwork on the walls, ceilings and in the domes, with figures and statures of saints and angels dotting about the whole building.
The Basilica is full of art focusing on ideas of God, but not "in the figure of the mortal Christ."
These ideas in the artwork is one of the things that sparked the Renaissance and the Ideas risen from it.

www.ibiblio.org

Hieronymus Bosch was an early Dutch painter, considerably best known for 'The Garden Of Earthly Delights' work. Bosch was one of the painters known throughout The Renaissance era. 

Detail from the right panel of
'The Garden Of Earthly Delights' - 
Heironymus Bosch
ISBN 1-84013-657-X

This was a period of creative achievement, and a period of social and artistic change, because of a number of different events and inventions. I like the way that 'The Garden Of Earthly Delights' shows a split between the different social and religion types, with each wing and center depicting different bits, like the left wing showing the Garden of Eden, as a paradise with lots of animals and different shades of green. This in comparison to the right wing which depicts hell, with dark burning colours, overcrowded people, fight and death.

Renaissance - Andrew Graham-Dixon

Bosch created a lot of pieces with the idea of politics, religion and humanism, which contributed to the development of the Renaissance movement. One piece in particular which plays with the idea of religion is The Last Judgement, right. In The Last Judgement a little Christ is looking over a world that has gone bad, with people dying and being tortured, Christ judges all this, with people on his left and right and what could be took as the devil and angel on each of his shoulders. The attention to microscopic detail in Bosch's work pushes the idea more strong than ever.