World History: The Modern Era Print - Renaissance Art and Literature [4:58] -

TRANSCRIPT: Michelangelo Buonarroti's David is the iconic sculpture of the Italian Renaissance. David stands as an ideal classical nude and a biblical hero all at once. The beauty of his body, the proportion of his figure, and the determination of his countenance all represent the positive view of humanity typical of Italian Renaissance humanism. David's statue however, lies at the end of the Renaissance. To find the roots of these humanist principles, one should start with the Italian writer, rhetorician, and poet Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, who wrote in the middle part of the 14th century.

Petrarch travelled from place to place in Italy, although he spent a great deal of time in Milan. He was actually born in southern France. Petrarch is, in many ways, the prototypical humanist; that is, Petrarch pioneers the movement. Petrarch in his work, above all, stressed the rebirth of pristine Roman Latin rhetoric, and in fact, Petrarch saw himself as a rhetorician above all things and sought to perfect his prose. Petrarch also was renowned for his attempts to bring back or to rediscover lost Roman texts. Petrarch also was a poet and pioneered new poetic forms, most particularly the Petrarchan sonnet. And indeed, many of Petrarch's most beautiful poems were written to his beloved Laura. Petrarch, as a humanist, set Italian culture down a path of emphasizing the beauty, power, and potential of humanity and the notion of Greco-Roman antiquity as the ultimate role model for contemporary Italian art.

One can see the emphasis on Greek and Roman models not just in Petrarch's writing, but in Italian painting and sculpture. Over the course of 150 years, Italians sought to revive classical values, classical notions of beauty and proportion, and indeed, the classical view of humanity. The use of the human nude as a positive image of human potential is very much a Renaissance revival of classical Greek and Roman statuary. These classical nudes can be seen in the sculpture of Michelangelo, the paintings of Raphael, and the paintings and drawings of Leonardo da Vinci.

Michelangelo combined his interest in classical figures with his own desire to surpass the Greeks and Romans. And so, a look at Michelangelo's painting and sculpture shows a vitality and a use of light that goes beyond Greek and Roman art and represents something uniquely the author's own.

Leonardo da Vinci—a polymath, a scientist, a mathematician, a painter, and a designer—typifies all of the different aspects of Renaissance artistic and intellectual activity. Leonardo's painting The Last Supper, demonstrates the Renaissance technique of perspective: the representation of a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. Perspective began to emerge in Italian painting in the early 15th century, but by Leonardo's age, 100 years later, it had reached a very high level of proficiency. In Leonardo's Last Supper, the space recedes to a point above the head of Christ and the viewer feels as if he is looking into a three-dimensional room. Leonardo's famous drawing, the "Vitruvian Man," demonstrates again the Renaissance notion of ideal humanity on the Greco-Roman model and also demonstrates the author's fascination with anatomy and the physical sciences.

In short, Renaissance art and literature combined an emphasis on reviving Greek and Roman ideals and models with a new vitality, a new confidence, typical of Italian artist and writers in the 14th and 15th centuries—and that vitality and that confidence is embodied in the marble form of Michelangelo's David.