Renaissance Art Essay

Renaissance art, the culture of art and architecture evolved in the 14-16th century in Florence. Artwork was based on a structure to show human perfection. Examples such as Leonardo Da Vinci’s and Michelangelo art show the artistic implications of what ancient Greeks thought of beauty. The Greeks idealized beauty in terms of forms and applied it in their art, which by the time of the Renaissance, began to incorporate it in a more realistic approach. Michelangelo used the Greek belief of perfect beauty and the newly emerging realistic viewpoint on art to create an image of a near god-like beauty. From the works of both Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci, Renaissance art heavily relied on Greek beauty, to portray their messages across on idealization and portrayed divinity in biblical art.

Ancient Greece is where the search for human beauty began. Exploring symmetrical and ideological perfections on human features, with reference to the Golden Ratio enabled the Greeks to answer what beauty was. Plato, born into an Athenian family in the golden age of Greek democracy, strived to elaborate the idea of Forms which originated from Hereclitus’ statement, “all things accessible to the senses are always in a state of flux.” Expanding from the idea of Forms, Plato questioned beauty, “What is beauty? Is it a reality or appearance? What is the essence of all these things . . . which we call beautiful?"

Along with Plato, Euclid too found a mathematical solution to define what beauty was. The Divine Ratio was founded by Euclid, which Plato incorporated into the theories of platonic solids. The Divine Ratio also known as the Golden Ratio has later influenced art, the reference of Phi helps understand why something comes across as having...

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... the form of mathematic ratios, art from ancient Greece has heavily based off the original concept of beauty in the Golden Ratio. As the renaissance period reinvented the idea of beauty, artists such as Michelangelo and Da Vinci took it a step further when incorporating the Golden Ratio in biblical art, embracing both ancient ideologies with Christianity. As seen in Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel, Creation of Adam and Pieta, he paired Greek beauty with god-like beauty through biblical referencing. Michelangelo was not the only person in the renaissance period who merged Greek ideals with biblical scripture, Leonardo Da Vinci was too famous for such connections too, in particular with ‘The Virgin of the Rocks.” It is thanks to mathematicians such as Euclid, who collaborated mathematics into beauty, leading artists to create such natural and idealistic art.