Renaissance: magic, perspective and melancholy

Your goal in this lesson: to understand what changed in the Renaissance, and where magic, astrology and tarot really appear in its art.

A rebirth, and a story about a rebirth

Later tradition “Renaissance” means rebirth. The painter and writer Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists (1550, enlarged 1568), told the story of a rebirth of art in Italy after centuries of decline. Historians in the nineteenth century turned the word into the name of a whole period, roughly 1400 to 1600. The idea is useful, but remember that it was partly propaganda: the art of the Middle Ages had not been in decline at all.

Florence and the open window

Historical Early fifteenth-century Florence was a rich city of bankers and merchants, above all the Medici family. Here artists worked out linear perspective, and the humanist Leon Battista Alberti explained it in On Painting (1435 in Latin, 1436 in Italian). He compared a picture to an open window through which we see the story. Painters such as Masaccio gave figures weight and natural light. Portraits like Fra Filippo Lippi’s woman at a window, now at the Met, celebrated families and marriages. See Early Renaissance.

Around 1500, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael raised these ideas to what we call the High Renaissance. Leonardo’s soft, smoky shading, called sfumato, makes the corners of the Mona Lisa’s mouth and eyes impossible to fix.

Magic in Florence

Historical Renaissance Florence also revived ancient philosophy and magic. Cosimo de’ Medici asked the scholar Marsilio Ficino to translate a set of Greek texts attributed to “Hermes Trismegistus”. Ficino finished the Latin translation in 1463, and it was printed in 1471. In his Three Books on Life (1489), Ficino wrote about the influence of the planets on health and temperament, including how a scholar born under Saturn could balance melancholy with music, light and the right images.

Later tradition The historian Frances Yates argued in 1964 that this Hermetic tradition was central to Renaissance culture. Many scholars now think she overstated it, but she opened a whole field of study. Be careful with claims that every Renaissance painting hides a magical program. Ask for evidence from the time.

Dürer’s melancholy angel

Historical North of the Alps, artists loved the detailed surfaces of the visible world. Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg spread his fame through prints. His engraving Melencolia I (1514) shows a winged figure sitting among tools of measurement and building, with an hourglass, a bell, scales and a magic square of sixteen numbers whose rows add up to 34; the bottom row includes the date, 1514.

Later tradition The classic reading, by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl in Saturn and Melancholy (1964), links the image to the idea, found in Ficino and in Agrippa’s On Occult Philosophy, that melancholy, ruled by Saturn, was the temperament of creative genius. In astrological magic, a square of four was linked with Jupiter, which was thought to ease Saturn. It remains an interpretation, but a well-argued one. Read the full close reading of Melencolia I, and see the Northern Renaissance page.

The first tarot cards

Historical In northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century, a new kind of card deck appeared, with an extra series of picture cards called trionfi, triumphs. They were used to play a card game, not to tell fortunes. The most famous early cards, made for the Visconti and Sforza families of Milan, are usually dated to about 1450 to 1480 and are painted by hand with gold and silver leaf. Reading tarot for divination came centuries later, in eighteenth-century France. See tarot as art history.

Try this

Today’s exercise: compare one Italian and one Netherlandish portrait from the fifteenth century, for example Lippi’s Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement and a Netherlandish portrait from any open-access collection. Make two columns: face, clothes, background, light. Which feels more like a real person to you, and why?

Quick recap

• Vasari’s “rebirth” is a useful story, not a neutral fact.
• Alberti explained perspective; Leonardo softened outlines with sfumato.
• Ficino revived Hermetic texts and planetary ideas in Florence.
• Melencolia I links to Saturn and genius; the first tarot cards were for a game.

Keep going

Next: From Baroque light to Romantic night. Need a refresher? Go back to Ancient and medieval symbols or see the whole course. For more, see Mannerism and the esoteric in art.

Sources

• Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (London: Nelson, 1964).
• Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964).
• Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (1435; Italian version 1436).
• Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550; 2nd ed. 1568), translated by Gaston du C. de Vere (1912).
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514, accession 43.106.1.

Go deeper: the art movements timeline and art history pages on this site

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