Renaissance Art and Ideas
The Epoch of the Renaissance manifested its connection with antiquity through the restoration of classic aesthetic principles, and thematic choice, which now openly and often illustrate scenes from ancient literature, history and mythology. That link is contained in the term rinascimento –or rebirth. The renaissance poet Angelo Police (Angelo Poliziano) in the fifteenth century, in the tomb of the painter Giotto (Giotto di Bondone) wrote:
Ille ego sum per quem pictura extincta revixit,
which essentially means that epoch of Neo-Platonism, the first biographer of artists and art historian Giorgio Vasari (Giorgio Vasari, 1550) clearly recognized tendency for art imitativeness caused by the measure of the man who is at the center of its attention . [6. Vazari, 2000, from the introduction to 20-21, 32-47], “born again" the art, according to the text of the epitaph of this predecessor of the early Renaissance, actually means renewal of formal and in one part of the thematic characteristics of ancient classical art of IV and V century BC, the time of Apeles, Fidia, Lisip, Vitruvius and other important artistic creators of ancient Greece.
Although Petrarch first, even in the fourteenth century, with its humanistic activity, saw the changes in the field of Fine Arts, Vasari clearly analyzed, noting that nature is an example, and the ancient art is a school, which accounted the artists to overcome the “old and modern" manner. Thereby he was thinking about the Greek (Byzantine) and the Gotic style as an expression of vulgarity and barbaric art. But, one hundred years before Vasari, about 1447 years the florentine sculptor and goldsmith Lorenzo Giberti (Lorenzo Ghiberti) searching the reasons for the long-time degradation of the art, in his Comments (Commentarii) explains that it was contributed by the Christianity, with the destruction of temples and images deities in the uncompromising fight against paganism. According to him, the art also dies together with the ancient’s Gods, which will be raised in Tuscany, when there
