Illumination of the Renaissance
The book Renaissance painting is a style of European book illumination . The Renaissance emerged from the Gothic in the 15th century .
The importance as one of the major genres of visual art that within the painting par with the Tableware or canvas - and the mural was the Illumination lost with the advent of the printing press , the inseparable from the era of Renaissance is linked. Through printing processes - first the woodcut , then the copperplate - book illustration also developed from an individual work of art to a mass medium that was affordable for large groups of people, which very quickly almost completely displaced book illumination.
As a rule, book illumination only survived in the early modern period where texts were only intended for individual editions and therefore printing was not worthwhile. One of the illustrated book types was the house book , as has been handed down as an example in a copy from Wolfegg Castle , or family chronicles , such as the Zimmerische Chronik from the middle of the 16th century, in which particularly heraldic paintings can be found. Local privileges and statutes were also created in illustrated individual copies, such as the Balthasar Behem Codex (Krakow, Biblioteka Jagiellońska ). 1505 in Krakow . A special form of the illustrated book were huge antiphonaries , choir books that had to be legible for the entire choir and whose book decoration consisted primarily of historicized initials. The most splendidly decorated book types of the 15th and 16th centuries were the books of prayer and hours intended for private devotion ; in Italy there were also writings from humanist literature . Many of these early modern books are illustrated not with opaque paint, but with partly colored pen drawings.
A special case is apparently the Venetian Renaissance book illumination, which experienced a massive boom from 1469 onwards due to the emergence of a local printing industry. In addition, official documents such as the Commissioni on behalf of the recipients were painted here well beyond the middle of the 16th century ; they are preserved in considerable numbers in the Museo Correr .
A special field of early modern book illumination were exclusive works for bibliophiles who did not want to do without unique items. Sometimes prints were also provided with illustrations afterwards, for example the prayer book of Emperor Maximilian I from 1514/1515, which was provided with marginal drawings by seven leading artists of the time, including Hans Burgkmair , Hans Baldung , Lucas Cranach the Elder. Ä. and Albrecht Dürer . Between 1469 and 1483, the Frankfurt merchant Peter Ugelheimer, who emigrated to Venice, had at least 14 printed works painted with frontispieces by the best miniatures working in the lagoon city, including Benedetto Bordone and Girolamo da Cremona .
On the threshold from Gothic to Renaissance are Jean Fouquet , Barthélemy d'Eyck , among others , while Giulio Clovio and Albrecht Altdorfer are clearly part of the Renaissance. Among the illuminators of the 16th century are the Glockendon family in Nuremberg , Hans Mielich in Munich , Jörg Kölderer in Tyrol , Jean Bourdichon in France, Attavante degli Attavanti in Florence , the Bening family in Bruges and Georg Hoefnagel in Antwerp and Vienna , which among other things for the Emperor Friedrich III. , Maximilian I , Charles V and Rudolf II, as well as Lorenzo the Magnificent , Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de 'Medici , the Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus and Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol worked for the lord of Florence .
It is characteristic of the Renaissance artists that book illustration approaches the autonomous work of art, the panel painting. All the achievements of Renaissance art, especially the painterly mastery of perspective and spatiality, also found their way into book illumination from Italy. At the same time, the historicized initials developed into picture frames for the miniatures, while the actual decorative initials disappeared north of the Alps. Another essential feature was the examination of antique book illustrations, which was reflected not least in antique decorative elements such as architectural frames, reliefs, medallions or putti. Typically, the text to be illustrated became more and more part of the picture and often integrated into the composition on tablets.
literature
in alphabetical order by authors / editors
- Jonathan JG Alexander: Illumination of the Italian Renaissance in the 15th century. (New York 1977, translated into German by Hella Preimesberger), Munich 1977.
- Jonathan JG Alexander (Ed.): The Painted Page. Italian Renaissance book illumination 1450-1550 ( exh . Cat. London, Royal Academy of Arts 1994-1995; New York, Pierpont Morgan Library 1995). Munich, Prestel 1994.
- Lilian Armstrong: The impact of printing on miniaturists in Venice after 1469, in: Dies .: Studies on Renaissance Miniaturists in Venice, London 2003, Vol. 1, pp. 406–433 (reprinted from: Sandra Hindman (Ed.): Printing the Written Word: The Social History of Books circa 1450-1520. Ithaca (NY) 1991, pp. 174-202).
- Ernst Günther Grimme: The History of Occidental Illumination . 3. Edition. Cologne, DuMont 1988. ISBN 3-7701-1076-5 .
- Susanna Partsch: Profane illumination of bourgeois society in late medieval Florence: The Specchio Umano of the grain merchant Domenico Lenzi (= Heidelberg art-historical treatises NF 16). Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, Worms 1981. ISBN 978-3-88462-008-3
- Ingo F. Walther / Norbert Wolf: Codices illustres. The most beautiful illuminated manuscripts in the world. Masterpieces of book illumination. 400 to 1600 . Taschen, Cologne et al. 2005, ISBN 3-8228-4747-X .
Web links
- New York Public Library - Digital Gallery Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts from Western Europe