German Renaissance
Artistic Movements, Periods and Styles in 5 Points
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German Renaissance
• The most influential person in the Renaissance in Germany was neither an artist nor a patron of the arts, but Gutenberg, since with the printing press, humanism and Martin Luther’s ideas spread rapidly, which would trigger the Protestant Reformation. (In the Renaissance, the center of man’s life was no longer God and the Church but man himself, and the Reformation implied a distancing from the Catholic Church.)
• The German Renaissance did not mean, as in Italy, a revival of the values of classical antiquity but focused on the revival of the spirit of the Germanic people itself. There was an exaltation of individual freedom, of personal will, of the man who is not part of the herd but a “conqueror.” Those things converged in a romantic and passionate vision of life, something that was definitely “German” and that put the individual at the center of the universe.
• Just as in Italy, the fundamental concern when representing an image was the illusion of space, perspective, and volume, in Germany (as in Flanders) the priority was instead the detailed precision.
• The 16th century is known as the Golden Age of German painting, mainly due to the prominence of Dürer. In the previous century, the characteristics of Gothic art persisted to a great extent in Germany, although it was the Renaissance. For this reason, the true Renaissance awakening came a little later than in other places.
• Another difference with Italy is the different conceptions of the representation of beauty: in the south, harmonic, ideal proportions were sought; in Germany, on the other hand, there was a search for beauty that was more oriented towards expressiveness or psychological depth than towards “beauty.”
Representative Artists: Altdorfer, Albrecht Dürer, Grünewald, Holbein the Younger, Cranach the Elder
Image: Self-Portrait (1500). Albrecht Dürer
Recommended links:
Self-Portrait (1498) Albrecht Dürer.
Characteristic Elements of Renaissance Painting.
The Four Greatest Painters of the Italian Renaissance.
Artistic Movements from Classical Antiquity to Rococo.
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