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WHAT THE RENAISSANCE DID FOR US

Great art, says CIWEM Executive Director, Nick Reeves, can have a profound influence on our thinking and our attitudes. In the Renaissance it was important in communicating serious messages about our relationship with the world that are relevant today.

Forget the popular image of the penniless artist starving in a garret, driven but disconnected. Artists have always been at the centre of things: commenting, describing, reflecting, interpreting and inspiring. Their work has shaped much of our thinking about our place and purpose in the world that can be tracked back to the glory days of Renaissance Europe. So, spin back to the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was a time when only a cultured elite could read and write, when travel was dangerous and difficult and when there was a growing fascination with other countries and with science. 

The artist was important, respected and lionised.....a communicator of messages and a pedlar of visions that were hugely symbolic and powerful. But, the creator of biblical scenes and portraits of Popes and potentates was just as likely to be conducting scientific experiments, managing construction projects or making intricate pieces of jewellery. This was the artist as painter, sculptor, scientist, philosopher, engineer and much else besides. Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) is the prime example of multi-skilled genius. His anatomical drawings were revered by doctors, surgeons and scientists. And his designs of impossible-looking machines, that would inspire later generations of engineers, were breathtaking in their vision, complexity and sheer audacity. His painting was sublime and he was feted by monarchs and merchants alike. Here was a man of his time and yet beyond it.

But there were others who, with breathtaking brilliance, also breached the barriers between art, craft, science and engineering. Benvenuto Cellini (1500 - 1571), the celebrated, but ever-so-slightly anarchic, sculptor, engraver and goldsmith, was many things: architect,  soldier, armourer and a designer/builder of militaria too. Much too clever by half, Cellini broke all the rules and got away with it. But, those were the halcyon days before too much regulation forced the professions to turn in on themselves and before we lost the true essence of creativity that spanned all disciplines and all areas of life.

So, what does all this prove? It shows that art is the highest and most nourishing form of human expression and that it can serve and inform all other human activity. For hundreds of years the artists of Renaissance Europe were people of status. The powerbrokers of the time understood too well the role that art could play in winning hearts and minds and in shaping the social, spiritual and political landscape. Artists were the spin-doctors of their day. Any statesman with ambition had to have a court painter, architect, musician or poet.

No argument, art (painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre, music and literature) was a vital tool in communicating  science and what it means to be part of the Earth's complex eco-systems. And the artists of the Renaissance have been important in passing a legacy of their fascination with the material and spiritual world down to us. Through time, across cultures and civilisations artistic activity has served science well. And if you accept one dictionary definition of the environment as 'the condition in which we live' then artists have had a rich source of material to draw upon.

In Britain, through art, we have a long and proud tradition of articulating our thoughts and feelings about the natural environment that stretches back to the Dark Ages and to pre-history. Art historians speak of the 'English landscape tradition' that is bang up-to-date with David Hockney and his large, critically-acclaimed, 2006 paintings of his native Yorkshire. Today, Stonehenge is celebrated as much for its visual impact on the landscape of rural Wiltshire as for its original spiritual purpose, and the two have become inseparable in the minds of most of us. And this intermingling of the spiritual with the environmental can also be seen in the Wilton Diptych masterpiece of 1395. By an unknown hand, the painter shows King Richard the Lion Heart being presented to the Virgin and Child. Recently restored, the silver knob atop the flag of England in the painting can now be seen to depict England as a green island set in a lustrous silver sea.  This is landscape as a regal renaissance setting, a backdrop for a mystical event.

Art teaching convention invites us to agree that the arts reached a new level of 'sophistication' in fifteenth and sixteenth century Europe. This was a time of 'high art' and big blousy statements on earnest matters of creation, life and death.  The natural landscape, as a legitimate concern for artists, fell off the radar though, and was not, in its own right, regarded as a legitimate subject for a serious artist. Only a few, like the German painter and engraver Albrecht Durer, believed that natural things were worthy of  attention. Look at his famous self-portrait as a very young man and you can see that he has this wide-eyed wonder that comes with youth. An inquisitiveness that would have made him one of those annoying children that never stop asking questions. His microscopic depiction of plants and animals were not only of artistic merit but of scientific importance too, a fusion of art and science that few ever achieved, then or since.

Caravaggio (1573-1610), confused art with life, big time. The violence and darkness in his paintings were very much part of his own way of life. He was a social misfit whose genius was to translate his personal experiences into biblical stories that look very real and say a lot about the futility of it all and about the darker side of life in late sixteenth and early seventeenth century Europe. For Caravaggio, and the other big-hitters, landscape was a mere backdrop to human stories that were intended to inspire religious fervour and  fear of evil. But, that's not to undermine the role of landscape in religious Renaissance painting. Consider the work of Jan Van Eyck (1395-1441). See and admire his forensic attention to detail and you will soon know that here was an artist who had studied flora and fauna.  

But, the natural environment at the service of art is not merely about the pastoral or the beautifully dramatic. Hieronymous Bosch, for instance, had other ideas. In late fifteenth century northern Europe (just before the Reformation) we see a different sort of concern that, oddly, has much in common with todays worries about our future and the very survival of the planet. In his scary and surreal paintings Bosch tells us, forcefully, that unless we change the way we live, we condemn ourselves to a slow and painful demise and the Earth itself to destruction. In the works of Bosch the figures and the landscape fuse into a cohesive whole of fantastical images that are as scary today as they were when they were first seen. If ever there was a visual metaphor for the dangers of climate change then Bosch has anticipated it and defined it.

Not much is known about Bosch (he died in 1519) but, for sure, he was way ahead of his time. He was a free-thinking, heretical radical, active when anyone who dared to be different and to challenge the established way was in danger from the authorities. How often must he have feared the sound of hammering fists on his studio door. But, his talent saved him and his work was in great demand from those powerful enough to protect him. Bosch struck a chord with the popular imagination. This was medieval Europe, dark with suspicion and the Church all powerful. People, rich and poor alike, believed in the certainty of heaven and hell. It suited the Church hierarchy that painted images of evil, death and destruction should strike fear into the minds of those who might be tempted to stray from the path of righteousness and beyond its control.  

But not all Renaissance art was destined for  churches and for the private collections of the aristocracy. Much of it was public art for popular consumption, adding value and beauty to the urban city-states of Rome, Venice and Florence and to the commercial hot spots of Ghent, Antwerp and Bruges. The sculpture, the architecture, the squares, canals, fountains and gardens, all coming together in a satisfying whole that is the model of urban environments, town planning and city living today.  

It now seems, to me at least, that the recent concern of certain British artists for the landscape is some kind of counter-current to Renaissance sophistication and an antidote to nineteenth century industrialisation. And comment on our ignorance about threats posed to the environment by an unstoppable consumer culture. There is something unique about the British situation. It rests on a shared myth of a time when, in the Middle Ages, life was lived in a rural idyll of small communities in harmony with nature. A time when polluting a river was a hanging offence.

In Britain, while the vast majority of us are urban dwellers, who have had little connection with the land since the migration of folk from the countryside to the towns and cities during the industrial revolution, we have a shared sense of memory of the countryside that goes back to the Renaissance and beyond. This means that artists will always be concerned for the environment and continue to produce important work that improves our understanding of the world we live in.  Albrecht Durer was a giant of the Renaissance. Yes, he could knock out the big flashy alterpieces making grand visual statements about God and the meaning of life. But, his small jewell-like watercolours and drawings of plants and animals are, in my opinion, his real masterpieces. Brilliantly, they connect art and science, saying a great deal about the environment of yesteryear that has meaning for us today.