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New Styles

New Styles in Painting

Early in the Renaissance, Giotto, an artist experimented with shades of dark and light. These changes gave his paintings a feeling of space.

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Last Supper, Giotto

In this picture, notice the shades on the backs of the people sitting at the table. These are signs of the shading.

"Sfumato" is an Italian word that was a style of painting invented by Da Vinci. He uses this style to blur the image so that it can look differently depending on where you view it from. He uses this style in the Mona Lisa.

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Mona Lisa, Da Vinci, about 1502

Notice how in the picture the eyes, and lips are blurred? This is the sfumato style. If you turn the monitor from left to right, you may be able to see the eyes still looking at you. This is how sfumato works. It makes you think it is following you, because it is not a very clear area on the painting.

Another style used by Da Vinci is very interesting. If you only look at the left side of the picture, you will notice that the ground in the background is higher. This makes her look more erect. Now focus on the right side. Notice how the ground is lower? This makes her look more slouched.

Alberti, a painter, made these elemental codes of color for paintings:
Red = Fire
Blue = Air
Green = Water
Grey = Earth

St. Antoninus made these theological codes of color for paintings:
White = Purity
Red = Charity
Yellow/Gold = Dignity
Black = Humility

These codes were used when painters wanted to make a painting seem like one of these meanings. Notice how in some Renaissance paintings there are tints of some colors.


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Da Vinci

Another idea of Da Vinci's was to paint a light figure on a dark background. This gives a brilliant effect that makes it look sort of like an angel.

Da Vinci said that marks on a face show past experiance. We see this in Andrea Mantegna's painting.

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St. Sebastion (Detail of a Boatman), Mantegna, about 1475

Bartolomeo Fazio summed it up when he said this. "... the eyes are the windows of the soul: almost everyone knows what their color, what their restlessness, what their sharpness indicates. Something worth mentioning, though, is that people with long eyes are malicious and immoral. And if the white of the eye is widely extended and visible all round, this shows shamelessness; if it is concealed, not visible at all, this shows unreliability."

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