High Renaissance

Refers to the culmination of the Italian Renaissance style in the late 16th century, characterized by the imitative use of the orders and Classical compositional arrangements.

High Renaissance

High Renaissance: interior of St. Peter’s, Rome

A term referring primarily to the culmination of the Italian Renaissance style in the 16th century (cinquecento). Saint Peter’s in Rome is the most famous example.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

High Renaissance

the period in Italian art history at the end of the 15th and during the first quarter of the 16th century; it heralded the highest, classical phase in the development of Renaissance art.

The main centers of the High Renaissance were Florence, Rome, and Venice (where the High Renaissance includes the 1530’s). The leading artists were Bramante, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giorgione, and Titian. In High Renaissance architecture, sculpture, and painting the realism, humanism, and heroic ideals of the Renaissance, as well as their vitality and vividness, were crystallized and expressed with titanic force. Developing unusually quickly and in many directions, the art as a whole had a majestic, monumental character, a harmonic perfection, and a lofty idealistic structure. The principles of the period were reflected in a complex and varied manner throughout 16th-century Italian art and had a strong influence on all subsequent art. The characteristics of High Renaissance style were seen in the work of a number of German artists of the early 16th century (A. Dürer, H. Holbein).

REFERENCES

Wölfflin, H. Klassicheskoe iskusstvo. St. Petersburg, 1912. (Translated from German.)
Rotenberg, E. I. Iskusstvo Italii XVI veka. [Moscow, 1967.] (Pamiatniki mirovogo iskusstva, series 1, issue 1.)

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References in periodicals archive

Raphael's Poetics: Art and Poetry in High Renaissance Rome is an impressive undertaking that delights, challenges and educates.

Raphael's Poetics: Art and Poetry in High Renaissance Rome

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The last fifty years have seen especially in Italy a surge of scholarship on the period between the High Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

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After his zappy modern-dress beginning, McAnuff pulls off a master stroke when the Capulets' ball is held in full High Renaissance dress (Paul Tazewell did the wildly flamboyant costumes).

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RAPHAEL (1483-1520) was one of the most important artists of the High Renaissance and most influential painters in European history, while the Medici family ruled Florence from the 14th to the 17th Century.

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His aides stressed that his chin should be concealed, so I put him in a contraposta pose." Contraposta is a High Renaissance pose in which the model twists his body in a certain way to give it the right symmetry.

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For scholars, it marked the transition from the vibrancy of the High Renaissance to a period dominated by the Counter-Reformation.

The Pontificate of Clement VII: History, Politics, Culture

Kevin Ancell's painted ramp paean to the high renaissance was directly commissioned by RVCA founders Conan Hayes and Pat Tenore.

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As sixteenth-century Europe experienced an explosion of new ideas during the Reformation and High Renaissance, Florentine artists like Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo flourished and influenced a multitude of others, not only in Italy, but throughout Europe.

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Chronologically, historians place Arcimboldo in the Mannerist period, falling between the end of the High Renaissance and the beginning of the Baroque, yet his allegorical paintings really aren't Mannerist at all.

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Raphael's figurative language at this moment is characterized by an unsurpassed monumentality and yet tempered by a restraint and equilibrium that has, ever since, come to define terms such as "classical" and "High Renaissance."

"Raphael at the Metropolitan: The 'Colonna Altarpiece'" The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York