which school
- michelangelo
- davinci
0 voters
i found this on web:
One question which occupied artists of the Renaissance was the old Paragone, the question of the relative merits of painting versus sculpture. Previously, in the Gothic period, sculpture and painting were taken to be the same thing; they were a vehicle for the divine. With the Renaissance and the advent of scientific inquiry, humanism and Neo-Platonism, man’s place in the cosmos became a central issue. Leonardo considered painting to be superior to sculpture because painting was a science based on intellect, and was therefore a true art, whereas sculpture was merely mechanical reproduction based on physical labor. The more physical effort involved in the creation of an art, the more mechanical it is; and the more mechanical, the less spiritual and noble. Leonardo is said to have derisively pointed to Michelangelo’s work clothes, covered with stone dust, and likened him to a baker covered with flour. Leonardo also stated that the “sculptor always takes off from the same block.” Painting, for Leonardo, was the noblest and most spiritual of all the arts.
The problem of physical exertion and manual labor took on a new aspect during the time of Leonardo. In 1528 Baldassare Castiglione introduced what he called sprezzatura: gentlemanly deportment and the life of leisure as an ideal virtue. Vasari himself was such a well-bred man, and Vasari presents Raphael as the paragon of this ideal type, as one who embodies “all those rare virtues of mind, accompanied by much grace, study, beauty, modesty, and fine manners as would have sufficed to cover up any flaw, no matter how ugly, or any blemish, no matter how large.”(p.303) One may see how the craft of stone cutting would be considered a somewhat lowly occupation, hardly an art in the highest sense of the Renaissance ideal.
Yet Michelangelo insisted upon sculpture as the most noble enterprise. In 1547 Benedetto Varchi tried to settle the Paragone by soliciting the thoughts of the Florentine artistic elite, among them Michelangelo. Michelangelo wrote to him, "By sculpture I mean that which is done by subtracting. That which is done by adding (namely, modeling) resembles painting.“(Stone, II, p.216) For Michelangelo, the single block of stone contained all the possibilities for a work of art. He frowned upon the modeler’s approach, and regarded the most skilful and truest art to be sculpted or revealed from the marble block. Painting was subordinate to sculpture in that it presented only one view. One of Michelangelo’s most famous sonnets, from the years 1538-44, begins with the lines:
Not even the best of artists has any conception that a single block of marble does not contain within its excess, and that is only attained by the hand that obeys the intellect.”(Saslow, p.302)
http://www.machinegraphics.com/writings/non-finito/non-finito.html
it has been an arguenment in renaissance as it is now, perhaps the seed was planted then but now it has become a tech/vis issue as well as the process which contains both.
so here’s my question:
which school you find more true to cause when you develop a concept. remember there should be no blurring or mixing the two as davinci and michelangelo had completely opposite views and did not agree with any middle solution.
also explain your view and include examples and reasons based on solid logic.
no rants and flames please!