-The Renaissance Project-
THEA MELODIAS
Michelangelo
Raphael
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form, ease of composition, and visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Many influences went into the formation of his beautiful style of painting. Everything that Raphael painted -especially hi madonnas- has an air of serenity and dignity. Raphael envisioned man as the ruler of his environment, not as its servant, a high Renaissance idea beautifully expressed in this painting.
One of the greatest 16th century artists was Michelangelo bounarroti (1475-1564). in sculpture, architecture, and painting he was so outstanding that he was called divine. He was born in Caprese, and as a young man moved to florence, where he studied the works of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello and the Greeks and Romans. He beacame fascinated with the problems of representing the human body,and he devoted himself completly to mastering them.
(1492-1549), born at Angouleme, France, was one of the most influential women of the French Renaissance. Marguerite was the sister of the French kinf Francis I and the wife of Henry the II of Navarre. She was a patron of the arts and supported some of the leading humanist scholars and religious reformers of her day. She was also as author. Among her best known works is the Heptameron, modeled on Boccaccio's Decameron.
(1469-1527), born in Florence,Italy, is the best known for his book II principe ( The Prince ). Machiavelli was a statesman and diplomat who rose to high positions in Florence in the early 1500's, a time when the Medici family was briefly out of power. In 1512, The Medici family has regained their power,Machiavelli was removed from office. He turned to writing. The prince presents his view of how a ruler should acquire and hold power. he was the first to express the idea that power, not ethics, is the most important factor in politics.
Marguerite of Navarre
Niccolo Machiavelli
HUMANISTS
The scholars who created the new interest in Greek and Roman antiquity were known as humanist. The word "humanism" comes from the latin humanitas, meaning "culture". But it has also come to express the concern with human life that characterized the ancient Greeks and Romans.