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| Fra Carnevale Ideal City ca. 1480 oil and tempera on panel Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Girolamo da Cremona Triumphs of Petrarch ca. 1500 oil on panel Denver Art Museum |
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| circle of Francesco Granacci Scenes from the Life of St John the Baptist ca. 1505 oil on panel Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool |
"Renaissance. The quattrocento and beginning of the cinquecento. Now that the gates were opened, the flood could no longer be contained. Observation of nature expanded, errors were discerned, and the danger of the polytheistic kernel lingering deep within Christian doctrine manifested itself among those people who had passed through classical polytheism. Inclined to grant excessive autonomy to natural phenomena, people began to ignore the God behind them. Although they veered toward a natural-scientific manner of observation, they did not attain the conception of a higher, overarching principle, because they understood individual natural phenomena as overly autonomous; at the same time, they began to lose faith in the Christian notion of God. Moreover, the dogmatic presentation of the Christian worldview had made many claims that close observation of nature proved untrue. Hence widespread atheism. What was art to do? It grasped the material world as autonomous; it perfected it and made it beautiful. Hence the rise of the cult of beauty, which predominated even in the papal court."
– from Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, a course of lectures delivered by Aloïs Riegl in 1899 at the University of Vienna, translated by Jaqueline E. Jung and published in English by Zone Books in 2004
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| Giorgione Adoration of the Kings 1506-07 oil on panel National Gallery, London |
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| Giorgione Sleeping Venus ca. 1508-10 oil on canvas Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden |
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| Lorenzo Costa Venus ca. 1515-18 oil on panel Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest |
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| Giorgione Young Woman (Laura) 1506 oil on panel Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna |
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| Jan van Eyck Portrait of a man holding a ring ca. 1430 oil on panel Brukenthal National Museum, Romania |
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| Antonio del Pollaiuolo Portrait of a woman ca. 1465 oil on panel Gemäldegalerie, Berlin |
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| Raffaellino del Garbo Bust-portrait of a young woman ca. 1483-92 tempera on panel Museum of Fine Arts, Houston |
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| Jean Fouquet Portrait of Etienne Chevalier with St Stephen (left-hand side of Melun Diptych) ca. 1452-58 oil on panel Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp |
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| Lorenzo Lotto Allegory of Virtue and Vice 1505 oil on panel National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC |
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| Giorgione Moses undergoing trial by fire 1505 oil on panel Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence |
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| Cosmè Tura The Muse Terpsichore ca. 1450-60 oil on panel Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan |