Extract
The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice.
For Jacob Burckhardt, the great tradition of modern European easel painting originated in the Italian Renaissance altarpiece. In its day, the altarpiece was "the most progressive genre in Italian painting," marked by the most advanced developments in the representation of figures, of space and light, and even of landscape.(1) Burckhardt made much of the fact that it was through the metamorphosis of the altarpiece that the rectangular picture, or quadro, became the primary format for panel painting, and then the paradigm for easel painting as such. The history of the altarpiece in the Renaissance was thus a decisive episode within the larger history of European art, and an especially useful laboratory in which to study the rise and eventual predominance of painting over sculpture in Western culture. Burckhardt's altarpiece essay originally appeared together with "The Collectors" and "The Portrait," all parts of a projected but never completed companion volume to The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Burckhardt had evidently intended to complement his famous account of the origins of modern individualism and statecraft with a similarly multifaceted account of the rise of a modern culture of aesthetics and art appreciation.
In the past two decades, the altarpiece has become the focus of a field-wide attention not unlike that enjoyed by "the great age of fresco" in the 1950s and 1960s. Peter Hum-frey's 1988 English translation and edition of Burckhardt's essay on the altarpiece was itself one of the fruits of th...See the full content of this document
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