The Controversy of Renaissance Art

Starting in the 1490's, Italy passed through a phase of religious conflict, one that anticipated and ran parallel to the Reformations of northern Europe. A season of controversy put religious images newly under scrutiny, provoking radical investigations into their modes and traditions. Could they reliably convey sacred truth and power, and if so, how? Was the artist a transmitter or an interpreter, or both? Did Christian art have its own logic and legitimacy, or was it part of a long series of formal adaptations that began in deep antiquity? The most vocal religious critics in Italy were also, very often, the most refined patrons of art. Skepticism about images was redirected back into the art, again and again turning controversy into an aesthetic occasion. Working at the limits of the available media, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Bartolommeo, Giorgione, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giulio Romano, Andrea Riccio, Rosso Fiorentino, Titian, Michele Sanmicheli, and Jacopo Sansovino successively dismantled and reconstituted the categories of art-making. Hardly capable of sustaining a program of reform, the experimental art of this period was succeeded by a new era of cultural codification in the second half of the sixteenth century.

The Controversy of Renaissance Art is a major reappraisal of a critical period of art-making from one of our most acclaimed historians of art.

Alexander Nagel is professor of Renaissance art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University He is the author of Michelangelo and the Reform of Art and coauthor, with Christopher Wood, of Anachronic Renaissance.