During the Renaissance, the Pope did not like Raphael very much, but did not give Leonardo da Vinci any orders, leonardo da Vinci in Italy, how did he mix so badly? The reason is that the church's demand for painting is stylized, cookie-cutter conceptual beauty, rather than painting like a real person and expressing the beauty of individuality.
The Ten Commandments explicitly stipulate that idolatry cannot be worshipped, and in the Middle Ages, except for the priests, everyone was illiterate, so the church needed to use images to render the atmosphere. Pope Gregory I said: "Painting is to the illiterate as books are to literate people." "The Church of Rome stipulates that painting can exist, but it must be a special kind of painting, called an icon, and the icon must present a strict, special stylized style, one must have a strict routine, and the other must use the face to symbolize the character, and create a sufficient distance from the real person.
However, after the practice, the implementation standards are different in different places.
In general, from east to west, the degree of stylization is showing a trend of decreasing. For example, in the east, the Byzantine icons, the Virgin Mary is a long-nosed and small-mouthed child, completely unlike a real person. The further west we went, to France, the weaker the stylization, the more our Lady became like a real person.
Our Lady of Vladimir
Our Lady of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul
The Virgin (Byzantine style) duccio
The Byzantine Virgin mary was fixed as an unreal long face, a long nose, a small mouth... The characters are the same, have no personality, and their identities are only marked by clothing and location.
"The Virgin and Child" Fouquet
The French painter Fouquet's "Virgin and Child" (part of the picture [covering face]) is modeled by Anne Sorrel, the mistress of King Charles VII of France. The Virgin wears a corset of Sorell's own invention, showing her figure by feeding Jesus, and the effect is self-evident. The temptation, as Baudrillard said, "comes from a lack of vision," so the Italians are very disgusted by the French approach.
The art historian Vasari derogated the French art style to the Gothic style. Don't look at France now, in the Renaissance, in the eyes of the Italians, the French have to be disposed of.
For the Church, the stylization of icons is not only a political issue, but also a matter of artistic niche. Only vulgar Frenchmen would think that the more they painted, the better.
The Church's view of painting coincides with the ancient Greek philosopher Plato's idea of "archetypes."
Plato's thought is a three-tier structure: the top is the idea, from God; the middle layer is the embodiment of the idea, called the "archetype"; the bottom is the material world that imitates the imperfect prototype.
The academic school of Western art, that is, Platonism: "sacrificing objective truth, pursuing archetypes, and expressing conceptual beauty", has always been the orthodoxy of Western painting until the 19th century.
The pursuit of conceptual beauty and the pursuit of stylization result in the same result, that is, a thousand faces.
This pursuit of conceptual beauty leads to a thousand people's side, which is most evident in Raphael.
San Sebastian
San Sebastian is raphael's most standard human body, or prototype, and you can see this face in many of Raphael's works.
Leonardo da Vinci, on the other hand, resented the idea, saying in his notes: "My research is based on practical experience, not on what others say."
Leonardo da Vinci invented many painting methods and techniques for the pursuit of reality, but his excessive pursuit of reality is something that cannot be put on the table of the church, and he feels that Leonardo da Vinci is too vulgar and too French. But the French didn't like Leonardo da Vinci from the beginning, da Vinci couldn't eat in Italy, and the French kings liked him very much.
The key is to understand that during the Italian Renaissance, the stylized requirements of the church for "iconographic" painting according to the Bible led to the promotion of Neoplatonic ideals and the implicit convergence from content to form between the two.
Was there any anti-religious element in this Renaissance movement? Are there any signs of humanism? Not really! This is the key to our understanding of the Renaissance movement.
The nature of the Renaissance movement, which is not anti-religious, on the contrary, is the product of religion, the last return to the light of the Catholic Universal Church.
Freud had a very brilliant assessment of Leonardo da Vinci, saying that he "woke up prematurely late at night when everyone was asleep."