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An Analysis Of Miguel De Cervantes Of The Northern Renaissance

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In the late-16th century, the era of Renaissance greats such as Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Raphael, and countless others gave way to the emergence of the Baroque period. In this era, lasting until the mid-18th century, those who lived hearing of the perfection and constant happiness that resulted from the excellent discoveries and works of art of the Renaissance came to a sudden realization of reality. These men and women who lived through the Renaissance as children demanded something new as they grew disillusioned with these promises of greatness. Eventually, this confession of the desire for change instigated the demise of the Renaissance era, similar to John Ruskin’s explanation of how humans cannot live in a world without variety and change …show more content…

In their respective sectors of the Renaissance, these two greats similarly used humanism, their hostile views of the aristocracy, and overall disillusioned attitudes of the Renaissance to instigate a whole new era in art, however doing so through the use of rather opposing techniques.

Miguel de Cervantes was born in 1547 in Spain, where he lived nearly his whole life. In the late 1590s, Cervantes wrote what is considered by most to be the first modern novel in history and one that entirely changed the tone of the Northern Renaissance, Don Quixote. In Don Quixote, Cervantes describes the fictional world of Don Quixote as he goes on an adventurous journey as a knight, saving princesses, fighting giants, and enduring through countless situations in which the odds stacked against him. This stereotypical journey of a knight, however, is only a fictional world in the imagination of Don Quixote, as he pictures …show more content…

A man who was often on the run from the law for getting in fights and even murder, Caravaggio did not care for the Catholic Church and even developed a slight resentfulness towards the organization as multiple artists whose paintings were funded by the Church often did. This being said, the Church was Caravaggio’s main source of income and even bailed him out of jail on one occasion, so he reluctantly agreed to paint biblical scenes. However, Caravaggio did little things like using prostitutes to model for his paintings, publically claiming reality as his teacher rather than the Catholic faith and Bible, and finally by painting the underbelly of the Bible all to express his negative opinions of the Catholic Church and the aristocracy (Erlandson). In his portrayal of dark Biblical scenes, Caravaggio also revolutionized Renaissance art by making his paintings physically dark as well as extremely realistic, as he “portrayed sacred religious personages as real, common people, complete with bare feet and dirt under their fingernails” (Artble). Caravaggio used shadows to darken individual parts of his paintings, or tenebrism, and the major contrast between dark and light commonly in the background of his paintings, or chiaroscuro to achieve this physical darkness. The use of tenebrism is evident in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus, in which each of the persons in the painting have

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