Realism

    Realism (with an upper case "R"), also known as the Realist school, denotes a mid-nineteenth century art movement and style in which artists discarded the formulas of Neoclassicism and the theatrical drama of Romanticism to paint familiar scenes and events as they actually looked. Typically it involved some sort of sociopolitical or moral message, in the depiction of ugly or commonplace subjects.

refectory (Med. Lat. refectorium)

    Monastic dining hall.

Reformed churches

    Churches that rejected the authority of the Pope from the 16th century. In 16th century Europe, the two main denominations were the Lutherans and the Calvinists, with the Anglican Church developing in England.

relic (Lat. relicquiae, "remains")

    a part of the body of a saint, or some item connected with a saint, the object of particular veneration.

relief (Lat. relevare, "to raise")

    A sculptural work in which all or part projects from the flat surface. There are three basic forms: low relief (bas-relief, basso rilievo), in which figures project less than half their depth from the background; medium relief (mezzo-rilievo), in which figures are seen half round; and high relief (alto rilievo), in which figures are almost detached from their background.

religious orders and congregations

    An order is a body of men or women bound by solemn vows and following a rule of life, e.g. the great orders of monks, hermits, canons regular, friars and nuns, or the Jesuits. A congregation may be either a subsection of an order, or a body of persons bound by simple vows and generally having a looser structure than an order. Among the old orders there was both fusion and fission. Among the contemplative orders, originally autonomous houses tended to group themselves into congregations, presided over by chapters general. A major stimulus to such reform movements was concern for mutual defence against the abuse of commendams, i.e. the grant of abbacies 'in trust' to non-resident outsiders to the order. At the same time, there was dissidence and fractionalization in almost all of the old orders and congregations, the great issue of contention being the strict observance.

    The Benedictines, who had no overall organization originally, were mostly grouped into congregations by the 16th century. The Silvestrines, Celestines and Olivetines were old congregations. That of S. Giustina, Padua, which was to become the main Italian one, developed from 1419 under the leadership of the Venetian Lodovico Barbo. He was particularly concerned to develop sacred studies and eventually there were certain designated houses of study for the entire congregation, the most notable being S. Benedetto, Mantua. In 1504, having absorbed St Benedict's original monastery, it became the Cassinese congregation. The Camaldolese were an offshoot of the Benedictines. Founded by St Romuald c. 1012, they followed a distinctive eremetical rule of life, rather on the model of Eastern monasticism, with hermitages linked to matrix monasteries. In the second decade of the 16th century Paolo Giustiniani led a movement for a revival of the strict eremetical ideal; hence the formation of the Monte Corona congregation.

    Canons Regular of St Augustine follow a rule and are basically monks; they are to be distinguished from secular canons who serve cathedral and collegiate churches. Two major congregations arose from reform movements in the 15th century: that of S. Salvatore, Bologna (1419), and the Lateran one (1446) which grew from S. Maria di Fregonaia, Lucca. A body genuinely monastic and contemplative in spirit, although technically of secular canons, was the congregation of S. Giorgio in Alga, Venice (1404), whose foundation is especially associated with Gabriel Condulmer (later Eugenius IV) and S. Lorenzo Giustiniani, the great patriarch of Venice. The Hermits of St Augustine and the Carmelites were originally contemplative eremetical orders which turned to the active life of friars. The Hermits of St Jerome (Hieronymites or Gerolimini) appeared from the 15th century and included the Fiesole and Lombard congregations and that of Pietro Gambacorta of Pisa.

    The Friars Minor (Franciscans) had been split after their founder's death by disputes between the Spirituals, with their ideology of an absolute apostolic poverty, and their more institutionalized brethren, the Conventuals. After the repression of the Spirituals, the great dispute in the order was primarily a legalistic one: the division was between the Conventuals, whose friaries were corporate property-owners; and the generally moderate Observants; whose friaries were technically non-property owning, their resources being in the hands of trustees. 'The Observance' did not necessarily designate a very straitened rule of life but in the 15th century a strict movement of the Observance developed whose leading figures were S. Bernardino of Siena, S. Giovanni da Capestrano and Giacomo della Marca. In 1517, the bull 'Ite vos' of Leo X instituted the Great Division between Friars Minor (Conventual) and Friars Minor of the Observance; various groups were fused in the latter body, which was given precedence over the Conventuals. The Conventuals, however, continued to hold the order's great basilicas. The same bull provided for special friaries within the Observance for those dedicated to a very strict interpretation of the Rule. Failure to implement this clause caused a splinter movement of zealot groups which finally coalesced into the Capuchins and the Reformed (canonically recognized in 1528 and 1532 respectively). The Order of Preachers (Dominicans) underwent similar if less serious crises over the issue of poverty and a body of the strict observance was established in the late 14th century; however, the Dominicans were substantially reunited under the generalate of the great Tommaso di Vio da Gaeta (1508-18). Other orders of Friars were the Minims, founded by S. Francesco da Paola in 1454 on the primitive Franciscan model, and the Servites following the Augustinian rule.

    The 16th century produced the Jesuits (founded in 1541) and several rather small congregations of clerks regular, who had many of the marks of secular clergy but who lived a common life. Generally they were devoted to pastoral and welfare work. The first, the Theatines, founded by Giampietro Caraffa (later Paul IV) and the Vicentine aristocrat S. Gaetano da Thiene, emerged from the Roman Oratory of Divine Love in 1524. The Somaschi were founded at Somasca near Bergamo in 1532 by S. Gerolamo Aemiliani, a Venetian noble castellan turned evangelist; this congregation specialized in the upbringing of orphan boys. The Barnabites were founded at Milan by S. Antonio Maria Zaccaria in 1533, while the Congregation of the Oratory was founded in Rome in the 1560s by S. Filippo Neri. One of the few significant innovations among the female orders were the Ursulines, an offshoot of the Brescian Confraternity of Divine Love, founded in 1535 by S. Angela Merici. S. Angela's intention was that they should be a congregation of unenclosed women dedicated to the active life in charitable and educational work; however, the ecclesiastical authorities forced the Ursulines into the mould of an enclosed contemplative order. While the friars basically remained attached to scholastic philosophy and theology, certain sections of contemplative orders were distinguished for humanist studies and related forms of religious scholarship; most notably the Cassinese Benedictine congregation, the Lateran Canons (especially of the Badia Fiesolana) and the Camaldolese, who included Ambrogio Traversari in Florence and a group of scholars at S. Michele in Isola, Venice.

Religious Peace of Nuremberg

    A temporary settlement of Germany's religious conflicts agreed in 1532 between Emperor Charles V and those German princes who supported the Reformed Churches. Though it merely postponed the final settlement of the issue until the next diet, the settlement was in effect a formal recognition of Lutheranism.

Renaissance

    A French label given to an Italian cultural movement and to its repercussions elsewhere; also, on the assumption that chronological slices of human mass experience can usefully be described in terms of a dominant intellectual and creative manner, a historical period. For Italy the period is popularly accepted as running from the second generation of the 14th century to the second or third generation of the 16th century. Though there is something inherently ridiculous about describing a period of 250 years as one of rebirth, there is some justification for seeing a unity within it, if only in terms of the chronological self-awareness of contemporaries.

    For Petrarch the challenge to understand and celebrate the achievements of ancient Rome led him to scorn the intervening centuries which had neglected them; he saw them as an age of intellectual sleep, of 'darkness', and his own as potentially one of light, of an energetic revival of interest in, and competition with, too long forgotten glories. Thanks to his fame not only as a scholar but also as a poet and a voluminous correspondent, this sense of living in an age of new possibilities was rapidly shared by others who worked within the intellectual framework which came to be known as Humanism. Perhaps the sense of living in a new mental atmosphere can be compared to the exhilaration that followed the realization that Marxist analysis could be used to look afresh at the significance of intellectual and creative, as well as political, life. The humanistic enthusiasm lasted so long, however, because its core of energy, the historical reality of antiquity, was so vast and potent, because it was uncontroversial (save when an assassin borrowed the aura of Brutus, or a paganizing faddist mocked Christianity), and because the scholarly excitement about the need to imitate the achievements of the Roman (and, increasingly, Greek) past was sustained by evidence from contemporary art and literature that it could be done. Even when the Wars of Italy had inflicted grievous humiliations on Italian pride, Vasari could still see a process of restored vigour in the arts, which had begun early in the 14th century, as only coming near its close with the death of Michelangelo in 1564.

    Vasari's Lives became a textbook of European repute. It was his contention that he was describing what followed from the rinascita or rebirth of the arts that launched the word on its increasingly inclusive career. For long, however, it was a 'renaissance' of this or that, of arts, of scholarship, of letters. Not until the publication in 1855 of the volume in Jules Michelet's Histoire de France entitled 'La Renaissance' was the label attached to a period and all that happened in it; not until the appearance of Jacob Burckhardt's still seminal Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy in 1860 was it ineluctably identified in particular with Italy and more generally with a phase of human development thought to be markedly different in kind from what went before and what came after.

    Thereafter, 'Renaissance' became a mercurial term: not just a label for a period or a movement but a concept, a concept redolent (in spite of Burckhardt's precautions) of Individualism, All-Roundness, even Amoralism; man had escaped from the medieval thought-dungeon, and the world (and its expanding physical and mental horizons) was his oyster; culture was linked to personality and behaviour; the Renaissance became both the scene and the work of Renaissance Man. To a northern European world (whence the alertest scholars and popularizers came), morally confined by Protestantism and social decorum, 'Renaissance' became a symbol of ways of conduct and thought that were either to be castigated (John Ruskin, whose The stones of Venice of 1851-53 had anticipated the art-morality connection) or envied (John Addington Symonds's avidly nostalgic Renaissance in Italy, 1875-86).

    A term that had become so liable to subjective interpretation was bound to attract criticism. During this century it has been challenged chiefly on the following points. (1) There is no such thing as a self-sufficient historical period. Much that was characteristic of the Middle Ages flowed into and through the Renaissance. Much that was characteristic of the Renaissance flowed on until the age of experimental science, of industrialization, mobilized nationalism, and mass media. (2) Renaissance art and literature did not develop so consistently that they can be seen in one broad Vasarian sweep. There was an early, a 'high' and a late stage (all variously dated) in terms of artistic and literary aims and style. (3) There is not a true, let alone a uniform, congruence between, 'culture' and 'history' during the period; 'Renaissance' culture came late to Venice, later still to Genoa, both thriving centres of political and commercial activity. (4) To define a period in terms of a cultural élite is to divert attention unacceptably from the fortunes of the population as a whole.

    Though thus challenged, mocked (the 'so-called Renaissance'), aped (the 'Carolingian' or 'Ottonian' renaissance, etc.) and genially debased ('the renaissance of the mini-skirt'), the term retains most of its glamour and much of its usefulness. It is surely not by chance that 'rebirth' rather than the 18th century and early 19th century 'revival' (of arts, letters, etc.) was the term chosen, because it applies to a society the resonance of a personal, spiritual and perhaps psychological aspiration: the new start, the previous record - with all its shabbiness - erased. It is for this additional, subjective reason a term to be used with caution. The challenges are to be accepted, however, gratefully, as having led to an enormous extension of knowledge and sensitivity.

repoussoir (French: "to push back")

    Repoussoir is means of achieving perspective or spatial contrasts by the use of illusionistic devices such as the placement of a large figure or object in the immediate foreground of a painting to increase the illusion of depth in the rest of the picture. Caravaggio had become famous for his paintings of ordinary people or even religious subjects in repoussoir compositions. Repoussoir figures appear frequently in Dutch figure painting where they function as a major force in establishing the spatial depth that is characteristic of painting of the seventeenth-century. Landscapists too learned to exploit the dramatic effect of repoussoir to enliven their renderings of the flat uneventful Dutch countryside.

retable

    Ornamental panel behind an altar and, in the more limited sense, the shelf behind an altar on which are placed the crucifix, candlesticks, and other liturgical objects. The panel is usually made of wood or stone, though sometimes of metal, and is decorated with paintings, statues, or mosaics depicting the Crucifixion or a similar subject. Although frequently forming part of the architectural structure of the church, especially in the High Gothic period, retables can be detached and, sometimes, as in the case of the famous retable by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, "The Adoration of the Lamb" (1432, Cathedral of Saint-Bavon, Ghent), consist merely of a painting. Probably the most well-known retable is that in the Basilica of St Mark in Venice, which is one of the most remarkable examples in existence of the craft of the jeweler and goldsmith. Originally commissioned in 976, the St. Mark's retable was enlarged and enriched in the 13th century. With the development of freestanding altars, retables have become extinct.

rilievo (It. "relief")

    In painting, the impression that an object is three-dimensional, that it stands out from its background fully rounded.

Rococo

    A style of design, painting, and architecture dominating the 18th century, often considered the last stage of the Baroque. Developing in the Paris townhouses of the French aristocracy at the turn of the 18th century, Rococo was elegant and ornately decorative, its mood lighthearted and witry. Louis XV furniture, richly decorated with organic forms, is a typical product. Leading exponents of the Rococo sryle included the French painter Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) and Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806), and the German architect Johann Balthasar Neumann (1687-1753). Rococo gave way to Neo-classicism.

Romanesque

    Style of art and architecture prevailing throughout most of Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries, the first style to achieve such international currency. The dominant art of the Middle Ages was architecture, and 'Romanesque', like 'Gothic', is primarily an architectural term that has been extended to the other arts of the period. As the name suggests, it indicates a derivation from Roman art, and sometimes Romanesque is used to cover all the developments from Roman architecture in the period from the collapse of the Roman Empire until the flowering of the Gothic roughly AD 500-1200. More usually, however, it is applied to a distinctive style that emerged, almost simultaneously, in several countries - France, Germany, Italy, Spain - in the 11th century. It is characterized most obviously by a new massiveness of scale, reflecting the greater political and economic stability that followed a period when Christian civilization seemed in danger of extinction. Romanesque painting and sculpture are generally strongly stylized, with little of the naturalism and humanistic warmth of classical or later Gothic art. The forms of nature are freely translated into linear and sculptural designs which are sometimes majestically calm and severe and at others are agitated by a visionary excitement that can become almost delirious. Because of its expressionistic distortion of natural form, Romanesque art, as with other great non-naturalistic styles of the past, has had to wait for the revolution in sensibility brought about by the development of modern art in order to be widely appreciated.

Romanist

    Name used to describe Northern artists of the early 16th century whose style was influenced by Italian Renaissance painting, usually as a result of a visit to Italy. Mabuse, B. van Orley, M. van Heemskerk, Q. Massys and M. van Reymerswaele are important Romanists.

romanticism

    A term loosely applied to literary and artistic movements of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Resulting in part from the libertarian and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, the romantic movements had in common only a revolt against the prescribed rules of classicism. The basic aims of romanticism were various: a return to nature and to belief in the goodness of humanity; the rediscovery of the artist as a supremely individual creator; the development of nationalistic pride; and the exaltation of the senses and emotions over reason and intellect. In addition, romanticism was a philosophical revolt against rationalism.

Rome, school of

    School of Italian painting of importance from the mid-15th to the late 19th centuries. Both Michelangelo and Raphael worked in Rome, making it the centre of the High Renaissance; in the 17th century it was the centre of the Baroque movement represented by Bernini and Pietro da Cortona. From the 17th century the presence of classical remains drew artists from all over Europe including Poussin, Claude, Piranesi, Pannini and Mengs.

rosette

    A small architectural ornament consisting of a disc on which there is a carved or molded a circular, stylized design representing an open rose.

Rubenist (French Rubéniste)

    Any of the artists and critics who championed the sovereignty of colour over design and drawing in the "quarrel" of colour versus drawing that broke out in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris in 1671 (see also Poussinist). The dispute raged for many years before the Rubenists emerged victorious. The aim of painting, they maintained, is to deceive the eye by creating an imitation of life or of nature and by manipulating colour. The colourists pointed to the art of Peter Paul Rubens (whence their name) as one in which nature and not the imitation of Classical art predominated.

ruddle

    Any red-earth pigment, such as red ochre.