Topic: European culture of the XVI-XVIII centuries.
1. Culture of the Renaissance.
2. Literature of the Enlightenment.
3. Art of the XVII-XVIII centuries.
1.
The new period in the cultural development of Western and Central Europe was called the Renaissance, or Renaissance.
Renaissance (in French, Renaissance) is a humanistic movement in the history of European culture during the period of the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of modern times. The Renaissance originated in Italy in the 14th century, spread to Western countries (Northern Renaissance) and reached its peak in the middle of the 16th century. Late 16th - early 17th century: decline - mannerism.
The phenomenon of the Renaissance was determined by the fact that the ancient heritage turned into a weapon for the overthrow of church canons and prohibitions. Some culturologists, defining its significance, compare it with the grandiose cultural revolution, which lasted two and a half centuries and ended with the creation of a new type of worldview and a new type of culture. A revolution took place in art, comparable to the discovery of Copernicus. At the center of the new worldview was man, and not God as the highest measure of all that exists. The new view of the world was called humanism.
Anthropocentrism is the main idea of the Renaissance worldview. The birth of a new worldview is associated with the writer Francesco Petrarch. Scholasticism, based on the formal terminological method, he opposes scientific knowledge; happiness in the "City of God" - earthly human happiness; spiritual love for God - sublime love for an earthly woman.
The ideas of humanism were expressed in the fact that in a person his personal qualities are important - mind, creative energy, enterprise, self-esteem, will and education, and not social status and origin.
In the Renaissance, the ideal of a harmonious, liberated, creative personality, beauty and harmony is affirmed, a person is turned to as the highest principle of being, a sense of the integrity and harmonious laws of the universe.
The Renaissance gave rise to geniuses and titans:
Italy - Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, politician Machiavelli, philosophers Alberti, Bruni, Val, Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, architects Brunelleschi and Bramante;
France - Rabelais and Montaigne;
England - More, Bacon, Sydney, Shakespeare;
Spain - Cervantes;
Poland - Copernicus;
Germany - Boehme, Müntzer, Kepler.
Renaissance masterpieces:
Leonardo da Vinci "La Gioconda", "The Last Supper";
Raphael "Sistine Madonna" and "Sleeping Venus", "Madonna Conestabile" and "Judith";
Titian "Danae" (Hermitage Museum).
The main feature of the art and culture of the Renaissance is the affirmation of the beauty and talent of a person, the triumph of thought and high feelings, creative activity. Baroque and classicism styles are developing in fine arts, academicism and caravagism are developing in painting. New genres appear - landscape, still life, paintings of everyday life, hunts and holidays.
Leonardo da Vinci Mona Lisa
Raphael Sistine Madonna
Renaissance architecture is based on the revival of classical, mainly Roman architecture. The main requirements are balance and clarity of proportions, the use of an order system, a sensitive attitude to the building material, its texture, and beauty.
The revival arose and most clearly manifested itself in Italy.
The period from the last decade of the 15th century to the middle of the 16th century (High Renaissance) becomes the "golden age" of Italian art. The solemn and majestic architecture of Bramante and Palladio remains in the memory of his descendants, he gives the world the immortal masterpieces of Raphael and Michelangelo. The entire 16th century continues, and only at the beginning of the 17th century does the flowering of the Renaissance culture born under the sky of Italy fade away.
The late Renaissance is characterized by the rapid development of such a synthetic art form as theater, the most prominent representatives of which were Lope de Vega, Calderon, Tirso de Molina (Spain), William Shakespeare (England).
Thus, the culture of the Renaissance reflects the synthesis of the features of antiquity and medieval Christianity, and humanism is the ideological basis of the secularization of culture.
The Renaissance replaced the religious ritual with a secular one, elevated a person to a heroic pedestal.
2.
People of the 17th-18th centuries called their time centuries of reason and enlightenment. Medieval ideas, consecrated by the authorities of the church and the all-powerful tradition, were criticized. In the 18th century, the desire for knowledge based on reason, and not on faith, took possession of an entire generation. The consciousness that everything is subject to discussion, that everything must be clarified by the means of reason, was a distinctive feature of the people of the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Enlightenment marked the end of the transition to modern culture. A new way of life and thinking was taking shape, which means that the artistic self-awareness of a new type of culture was also changing. Enlightenment saw in ignorance, prejudice and superstition the main cause of human disasters and social evils, and in education, philosophical and scientific activity, in freedom of thought - the path of cultural and social progress.
The ideas of social equality and personal freedom took possession, first of all, of the third estate, from whose midst most of the humanists emerged. The middle class consisted of the prosperous bourgeoisie and people of liberal professions, it possessed capital, professional and scientific knowledge, common ideas, and spiritual aspirations. The worldview of the third estate was most clearly expressed in the enlightenment movement - anti-feudal in content and revolutionary in spirit.
Radical changes also took place at the level of aesthetic consciousness. The main creative principles of the 17th century - classicism and baroque - acquired new qualities during the Enlightenment, because the art of the 17th century turned to the image of the real world. Artists, sculptors, writers recreated it in paintings and sculptures, stories and novels, in plays and performances. The realistic orientation of art prompted the creation of a new creative method.
Literature relied on public opinion, which was formed in circles and salons. The courtyard ceased to be the only center to which everyone aspired. The philosophical salons of Paris came into fashion, where Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Helvetius, Hume, Smith visited. From 1717 to 1724 more than one and a half million volumes of Voltaire and about a million volumes of Rousseau were printed. Voltaire was a truly great writer - he knew how to comprehend and explain simply and in a beautiful, elegant language the most serious topic that attracted the attention of his contemporaries. He had a tremendous influence on the minds of all enlightened Europe. His evil laughter, capable of destroying age-old traditions, was feared more than anyone's accusations. He strongly emphasized the value of culture. He portrayed the history of society as the history of the development of culture and human education. Voltaire preached the same ideas in his dramatic works and philosophical stories (“Candide, or Optimism”, “Innocent”, “Brutus”, “Tancred”, etc.).
The direction of enlightenment realism was successfully developed in England. The whole group of ideas and dreams of a better natural order received artistic expression in the famous novel by Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) Robinson Crusoe. He wrote more than 200 works of various genres: poems, novels, political essays, historical and ethnographic works. The book about Robinson is nothing but the story of an isolated individual, given to the educational and corrective work of nature, a return to the state of nature. Less well known is the second part of the novel, which tells of a spiritual rebirth on an island far from civilization.
German writers, remaining on the positions of enlightenment, were looking for non-revolutionary methods of combating evil. They considered aesthetic education to be the main force of progress, and art as the main means. German writers and poets moved from the ideals of public freedom to the ideals of moral and aesthetic freedom. Such a transition is characteristic of the work of the German poet, playwright and Enlightenment art theorist Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). In his early plays, which were a huge success, the author protested against despotism and class prejudice. "Against Tyrants" - the epigraph to his famous drama "Robbers" - directly speaks of its social orientation.
In addition to the styles of baroque and classicism generally accepted in Europe, new ones appeared in the 17th-18th centuries: rococo, sentimentalism, pre-romanticism. Unlike previous centuries, there is no single style of the era, the unity of the artistic language. The art of the 18th century became a kind of encyclopedia of various stylistic forms, which were widely used by artists, architects, and musicians of this era. In France, artistic culture was closely connected with the court environment. The Rococo style originated among the French aristocracy. The words of Louis XV (1715-1754) "After us - even a flood" can be considered a characteristic of the mood that prevailed in court circles. Strict etiquette was replaced by a frivolous atmosphere, a thirst for pleasure and fun. The aristocracy was in a hurry to have fun before the flood in the atmosphere of gallant festivities, the soul of which was Madame Pompadour. The court environment partly itself formed the Rococo style with its capricious, whimsical forms. Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), a court painter, can be considered the founder of Rococo in painting. The heroes of Watteau are actresses in wide silk dresses, dandies with languid movements, cupids frolicking in the air. Even the titles of his works speak for themselves: "The Capricious", "The Feast of Love", "Society in the Park", "The Predicament". 
Watteau "The Predicament".
As a painter, Watteau was much deeper and more complex than his numerous followers. He diligently studied nature, wrote a lot from nature. After the death of Watteau, Francois Boucher (1704-1770) took his place at court. A very skilled craftsman, he worked a lot in the field of decorative painting, made sketches for tapestries, for painting on porcelain. Typical plots are The Triumph of Venus, The Toilet of Venus, The Bathing of Diana. In the works of Boucher, the mannerisms and eroticism of the Rococo era were expressed with particular force, for which he was constantly accused by moralist educators.
In the era of the French Revolution, a new classicism triumphed in art. The classicism of the 18th century is not a development of the classicism of the previous century - it is a fundamentally new historical and artistic phenomenon. Common features: an appeal to antiquity as a norm and an artistic model, the assertion of the superiority of duty over feeling, an increased abstraction of style, pathos of reason, order and harmony. The exponent of classicism in painting was Jacques Louis David (years of life: 1748-1825). His painting "The Oath of the Horatii" became the battle banner of new aesthetic views. A plot from the history of Rome (the Horace brothers swear an oath of fidelity to duty and readiness to fight enemies) became an expression of republican views in revolutionary France.
J.S. Bach
The 18th century brought a lot of new things to musical creativity. In the 18th century, music rose to the level of other arts that had flourished since the Renaissance. Johann Sebastian Bach, Georg Friedrich Handel, Christoph Gluck, Franz Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stand at the pinnacle of musical art in the 18th century. The flourishing of music as an independent art form at that time is explained by the need for a poetic, emotional expression of the human spiritual world. In the work of Bach and Handel, the continuity of musical traditions was still preserved, but they began a new stage in the history of music. Johann Sebastian Bach (life: 1685-1750) is considered an unsurpassed master of polyphony. Working in all genres, he wrote about 200 cantatas, instrumental concertos, compositions for organ, clavier, etc. Bach was especially close to the democratic line of the German artistic tradition, associated with poetry and music of the Protestant chorale, with folk melody. Through the spiritual experience of his people, he felt the tragic beginning in human life and, at the same time, faith in ultimate harmony. Bach is a musical thinker who professes the same humanistic principle as the Enlighteners. 
Mozart
Everything new that was characteristic of progressive trends in music was embodied in the work of the Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (life: 1756-1791). Together with Franz Joseph Haydn, he represented the Vienna Classical School. Haydn's main genre was the symphony, Mozart's opera. He changed the traditional opera forms, introduced psychological individuality into the genre types of symphonies. He owns about 20 operas: (“The Marriage of Figaro”, “Don Giovanni”, “The Magic Flute”); 50 symphonic concertos, numerous sonatas, variations, masses, the famous "Requiem", choral compositions.
It arose during the period of the late Renaissance, and some researchers believe that it became a kind of reaction of the intelligentsia to a number of crisis phenomena during the Renaissance.
General characteristics of the era
Mannerism is a transitional stage from the early modern period. These were very difficult decades in the history of Western European countries. After all, it was then that the formation of new socio-political and economic systems took place. All this was connected with the conduct of wider wars, in which military-political alliances and even entire blocs of states participated. Within a number of countries there have been serious changes associated with the transition to the capitalist way of life.
In addition, the educated society of that time was especially shocked by the sack of Rome in 1527. All these changes could not but affect the worldview of educated circles. Mannerism is a kind of reaction to the crisis of humanistic ideals that glorified man and his existence. Therefore, many artists, sculptors and architects turned to new searches in their work.
Direction features
A new style originated in Italy, then spread to a number of European countries. First of all, his principles began to be shared by artists from France and the Netherlands. This direction is characterized by the following features: the desire to convey the harmony of the external and spiritual appearance, the elongation and elongation of the lines, the intensity of the poses. This was different from the harmonious perception of Renaissance artists, who sought to convey tranquility in their works, and also especially cared about the proportionality of forms in the composition.
In sculpture, the masters began to pay special attention to plasticity and elegance. In architecture, there was also a violation of the harmony of forms characteristic of the previous era.
In painting
The school of painting in Italy became the founder of a new direction. It developed in such cities as Florence, Mantua. Its most prominent representatives were Vasari, Giulio Romano and others. The paintings of artists of this direction are characterized by a complex composition, mythical congestion, a special, light color scheme. The topics were very diverse, but one of the main ones was the opposition of heavenly love and earthly love. Spiritualism was characteristic of many works of painters.
Its own school of painting has developed in France (in Fontainebleau). Many Dutch artists imitated Italian authors. Within the framework of this direction, interest arose in the revival of the knightly portrait and medieval themes.
Sculpture and buildings
Mannerism in architecture was also widely developed. Buildings in this style are characterized by a violation of the proportions and lines of the facades. The architects sought to arouse a feeling of concern in the viewer, which manifested the spirit of the era, namely the crisis of Renaissance values and the loss of a sense of harmony and peace. One example of buildings in this style is the Laurentian Library in Florence (author - Michelangelo). In the same style, the square in Mantua was decorated, as well as the loggia in the gallery building in the Uffizi.
Mannerism is a transitional stage between the Renaissance and the Baroque. In sculpture, the same phenomena were observed as in architecture and painting. The most prominent representative is B. Cellini. His works are distinguished by underlined elegance and sophistication, even by some pretentiousness of shapes and colors.
Place in culture
Mannerism is an important stage in the history of art. Many researchers see in it the beginnings of Rococo and early Baroque. Of course, many elements of this trend affected subsequent trends. Baroque, for example, adopted from this direction the pretentiousness of forms, the complexity of the composition, Rococo - elegance and graceful manner of images. In general, mannerism in the visual arts, despite all the above features of performance technique, is a rather broad and loose concept.
For example, in the works of Renaissance artists, the features of this style are already traced. Raphael was one of the first to somewhat move away from the usual form of classicism and began to give elongation to his figures. In the canvases of Leonardo da Vinci, there are some features that portend mannerism: the emphasized sophistication of some images and a special refinement, spirituality.
Influence
It is significant that the Renaissance and Mannerism diverged in defining the principles of artistic creativity. After all, a new direction appeared just when the classical forms of the Renaissance were still considered a role model. But even more interesting is the fact that Mannerism proved to be very popular in the 20th century. There is even the concept of "neo-mannerism", by which it is customary to understand the imitation of some contemporary artists in this direction. There is a point of view that this direction influenced the domestic art of the Silver Age period. The reasons for this influence should be sought in the fact that Mannerism was a transitional step between the Renaissance and the Baroque. It is inherently eclectic, so it is somewhat universal. In our time, mannerism is interesting for its unusual and pretentious forms, originality of approaches, as well as an active search for color solutions.
Answer left Guest
17th century - a significant stage in the history of Western European culture, a time for further growth and strengthening of the national states of Europe, a time of fundamental economic shifts and social clashes, a time of exacerbation of the contradictions of dying feudalism and the emerging capitalist system, the acquisition of national self-consciousness of the masses. The political and economic development of European countries is unequal. In Holland and England - the victory of the bourgeois revolutions; in France and Spain - the victory of absolutism, in Italy and Germany - petty-power despotism. The nobility and the bourgeoisie fought for political dominance, and in this struggle the popular masses were the driving force.
The science
Economic needs, the expansion of the manufacturing industry, trade contributed to the rapid rise of the exact and natural sciences. In the 17th century completed the transition from a poetic-holistic perception of the world to proper scientific methods of cognition of reality. The motto of the era can be called the words of Giordano Bruno, said on its threshold: “The only authority should be reason and free research. This was the time of the great discoveries of Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Leibniz, Huygens in mathematics, astronomy and various fields of physics, remarkable achievements of scientific thought, laid the foundations for the subsequent development of these branches of knowledge.
Philosophy
The development of the exact and natural sciences directly served as an impetus for a powerful leap in philosophical thought. Philosophy developed in close connection with the sciences. The views of Bacon, Hobbes, Locke in England, Descartes in France, Spinoza in Holland were of great importance in the establishment of materialism and the formation of advanced social ideas, in the struggle against idealistic currents and church reaction.
Literature
Fiction of the 17th century is distinguished by a wide coverage of reality and a variety of genre forms: high tragedy and romance, everyday comedy and short story, epic drama and lyrical plot, ode and satire - enduring artistic values were created in each of these genres. The beginning of the century is associated with the names of Shakespeare and Cervantes. The luminaries of the next generation of literature are Milton in England, Calderoy in Spain, and the great French playwrights Corneille, Racine and Molière.
Music
17th century - This is a period of gradual liberation of music from cult forms and a wide penetration of secular elements into it. This is the time of the birth and formation of new musical genres: opera, oratorio, instrumental music, and the development of artistic means corresponding to them.
Art.
In accordance with the formation of nation-states in Western Europe, national art schools are taking shape. In England, the Puritan movement did not favor the development of the fine arts. In Germany, after the defeat of the peasant revolutions, artistic life stagnated for almost two centuries. Italy, despite the fragmentation, thanks to the strong artistic traditions of the Renaissance, continues to be the leading, or rather one of the leading European states in the field of artistic culture. The highest achievements of Western European art of the 17th century. associated with the art of Italy, Flanders, Holland, Spain and France. One can speak about the national characteristics of the art of each of the countries, and at the same time about mutual commonality, which makes it possible to consider the 17th century as a certain integral stage in the history of Western European art.
