Practice question · Multiple choice
Medieval contracts name a workshop; by 1550 Vasari is writing biographies of individual artists. What changed about the artist's status?
Hints
- Ask what separated a liberal art from a mechanical one in this period.
- Why would mastering geometry matter to a painter's social claim?
Show the answer
C. The artist moved from craftsman to intellectual
Why
The liberal arts were intellectual and the mechanical arts manual, so demonstrating that painting required mathematics was an argument about the painter's rank. Alberti and Leonardo make it explicitly, and Vasari's Lives is that claim institutionalised as a genre.
Practise The Italian Renaissance
The app has 4 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on The Italian Renaissance
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