The following catalogue presents the museum exhibition 'From Light to Enlightenment' held at the Shanghai Art Museum in China.
Italian art was the great inheritor of Greco-Roman culture. The vestiges of architecture and classical art lay strewn on its soil, and Rome, the capital of the Empire, became the seat of Christianity. With the fall of the Roman Empire, Italy retained its spiritual and temporal authority, with an influence that spread throughout Europe. During the fifteenth century, Humanism and the Renaissance provided a great stimulus for artistic evolution, and Greece became the desired model, even when this was through Roman copies. Sculpture offered beautiful examples of how to represent the human body over a period that lasted several centuries, and the fullest expression of human proportions and movement lay in Greek art. Architects learned the rules that governed ancient structures, imitating the sense of three-dimensional space. Founded on this legacy, the civilization of the Renaissance gave mankind, its history and its achievements a pre-eminence that was to last until the nineteenth century, and these principles were also important for the theories formulated in the treatises of Leon Battista Alberti. This exhibition presents a group of Italian paintings ranging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and reflects an artistic hierarchy that has long given pride of place to "history painting", in which action is represented through subjects taken from ancient history or the Bible, or from Greco-Roman mythology and the Christian world. Comparing itself with the canons of ancient aesthetic beauty, Italian art thus reached a zenith at the beginning of the sixteenth century with the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, and it was at this time that the "modern manner" was born: a unified vision of reality that combined figures, landscape and composition.