The “Wow” Factor of Renaissance Art Was Intentional

Image: Sandro Botticelli, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

You know that moment when you see a Renaissance painting and just stop? Maybe it is the impossible size of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment. Maybe it is the perfect perspective of Raphael’s School of Athens. Or maybe it is one of those paintings where you zoom in and suddenly realize there are fifty tiny details you somehow missed the first time.

That feeling of wow is part of what makes Renaissance art so much fun to look at. And it turns out Renaissance thinkers were very interested in that feeling too.

The Art of Wonder

Renaissance writers and theorists spent a surprising amount of time thinking about wonder: what causes it, why people enjoy it, and how an artist or writer might deliberately create it. Many of their ideas came from Aristotle. In his discussions of poetry and rhetoric, Aristotle connected wonder with things that were unexpected or unfamiliar. Renaissance theorists returned to those ideas and expanded them, treating wonder as an important goal in forms of writing beyond the tragedy and epic poetry Aristotle had discussed (Biester, 1997).

In other words, they were thinking about the Renaissance equivalent of the wow factor. One particularly interesting idea was that surprise worked best when it was not completely random. Aristotle argued that an unexpected event could seem especially marvelous when, after it happened, you could look back and think, Of course. That makes perfect sense (Biester, 1997). There was pleasure in being surprised and then understanding why.

Make the Familiar Feel New

Wonder could also come from seeing something familiar in an unfamiliar way.

Biester describes how Aristotle connected unusual language with wonder. Ordinary speech could be made strange enough to catch someone's attention, while metaphor could suddenly reveal a connection the audience had never noticed before (Biester, 1997).

Renaissance writers ran with the idea. They experimented with novelty, paradox, exaggeration, unusual comparisons, and other ways of making an audience stop and pay attention. By the sixteenth century, rhetorical manuals were teaching writers and speakers techniques designed to emphasize the surprising or strange and provoke wonder in their audiences (Biester, 1997). And that makes the Renaissance obsession with extraordinary art feel a little different.

These were people living in a culture that did not always want art simply to be pleasant. Astonishment could be an artistic achievement. So when you stand beneath an enormous Renaissance fresco, get lost in an impossibly deep painted room, or stare at a face that somehow looks ready to breathe, that little moment of How did they DO that? feels surprisingly appropriate.

Five hundred years later, the wonder still works.

Further Reading:

Biester, J. (1997). Lyric wonder: Rhetoric and wit in Renaissance English poetry. Cornell University Press.