Exploration of Artistic Expression in the Context of the Renaissance from Different Countries: Take Innovations in Painting Techniques as an Example

Abstract

This study investigates the painting techniques of different regions as a representative of urban culture in Italy and the Netherlands during the Renaissance. At this time, the artworks struggled between humanistic and divine worldviews but also manifested regional relatively independent personalities resulting in various economic and cultural contexts. Incorporating evidence from paintings, artists' manuscripts, and other contexts, this paper contrasts painting techniques from two countries concerning ways of seeing the world, renewing suitable materials, and drawing scientifically. These creations are particularly evident throughout the painting's history revealing disparate proportions of city-culture components, including artistic creation, everyday lifestyle, and city value from historical memories. It allows the Renaissance cultural development process to be easily grasped by a direct artistic expression despite space-time barriers. Though the different paths of national artistic development have produced different results, the similar cause and connotation of painting techniques’ innovations in the two places reflects the inevitability of history, because art is not an accidental product, but the result of the cultural development of an entire city.