>>2839882>>2839830Mastering light and shadow for every ligament is not necessary. You can have the scheme quite simplified although you do have to be efficient. The lighting that they use is generally different from the lighting of very realistic painters today.
Practical training for it is hard enough, but even for those who want to produce works like the Renaissance, few could even discover the proper way to teach themselves how to draw let alone paint like the Renaissance.
As for the materials to read, it's more tempting to read about what others have written about the Renaissance than to read anything of what the painters and intellectuals of the time would have written and read. This is a fundamental issue as the way post-Renaissance art history looks at Renaissance art is different than how they themselves looked at art. It requires a certain quality of mind for many of the texts to make sense and apply to art and composition. To understand them, one has to have at least an intuition for classical poetics, iconology, rhetoric, philosophy, myths and history, and other fields of study. To discover some of the suitable reading materials requires luck, as no art education system cares for them. Many of the terms used then had rich meanings and implications, which now are either meaningless to the modern ears or have acquired a new and lame meaning.
He ought also to familiarize himself with architecture, ornaments, hair styles, drapes...
There is also the questions of categories, forms, regional variety. Some are more suitable for emulation than others. Some are too contained to the specific time and place.
There are the common dangers that someone wishing to paint Renaissance-classical will do only portraiture, make what amounts of period genre painting, or worse, both at once. But the worst offense of all is when painters today make parodies referencing famous works of art and think themselves to be influenced by the period.
