From the Art Institute to the Gold Coast: The Italian Renaissance Reimagined in Gold for Chicago’s Finest Interiors
The Italian Renaissance changed forever how the world understands beauty, the human body, light, space and emotion. Centuries later, its visual language is still very much alive. It is not a historical style to copy, but a source of inspiration to reinterpret. Chicago has always thought big about beauty. In 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition raised the gleaming "White City" on the shore of Lake Michigan: palaces, domes and colonnades in the classical and Renaissance tradition, built to show America what a great city could be. Its Palace of Fine Arts still stands today as the Museum of Science and Industry, and Daniel Chester French's gilded Statue of the Republic still shines in Jackson Park.
For the French-American artist and photographer of Italian descent Zack Zublena, the Renaissance becomes a contemporary visual dialogue. Through gold body paint, photography, collage and mixed techniques, he takes classical figures, golden light, mythology and sculptural forms out of their original context and gives them a place in the interiors of today.
Discover the Italian Renaissance collection: works that sit between classical beauty, mythology and golden light.
This approach does not try to recreate Renaissance painting. It asks a different question: what happens when the visual language of the Italian Renaissance is seen through the lens of contemporary fine art photography?
When Photography Meets the Renaissance
The Renaissance was an age of extraordinary experimentation. Artists explored anatomy, perspective, proportion, architecture, mythology and the relationship between the human figure and the space around it.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, guarded by its famous bronze lions on Michigan Avenue, that experimentation is on view in one of the world's great museums. Its galleries hold Italian paintings from the early Renaissance to the Venetian masters, including Giovanni di Paolo's luminous scenes from the life of Saint John the Baptist, painted on shimmering gold grounds. The museum has also been a pioneer in collecting photography as fine art, so Chicagoans know that the camera can be as serious an artistic tool as the brush.
Photography offers another way to explore the same ideas. In Zack Zublena's work, the camera is a tool for building images, not just recording reality. The human figure can look monumental, mysterious, almost architectural. Gold turns skin into something close to gilded sculpture. Shadows create the depth of a fresco.
Archangel Michael, Golden Guardian brings several of these ideas together: the monumental figure, the symbolism of wings and the power of gold. The work speaks to Renaissance iconography while remaining unmistakably contemporary.
Light as a Language
In Renaissance art, light was never just a technical element. It was a language. A face emerging from darkness could become the centre of an entire composition. A hand lit against a shadowed background suddenly became symbolic.
Chicago has some of the most spectacular light in American architecture. At the Chicago Cultural Center, Preston Bradley Hall is crowned by what is considered the largest Tiffany stained-glass dome in the world, a glowing canopy of glass that turns daylight into colour and gold. In Millennium Park, Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate, "the Bean" to every Chicagoan, reflects the sky, the skyline and the people beneath it in polished steel. Zack Zublena works with controlled light and deep contrast that give his images an almost painterly quality. The gold recalls gilded frames, Renaissance altarpieces and the warm windows of the city on a winter evening. In photography, it takes on a new physical quality: reflective, atmospheric and contemporary.
Anatomy of the Soul explores the relationship between the human body and the atmosphere around it. The figure stops being the portrait of a specific person. It becomes a study of form, identity and the link between the physical and the symbolic.
The Human Body as Sculpture
One of the strongest connections between the Renaissance and contemporary fine art photography is how they treat the human body. Renaissance artists studied anatomy with extraordinary precision, inspired by the sculpture of antiquity.
Photography approaches the same subject from another direction. Through pose, light, framing and composition, a photographed figure becomes sculptural. Without unnecessary detail, the eye focuses on silhouette, muscle, gesture and empty space. Chicago lives with one of the most powerful sculptural meditations on the body anywhere: Magdalena Abakanowicz's Agora in Grant Park. Its 106 headless iron figures stand and walk together, turning the human silhouette into pure presence.
Winged Essence takes this idea further. It joins the human figure with wings and a bold visual language of gold and blue, the colours of Lake Michigan on a summer evening. The work recalls religious and mythological imagery without belonging to a single era.
Wings, Myth and the Renaissance Imagination
Wings have lived in the imagination of Western art for centuries. Angels, messengers and allegorical figures fill Renaissance painting and sculpture. In Chicago, wings soar among the skyscrapers. Peregrine falcons, the fastest birds on earth, nest on the ledges of downtown towers and dive between the buildings of the Loop. And every spring and autumn, the lakefront becomes one of the great migratory flyways of North America.
Wings can also be read in a more abstract way: as an image of freedom, transformation, desire, transcendence, or the longing to go beyond the physical world.
Wings of Desire plays with this symbolic vocabulary. Film lovers will recognise the title of Wim Wenders' classic. Here the wings are far more than ornament. They make the figure ambiguous, suspended between earthly beauty and something almost celestial.
That ambiguity is at the heart of contemporary readings of the Renaissance. The goal is not to imitate the past, but to let its symbols take on new meanings.
A Beauty That Does Not Age
Renaissance images still move us because they see beauty as something bigger than fashion. Their faces, bodies and gestures speak of universal themes: desire, mortality, spirituality, identity, love and the search for meaning.
Symphony of Her Soul approaches the figure through emotion and atmosphere. With its Venetian mask and sheet music, the image creates a contemporary story in which music, movement and the body merge. It evokes a night at the Lyric Opera of Chicago in the grand Civic Opera House on the river, where Verdi and Puccini have filled the hall for generations. It equally evokes an evening with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Center, one of the world's legendary orchestras. In summer, music fills Frank Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, and the city's blues and jazz clubs play long into the night.
From the Italian Masters to Contemporary Interiors
The great masters of the Renaissance created for architecture: churches, palaces and private residences. Their compositions were designed to speak with the space that held them. Chicago understands this better than any American city. It is the birthplace of the skyscraper and home to Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe, a city where architecture itself is the great art. At the Art Institute, the beloved Thorne Miniature Rooms even show how European and American interiors were designed across the centuries, room by room.
Contemporary fine art photography can play the same role. A large-format work becomes an architectural element. It can live in a greystone or mansion on the Gold Coast, a co-op on Lake Shore Drive or a penthouse in Streeterville. It suits a townhouse in Lincoln Park, a loft in River North or the West Loop, or an estate on the North Shore, from Winnetka to Lake Forest. It also belongs in a restaurant on Fulton Market or the lobby of one of Chicago's grand hotels. A monumental figure sets the scale. A restrained palette creates atmosphere. Gold brings warmth and light without overloading the space with colour, in natural dialogue with limestone, walnut, steel and the silver light of the lake.
The Gladiator Philosopher shows this relationship between classical visual language and contemporary interior design. The work carries the monumental presence of classical and Renaissance figures while working as a statement piece for today.
The Renaissance as a Living Language
Perhaps the most interesting way to look at the Italian Renaissance today is not as a closed era, but as a visual language that keeps evolving. That language is made of the human body, dramatic light, mythology, architecture, symbols, gold and gesture. It is also made of the relationship between beauty and emotion.
These elements can be photographed, built digitally, turned into collage and reinterpreted. They can even be deliberately detached from their historical context. Chicago's architects did exactly that. After the White City of 1893, the arches, cornices and palazzo proportions of Renaissance Italy were reinvented in steel and terracotta, rising twenty and thirty storeys above State Street and LaSalle. The Chicago Architecture Center tells that story on its famous river tours, where every bend reveals how an ancient language became the language of the modern city.
Serpent of Light introduces another archetypal symbol: the serpent, which since antiquity has stood for transformation, renewal and knowledge. Set against a Pompeii fresco, the work brings together mythology, transformation and mystery. It builds a bridge between ancient imagery and contemporary fine art photography.
The Body, Light and the Classical Ideal
The Renaissance fascination with the human body was deeply tied to the classical world. In Chicago, that ideal looks down on hotel guests every day. In the lobby of the Palmer House, a celebrated ceiling painted by the French artist Louis Pierre Rigal fills the room with gods and heroes from Greek mythology, a classical fresco in the heart of the Loop.
Contemporary photography can revisit this ideal without turning it into an absolute rule. The body becomes material for composition: a line, a silhouette, a volume and a source of light.
Golden Tension explores this relationship through the male figure. The tension between body, light and shadow gives the image a sculptural strength and places it firmly in contemporary fine art photography.
A Meaningful Gift for the Holidays
Finding the right gift for someone who loves art, design, architecture and beautiful interiors is not easy. A work of art is different. It is not just a gift to unwrap, but a piece that becomes part of a home and keeps its meaning for years.
In Chicago, the holiday season is the season of warm interiors: snow on the lakefront, lights along the Magnificent Mile, long dinners with family and friends, and the New Year's fireworks over Navy Pier. For those drawn to the beauty of the Italian Renaissance, to classical figures, mythology and golden light, a contemporary fine art photograph inspired by this tradition is a deeply personal choice for the holidays. For collectors on the Gold Coast, in Lincoln Park, Streeterville or along the North Shore, it is also a way to bring warmth and golden light into the heart of a Chicago winter.
If you are looking for a unique gift for someone who already has everything, an original work of art can be one of the most personal choices there is.
The Past, Seen Anew
The Italian Renaissance does not need to be recreated to stay relevant. Its ideas can be transformed. Its symbols can be questioned, simplified and reinvented. Its fascination with the human body can become contemporary photography. Its dramatic use of light can become a new atmosphere, and its mythology can be the starting point for entirely new stories.
Through gold, light, bodies, wings, mythology and emotion, Zack Zublena explores this vocabulary. He creates works that look to the past while belonging fully to the present.
Discover the Italian Renaissance collection: contemporary fine art photography inspired by classical beauty, mythology and the timeless visual language of the Renaissance.
