Growth Of Humanity-Focused Art In The Pre-Renaissance Era Of The Middle Ages

Centuries before humanity was able to tell stories through motion picture or photography, artists wished to tell a story visually. This is especially true within the Pre-Renaissance Era of the Middle Ages. Artists would take inspiration from written manuscripts and create art based on their story or message to the audience. For example, illuminated manuscripts, in particular, were literal manuscripts that artists embellished with beautiful decorum or illustrations to heighten the delivery of the storyline. This practice of storytelling carried on into the Early Renaissance and was revolutionized by Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337). Giotto, an Italian painter and architect of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, is widely esteemed as a pivotal

The combination of these three elements is what established the growth of humanity-focused artwork in the Renaissance, an ideology that emphasizes one’s individual agency and autonomy.

Medieval narrative art often depicted the lives of saints in a series of pictures or scenes from the Bible. Predetermined knowledge of the Bible was essential since the art was symbolic with no clear, direct storyline. The original purpose of these representations was to simply communicate religious themes to the viewer and inspire piety and devotion to Christianity rather than tell the story of the Bible. As a result, they were difficult to understand without a deep understanding of Christian doctrine and iconography. For example, the Palatine Chapel, created during the prime medieval period of the 1100s is enveloped in stunning Byzantine mosaics along the walls and ceilings. These mosaics contain illustrations of iconographic Christian figures decked out in gold to represent their status and nobility. Most notably, at the highest point of the ceiling, Jesus Christ sits there, the largest figure of them all,

Naturalism seeks to replicate a believable, everyday reality. In art, this is represented with the least possible distortion or stylization. In a way, naturalism wishes to capture every bit of nature and humanity despite how imperfect it may seem. In contrast, medieval Byzantine-style art was especially unlike reality. It consisted of flattened designs with elongated figures, angular faces, and uniform gold backgrounds. Chiaroscuro, or the depiction of light and shadow to achieve a sense of volume, was rarely used, so figures were mainly two-dimensional. Cimabue (1240-1302), though on the tail end of the Medieval ages, was greatly influenced by the Byzantine style in Santa Trinita Maestà (1286). This tempera painting depicts Mary and Jesus Christ on a throne surrounded by angels with the prophets in blocks along the bottom of the painting. Similar to the Palatine Chapel, the figures were highly iconographic like a set of carefully crafted idealized portraits. The prophets, for example, are in an imaginary space beneath the throne, while the angels are floating around the throne with no sense of gravity. In comparison to Cimabue’s iconic representation of the Madonna and Child, Giotto uses a much more didactic, naturalistic approach to engage the viewer into the true meaning of Mary and Christ in his Ognissanti Madonna (1310). Though Giotto’s comic book style of