Implications.

The Renaissance was a time of unprecedented achievement in the visual arts and in no other area of culture was change so readily evident. In 1300 European painters and sculptors composed their works using symbols and styles that had flourished for several centuries. While much of the art they produced was of great beauty, the imitation of nature was not a high priority for most medieval artists. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a new set of visual sensibilities prompted patrons to demand, and artists to produce, works that represented the world in a new, boldly naturalistic way. This revolution in visual perception began first in Italy, but soon appeared in Northern Europe as well. This episode in European history forms an important chapter in what the great nineteenth-century historian Jacob Burckhardt once called the Renaissance's "discovery of man and the natural...