Overview

Throughout the Middle Ages, European artists concentrated on religious subjects. Whether a piece of sculpture on the facade of a cathedral, a mural on a monastery wall, an altarpiece, or an illustration in a prayer book, most medieval art served a religious function: to focus people's attention on attaining salvation. The development of the Renaissance in fifteenth-century Italy and its spread to Northern Europe dramatically changed this. Since Renaissance humanistic thought emphasized nature and the beauty of the human body, artists now attempted to duplicate the natural world in their work. They enthusiastically incorporated this new naturalism into their art and in doing so, played a major role in creating new sciences, particularly those of anatomy and botany, the earliest of the modern life sciences. Artists such as Leonardo...