When the Renaissance Art period surfaced, the ideal of bodily perfection and picture perfect paintings began to surface as the type of art people loved and wanted the most. Art of the Renaissance also began to depict more and more religious art then ever before. The Church of Rome began to take over Europe and wanted to stress the importance of themselves and of religion across the board. They began to commission paintings of themselves shown in a great standard, with markings and attributes to tell who they were and what they did. The Renaissance was named the period of “rebirth” due to the high volumes of paintings, sculptures, books and even buildings that were erected to promote the ideas and teachings of the church; and how heavily influenced the art was by the religion of the region.
I feel as students of art history, it is important to study The Renaissance and how it affected art after it. I feel that the art of The Renaissance is some of the most important art of our culture. (note, not THE most important…) I feel this way due to the amount of studying also occurred during the time period, and I think that if that study of the human body, both inside and out hadn’t occurred, we wouldn’t know now about how the body works or how to depict the body properly. I think that Michelangelo and da Vinci began paving the road for perfection in art and are some of the founding fathers of great art for us to learn about and how to do today.
I feel that our society likes to focus on art of this period because it was so important to The Church, and that people still heave a strong connection to the church, cannot find any better way to depict their images of angles, saints, or the stories of the bible. I also feel that people in the church like to remember the “happy, shiny, puppies and rainbows” version of the stories. Even in the paintings that are about sad or horrific events, the artist still shows the events in a… “Good light” for example, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve From Paradise by Masccio on Page 611, shows the story of Adam and Eve being tossed out of the garden, but the colors are still bright, and the sun shines. The only “down” part of the painting is the look on the faces of Adam and Eve.
