This paper considers the way that art relates to changes in the socio/political/religious climate of its times. Art can be both a reflection and a launching pad. An excellent example of this is the way that art in the Middle Ages in Italy began to visually break away from medievalism, presaging the whole intellectual revolution that became the Renaissance. By returning to classical roots for inspiration and then expanding on those classical models, Italian artists led the move away from the stilted, non-naturalistic, Gothic vision of the world that had characterized Western civilization during the medieval period. The Renaissance began in Italy, and this is visible in the paintings, sculpture, and even the architecture of the time. However, the art produced in Italy in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries did not simply reflect a new, humanistic way of thinking, it also helped it to happen.
Fred S. Kleiner and Christin J. Mamiya write, "Italian artists and scholars regarded medieval artworks as distortions of the noble art of the Greeks and Romans" (375). Studying the classical age enabled the Italians to reconsider what the inward focus of the Middle Ages had allowed to become obscured and to look at these earlier aesthetic traditions through new eyes. The dominance of the Catholic Church had so overshadowed the art world that even finding a significant painting from the 13th century whose subject was not religious was nearly impossible.
Yet there were signs that change was in the wind. One such sign can be seen in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Peaceful Country, which "represents one of the first appearances of landscape in Western art since antiquity" (Kleiner Mamiya 391). What makes this painting significant is its specificity. It is not a general view of a space outside of a building but instead looks like a real place. As Kleiner and Mamiya note, "Although religion continued to occupy a primary position in...