THE MIDDLE AGES

PAINTING THe middle ages is looked down upon as a dark age but everything that came in the so called Renaissance was because of the Middle Ages as regards painting. Giotto di Bondone is regarded as the most celebrated Italian painter of the 14th century and one of the most influential artists of the middle ages. He is considered the father of modern painting, having influenced the likes of Michelangelo, Masaccio, and Raphael. Giotto was born either in 1266/1267 in Vespignano, near the city of Florence in Italy and died in 1337. He spent his early years as an apprentice to a great Florentine painter named Cimabue. Legend has it that his master discovered the genius of the young man when he came across his lifelike paintings of sheep and took him under his wing. He worked throughout Italy visiting places such as Padua, Rome, and Naples. However, it was in Florence where most of his time was spent. The focus of Giotto’s career was almost exclusively on frescoes. Fresco is a technique where a painting is done on wet plaster so that it becomes fixed when the plaster dries. He had an unparalleled understanding of human emotion which he transferred to his work with accurate detail. He was a revolutionary in his work at the time. He shifted from the Byzantine style into realism which he achieved through three-dimensional expressions. Due to his artistic skill, the Italian artist is considered influential in the birth of the Renaissance. ARCHITECTURE The testimony of Medieval architecture is that all Central European cities still do have Medieval buildings in them - usually either

SCULPTURE With the fall of Rome, statues disappeared as a major art form in Europe until the Gothic age. The primary types of medieval sculpture in Western Europe were architectural sculpture (especially reliefs) and carved ivory objects (aka "ivories"), including small figures, crucifixes, relief panels, and containers. WRITING The majority of the literature produced during the Middle Ages was written by religious clerics and monks. Few other people knew how to read and write. Much of what they wrote was hymns, or songs, about God. Some also wrote philosophical documents about religion. Dante, The Divine Comedy. ... Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales. ... Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe. ... Marco Polo, Travels. ... Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain. ... Anonymous, The Mabinogion. ... Anonymous, Beowulf. 

FOOD Those lower down the social scale ate a less impressive diet. Unless you served in a large household, it was difficult to obtain fresh meat or fish (although fish was available to those living by the sea). Most people ate preserved foods that had been salted or pickled soon after slaughter or harvest: bacon, pickled herring, preserved fruits, for instance. The poor often kept pigs, which, unlike cows and sheep, were able to live contentedly in a forest, fending for themselves. Peasants tended to keep cows, so their diets consisted largely of dairy produce such as buttermilk, cheese, or curds and whey. Rich and poor alike ate a dish called pottage, a thick soup containing meat, vegetables, or bran. The more luxurious pottage was called 'mortrew', and a pottage containing cereal was a 'frumenty'. Bread was the staple for all classes, although the quality and price varied depending on the type of grain used. Some people even used bread as plates: 'trenches' were thick slices of bread, slightly hollowed out, and served bearing food at meal times. ARGUMENT “Renaissance,” referring to a period starting around the 15th century in Italy and later spreading to the rest of Europe involving a revival of Classical learning, economic and social improvement, and all kinds of other nice things, gets criticized periodically for a variety of reasons. Among them: The changes of that period aren’t necessarily a sudden revival from a dismal Middle Ages, but involve various trends that had been ongoing for centuries. It’s poorly and vaguely defined, both in time and space. I remember reading one scholar who argued that it should only be used to describe certain Italian artistic movements and shouldn’t apply to the rest of Europe or any other fields. The extent of improvements attributed to the Renaissance may be less than has been argued (for example, economic growth and scientific advances), and were accompanied by a number of negative trends as well (the rights of women and religious minorities were often threatened). The past is infinitely complicated, composed as it is of events, big and small, beyond computation. To make sense of it, the historian must select and simplify and shape. One way he shapes the past is to divide it into periods. Each period is made more memorable and easy to grasp if it can be labeled by a word that epitomizes its spirit. That is how such terms as "the Renaissance" came into being. Needless to say, it is not those who actually live through the period who coin the term, but later, often much later, writers. The periodization and labeling of history is largely the work of the nineteenth century. The term "Renaissance" was first prominently used by the French historian Jules Michelet in 1858, and it was set in bronze two years later by Jacob Burckhardt when he published his great book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. Why do we use the word Renaissance and not Rinascimento? Because the French were the first to use that term. 

The historian Jules Michelet coined it and applied it to that era of Italian history and that originated in the 19th Century. Italians themselves never called it the Renaissance, leave alone the Italian word for it until other Europeans started doing it. They used their characteristic naming functions to typify the art and culture of a certain era. So the Florentine Renaissane is Quattrocento (1400s) because that was the century in which it happened. The Renaissance that came after, centered in Rome, and also Venice, is Cinquecento (1500s). Some proto-Renaissance sentiment, i.e. seeing themselves as a rebirth and revival, as a mark of a new humanism, and individual moment, is there among Renaissance writers but they never had a unified sense of their position, time and place in the manner that later art movements like Impressionism, Surrealism and Cubism did. The usage stuck because it turned out to be a convenient way of describing the period of transition between the medieval epoch, when Europe was "Christendom," and the beginning of the modern age. It also had some historical justification because, although the Italian elites of the time never used the words "Renaissance" or "Rinascita," they were conscious that a cultural rebirth of a kind was taking place, and that some of the literary, philosophical and artistic grandeur of ancient Greece and Rome was being recreated. In 1550 the painter Vasari published an ambitious work, The Lives of the Artists, in which he sought to describe how this process had taken place, and was continuing, in painting, sculpture and architecture. In comparing the glories of antiquity with the achievements of the present and recent past in Italy, he referred to the degenerate period in between as "the middle ages." This usage stuck too. That said Giotto was the champion of modern paiting he was of the middle ages and Dante the greatest Italian writer was too. 

 1. Why do you think the Middle ages is denigrated ?

 2.Jules Michelet hated the middle ages and decided to create a new age with the Renaissance term . Why? 

3. Why do we divide time into periods? 

4. What is a dark age ? Are we living through one now but don't know it? 

5. Was the so called Renaissance really a time of peace and invention or more  war? 

6. Why didn't Italians call it the Renaissance? What did they call it ?

7. Did the Renaissance exist or just an invented term by Michelet?