Question

Using the textbook or a web search, select an artifact or image created in 1000–1300 C.E. Artifacts can include written works, laws, codes, buildings, maps, art, rituals, dance, holidays, and so on. Explain how the artifact reflects the character of this period, and support your insight with at least one example of a political, economic, or religious development in this period to which it relates. Provide a link to your artifact; if you use the textbook, provide the page number for where it is located.

Please answer using a minimum of 300 words and must not use wikipedia.

Answer 1

Characterizing the Middle Ages as a period of darkness falling between two greater, more intellectually significant periods in history is misleading. The Middle Ages was not a time of ignorance and backwardness, but rather a period during which Christianity flourished in Europe. Christianity, and specifically Catholicism in the Latin West, brought with it new views of life and the world that rejected the traditions and learning of the ancient world.

During this time, the Roman Empire slowly fragmented into many smaller political entities. The geographical boundaries for European countries today were established during the Middle Ages. This was a period that heralded the formation and rise of universities, the establishment of the rule of law, numerous periods of ecclesiastical reform and the birth of the tourism industry. Many works of medieval literature, such as the Canterbury Tales, the Divine Comedy, and The Song of Roland, are widely read and studied today.

The visual arts prospered during Middles Ages, which created its own aesthetic values. The wealthiest and most influential members of society commissioned cathedrals, churches, sculpture, painting, textiles, manuscripts, jewelry and ritual items from artists. Many of these commissions were religious in nature but medieval artists also produced secular art. Few names of artists survive and fewer documents record their business dealings, but they left behind an impressive legacy of art and culture.

t was during this period that the ancient Greeks first applied human reason to their observations of the natural world and created some of the earliest naturalistic images of human beings. This period is often credited with the birth of Western philosophy, mathematics, theater, science, and democracy. The Romans in turn created an empire that extended across most of Europe, and all the lands that surround the Mediterranean Sea. They were expert administrators and engineers and they saw themselves as the inheritors of the great civilizations that came before them, particularly, Greece and Egypt (which they conquered).

It’s important to remember that although history is often presented as a series of discrete stories, in reality narratives often overlap making history both more complex and more interesting. For example, it was also during the Roman Empire that the figure we now call Jesus lived. Jesus and his apostles were Jewish men living in what is today Israel, but which was then part of the Roman Empire.

n very simple terms, the Italian Renaissance re-established Western art according to the principles of classical Greek art, especially Greek sculpture and painting, which provided much of the basis for the Grand Tour, and which remained unchallenged until Pablo Picasso and Cubism.

From the early 14th century, in their search for a new set of artistic values and a response to the courtly International Gothic style, Italian artists and thinkers became inspired by the ideas and forms of ancient Greece and Rome. This was perfectly in tune with their desire to create a universal, even noble, form of artwhich could express the new and more confident mood of the times.

In the visual arts, humanism stood for (1) The emergence of the individual figure, in place of stereotyped, or symbolic figures. (2) Greater realism and consequent attention to detail, as reflected in the development of linear perspective and the increasing realism of human faces and bodies; this new approach helps to explain why classical sculpture was so revered, and why Byzantine art fell out of fashion. (3) An emphasis on and promotion of virtuous action: an approach echoed by the leading art theorist of the Renaissance Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72) when he declared, "happiness cannot be gained without good works and just and righteous deeds".

The promotion of virtuous action reflected the growing idea that man, not fate or God, controlled human destiny, and was a key reason why history painting (that is, pictures with uplifting 'messages') became regarded as the highest form of painting. Of course, the exploration of virtue in the visual arts also involved an examination of vice and human evil.