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Breaks with Tradition
One of the most significant breaks with tradition came in the
field of history. History became a branch of literature
rather than theology. Renaissance historians rejected the medieval
Christian division of history that began with the creation.
The Renaissance vision of history also had three
parts: It began with antiquity, followed by the Middle Ages and
then the golden age of rebirth that had just begun.
Classical texts were studied and valued on their own terms, no longer
serving merely to embellish and justify Christian civilization. In 1455 the Gutenberg Bible—the first ever printed with moveable metal type—was
published in Mainz, Germany. However,
the first moveable type was used in China long before the Gutenberg Bible appeared.
The advent of printing revolutionized learning by making books more readily available.
The perfection of the body by physical training, an ideal rarely
acknowledged in the Middle Ages, became a prominent goal of Renaissance education.
The recovery and study of the classics entailed the creation of new disciplines
and critically affected the development of older ones.
During the Renaissance, artists were no longer regarded as mere
artisans, as they had been in the medieval past, but for the
first time emerged as independent personalities, comparable to
poets and writers. They sought new solutions to formal and visual
problems, and many of them were also devoted to scientific
experimentation. In this context, mathematical or linear
perspective was developed, a system in which all objects
in a painting or in low-relief sculpture are related both
proportionally and rationally. As a result, the painted
surface was regarded as a window on the natural world, and
it became the task of painters to portray this world in
their art. Consequently, painters began to devote themselves
more rigorously to the rendition of landscape—the careful
depiction of trees, flowers, plants, distant mountains, and
cloud-filled skies.
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