Renaissance Religion

Religion and Renaissance Art and Thought My research focuses on how religion influenced Renaissance art and thought. My primary thesis is that religion changed the way the Renaissance artists employed art as a transformative agenda to persuade social issues. Levine’s essay, “ Michelangelo's Marble David and the Lost Bronze David: the Drawings,” is the first source that depicts the political elements of the David sculpture. Conlin’s article, “Gladstone and Christian Art,” the second source, examines, in part, how the links to liberal Catholicism influenced the works of artists during the Renaissance era. Together, the two sources offer rich insights on the social factors that changed art and thought during the Renaissance era.

These artists thought that the only way for the Catholic Church to regain its influence was by severing its links to the state. These links had discredited the Church in the eyes of the public by the popes having a larger interest in lavishing their own families with money and land, commissioning new artwork, and other secular preoccupations. As such, the liberal artists insisted that art had to help the church detach itself from the state. Alexandre Francois Rio was a prominent champion of the Catholic liberal movement who served as the liaison between the conservative factions of the art fraternity and the liberal movement. The artists who identified with Rio’s view saw artwork as the unseen hand that ensured the Christian ideals manifested in the lives of the ordinary people. Rio launched and won a campaign for freedom of education that allowed the people to establish their own schools apart from the influence of the clergy. The liberal movement initiative received momentum when the German scholars of art history published studies on the classical Renaissance art, and these studies enlightened people in a period that many prominent artists deemed a dark age (Conlin 348-349). The publications on Italian painting marked the transition in the use of Christian art to champion the restoration of Catholicism as a dominant aspect of the mainstream social affairs. Before these publications, Italian painting primarily focused on religious issues and ignored the naturalistic details that could have made it effective in the pious presentation of the doctrines of Christianity (Colin 349). The focus shifting away from religious aspect and on to the humanity of the subject is one of the hallmarks of the