endency to stress the group. Painters began painting realistically in the attempt to mirror reality and the wealthy hired painters to paint their portrait to immortalize a part of themselves in a depiction of their glory and accomplishments.The Middle Ages introduced the importance of education of becoming a civilized person, and learning was still an important aspect that continued into the Renaissance. The difference between the two periods was how scholars went about their studies of past literary culture. The Renaissance style of learning became known as humanism, or new learning. Humanists studied the Latin classics to learn about human nature and emphasized human beings achievements, interests, and capabilities. On the other hand, medieval scholars studied ancient works to understand God and interpreted them purely in a Christian sense. Although Renaissance humanists possessed strong Christian values, they studied the classics far differently than those in the Middle Ages. While medieval writers used the classics to reveal God and Christian ideas, humanists tended to look at the way these ideas were expressed rather than the ideas themselves.An interesting repercussion of the crisis of the fourteenth century was the economic prosperity that followed. Apparently the famine, plague, and numerous deaths of the fourteenth century served as an effective population control and managed to increase the demand for labor. The increase in the demand for labor allowed for increased wages and people were back to pre-plague levels of income. With this increase in material wealth came more importance placed upon the material world instead of the eternal world of spirit. Even though medieval people were ruthless in their pursuit of the almighty dollar, they still dominantly focused their attention on life after death. Renaissance people were quite the opposite in their interests by holding strong religious values yet centering their c...
