olved. He was now seen as a compassionate, forgiving, and father-like figure who cared about His earthly and sinful children. The Renaissance also brought drastic changes to the artistic world. The decisive break with medieval tradition occurred in Florence, Italy in 1420 with the invention of linear perspective. This innovation made it possible to represent three-dimensional space on a flat surface. In previous years, objects had been represented on the canvas as one-dimensional. This paralleled the one-dimensional thinking of the time and served to create rigid and unrealistic portrayals in art. Another ideal that evolved was the culmination of harmony and proportion. The human form was seriously analyzed for the first time. Careful attention was payed to minute details such as the shape of muscles and how they looked as they moved. This led to a more realistic and accurate reproduction of the human body. During the Renaissance "...the medieval aspects of the Christian religion were swept away, especially by the violent surge of the Reformation: No other artist managed, as Michelangelo did, to portray this change in his works..." (Heusinger 3). Michelangelo Buonarroti was a sculptor, architect, painter, and poet. He was, perhaps, the most potent force in the Italian High Renaissance. His work exerted a tremendous influence on his contemporaries and on subsequent Western art. He spent the greater part of his adulthood in Rome, employed by the popes. "In the fourteenth-century the papacy had become weakened, and some of the wealth of the territory had been lost. Pope Julius was determined to restore its former glory, with the help of...Michelangelo" (Green 16). This patronage was a tremendous influence on his art. The work of Michelangelo illustrated the upheaval of the Reformation by presenting Renaissance ideals as opposed to those of the Dark Ages. One of his most beloved pieces is the Pieta. In this ...
