Numerous massive stylistic changes in art produced a reaction throughout Europe and not merely in one school or region. Changes in the styles of artistic expression throughout history have reflected not only developments in materials and shifting patterns within the art world itself, but have also reflected changing circumstances in society at large. These patterns include political changes, historical movements, altered social conditions, changed economic circumstances, shifts in religious thinking, and so on. Such differences manifest themselves in new ideas an forms for painting, sculpture, and architecture, and one of the massive shifts in thinking came during the period now known as the Renaissance. We may think of the Renaissance as associated always with Italy and with Italian art, but the Renaissance had an effect in other regions of Europe as well, producing new types of works with new historical and aesthetic concerns. The Renaissance affected German artists as it did those in Italy.
The Renaissance is a period seen as a rebirth of learning on the classical model. The modern conception of the Renaissance actually derives from the nineteenth century in the work of Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, who published a pioneering work in 1860 in which he saw the Renaissance as almost purely cultural, as the work of a small Italian elite pioneering a new attitude toward human beings. They now saw human beings as people who had suddenly acquired a new consciousness of their own uniqueness and individuality. We now know that the Renaissance had three dimensions, historic, economic, and cultural. Historically, there was a new interest in the remote past, especially that of Greek and Roman antiquity, and also a tendency to reject the more recent past we now call the Middle Ages. This was fed in Italy by a number of revivals of Roman buildings and the occasional piece of sculpture. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 brough...