The University of Kansas

Attributed to Orazio Fontana

Italy, 1512-1597
Mailica bottle
Museum purchase, 1960.76

The Spencer Museum of Art has a rich collection of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Middle Ages, or medieval period, began with the fall of the city of Rome and the collapse of the Roman Empire in the mid-5th century and continued in some areas of Europe into the 16th century. Most medieval art in the Spencer is either Romanesque (9th-12th century) or Gothic (13th-15th century). The Renaissance, the time often considered the beginning of the modern age, began in Italy in the 14th century and continued throughout Europe well into the 16th century. In England the Renaissance began in the 16th century and continued into the 17th century.

Almost all the art in the Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the Spencer has a religious or classical subject. The Christian church dominated the lives of Europeans during these times, and the majority of artistic commissions were of Christian subjects. During the Renaissance, artists and their contemporaries also had a renewed interest in Greek and Roman antiquity. As philosophers and historians delved into ancient texts and Greek and Roman art and architecture began to be excavated, artists, encouraged by their patrons, imitated both the subjects and forms of the art of these ancient civilizations. Portraits also were commonly painted in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but scenes of nature or of everyday life were not.

None of the works in these galleries was made for museum display. (Museums as we know them did not come into existence until the 18th century.) Everything shown here was made for a church or a home (usually a palace). Many of these paintings and sculptures long ago were torn from larger altarpieces or taken from their original settings. You might try to imagine the objects in those settings—in dark churches illuminated by intermittent sun and flickering candlelight, or in princely homes surrounded by elaborate furniture and tapestries.

The medieval artists did not try to represent human forms naturalistically, as works of art were symbolic rather than imitative of life. It was during the Renaissance that artists seriously began to try to recreate more accurately the world around them.

This depiction of the world took different appearances in Northern and Southern European art. In Flanders (parts of present-day France, Belgium, and the Netherlands), artists concentrated on the details of the world they saw, recreating the colors of the sky, the textures of fabric, flowers, and animals. In Italy, rich surface decoration gradually gave way to a focus on the structure of the world. Artists devised perspective systems to create the illusion of coherent spaces in paintings and concentrated on representing the structure and weight of the human body rather than its surface detail.

For the most part, medieval and Renaissance artists did not make art to sell on the market; instead they relied on commissions for support. The church and wealthy patrons made contracts with artists to produce works of art for specific places or purposes. Generally patrons used works of art not just as decoration, but also to promote themselves, church doctrine, or a political position. With several notable exceptions, most arts patrons were men.

During the Renaissance in Italy, visual artists improved their position in society and gained recognition as fine artists, equal to musicians or mathematicians, rather than merely as craftsmen. This raised the status of the visual arts.