Reflecting Change: The Impact Of Social Upheaval On Art In Early Modern Europe

The population decrease in Europe due to plague in the fourteenth century, as well as the rise of humanism and calls for religious reform, caused the fracturing of the perception of a monolithic Christian belief. The fractures within Western European Christianity in the late Medieval and Renaissance periods set the scene for the social and political revolutions within those periods and later. This paper will focus primarily on the manner in which the art of Europe reflected and influenced the shifts in the theological and political ideals of the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries.