Abstract
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.
