ART COMPARISON

Art Comparison

Art Comparison

Middle Ages characterize the peak of Renaissance arts marking Mary and Jesus. The period between 1350-1520 CE holds special importance with respects to Renaissance art (Harris 1994). Numerous accounts of this art present the collections of works devoted to Christian art. There are scenes in the life cycles of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Despite being familiar to our eyes, these resemble an iconographic content that does not correspond strictly to the canonical Gospel accounts. These visual scenes, though engendered in the bosom of the Church, respond to apocryphal stories and legends and oral traditions. Indeed, the orthodox Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), are insufficient to explain the fertile rich iconography contained in Christian visual images.

The Virgin appears with the majesty of a Byzantine Empress, San Jose looks like a Roman official judicial robes, and baby Jesus is clothed with all the attributes of kingship and shows, as an indication of his divinity, an uncommon form of cruciferous nimbus, a halo with a small gold cross over his head. The originality of the mosaics of Santa Maria Maggiore is interpreted to reflect early alien to orthodox texts even though it is precisely at the time when the church separated from the canon to the Apocryphal Gospels, believing that they were not divinely inspired. Then there is an appropriation of the Holy Family as members of the ruling nobility. Indeed, the representation of Jesus and the Virgin as imperial figures of the Roman Empire is an iconography that is sustained throughout the Middle Ages. This case, however, is one of the few examples of late Roman art, Byzantine-influenced popular (Jensen 2000). In this style frame typically fits a splendid medieval ivory carving that belongs to a series of excellent plates known as "ivories of Salerno", as occurred ...