![]() The “Mona Lisa,” probably created between 15, epitomizes many of these ideas as it is essentially a portrait, believed to be that of a wife of a Florentine cloth merchant and therefore no one particularly important yet brought to center focus. Under this vision, this entailed the provision of public services to bring these arts to the common people and worked somewhat against the teachings of the church in that it assumed that people were provided with certain rights regardless of whether they had promised themselves to God through the church. Petrarch’s humanism held that all people were essentially equal in God-given graces and that these graces were best explored through the arts, philosophy and the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans (de Bracton, 1994). However, the role of God has shifted in emphasis nearly from the beginning. In its strictest interpretation, this worldview does not allow for the existence of God, therefore man is left to construct morality for himself in order to establish civilized, ethical culture and society. Humanism is basically a secular worldview which holds that nature is all there is. To more fully understand humanism, it is helpful to examine its principles as they are expressed through one of the era’s more representative pieces, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.” The Renaissance period is characterized primarily by a philosophical focus on humanism. Many of the ancient works of these cultures focused on representing nature in perfected form (Greeks) or nature as it existed (Romans). ![]() “The term ‘Renaissance’ might now be defined as a model of cultural history in which the culture of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe is represented as a repudiation of medieval values in favor of the revival of the culture of ancient Greece and Rome” (Campbell, 2004, v-vi). This is because this cultural revival, which happened roughly between the years 14, had its start earlier than other countries in Western Europe within the major city-states of Italy. ![]()
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