The Influence of Art in the Middle Ages Art is in a constant state of change, modernized every day, and this has been true since the dawn of artistry. Culture inspires artwork, people have always depicted the world around them. For medieval persons the culture that surrounded them was that of either religion or of the gruesome wars their kings fought. In the span of the Middle Ages art transforms to a more prominent degree that leads the public to have a higher appreciation for the arts. Before the sixteenth century art there was a limited variety of artwork, only a handful of people had the time to spend on anything but the basic survival of day to day life. In the early Middle Ages leisure time was an action even …show more content…
This caused all advances to be minimal, it was challenging to focus on a study when from dawn to dusk life was centered on providing for yourself, family and your lords. The monks who spent hours “pouring over books in cloisters” (Chaucer, 1993, line 189) and writing scripture were the artists of this era. While spending hours copying Latin text the monks would draw the activities and the world around them. The Luttrell Psalter, written in the fourteenth century, is a very decorated manuscript commissioned for a wealthy landowner. It is renowned for its illustrations of Lord Luttrell’s life and beautifully shows the artistic ability and depth of the Middle Ages. The Luttrell Psalter also shows that in the past three hundred years that art was still predominantly of religious theme. Psalters in the middle ages were a fundamental part of Christian devotion, a psalter was a book of songs that made up one part of the Old Testament. Very little had changed artistically in those years, but the visual techniques had progressed the well-known “Gothic figure style characterized by the linear contour drawing, vigorous modeling of faces, and the richly shaded draperies” in the thirteenth century (Fogg, 2007, p.