Art History Survey Part 2

Byzantine influence dominated Italian art of the 13th Century but a new wave of Humanist thought in the 14th Century brought Humanist thought and a fascination with Classical culture that saw the return of realist artistic techniques derived from the innovation of Greek and Roman artistic predecessors. Humanist intellectual thought, also, predicated an interest in artists creating figures that exhibited clear and individualized emotional responses in the faces and body language of their figures. From this Humanist revival emerges the artists Duccio and Giotto who will lay the groundwork for the explosion of technical artistic innovation in the following 14th Century with the birth of the Italian Renaissance.