International Gothic Style continued the movement began by the trecento Italian artists who discovered how to render space and the perspective on a bidimentional support. Artists like Master Theoderic from Prague and Master Bertam von Minden, from Hamburg, were two of the painters who along with others from France and other parts of Europe adopted and developed the style of the International Gothic that flourished by the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century. Painting, along with the other arts developed during the Middle Ages under the strong impressions and rules of the romanticism, dominated by the religious philosophy of the time. The International Gothic marked a transition from the expression of human suffering and the general idea of sin, punishment and penitence toward "a vision of pure and naive beauty, of religious fervour and profound mystic peace"(Huizinga, 222).

The international Gothic, added to the old Gothic style a different perspective. Naturalistic elements combined with non-naturalistic ones gave the religiously dominating subjects the chance to evolve into ways of expression closer related to the dawn of humanism. Material and organic forms are strictly separated in the imagistic arts of the International Gothic. The human emotions, reflections of the soul in the human form of the body...

Konrad von Soest's Crucifixion contains one naturalistic element: John's dramatic expression of suffering at the terrible sight of the crucified Christ. On the other hand, the position of the crosses, the boneless human bodies of Christ and the two thieves, the Roman soldiers that are dressed like knights, the Virgin and those around her who are rather serene than contorted by suffering, the decorations, plants and animal are non-naturalistic. The artist combined these two elements in a painting that was no statement of radical change from the Medieval Gothic, but a compromise between the decorative arts of the Middle Ages and the new art styles developed by the Italians during the first half of the fourteenth century.
Book illumination and panel painting are two painting milieus that developed the International Gothic style in France. "Book illumination, on the other hand, developed so rapidly in the direction of perspective naturalism that it finally ceased to be book illumination" (Panofsky, 1971, p. 28). "During the fourteenth century, however, the miniatures assumed more and more the character of independent paintings and about 1400 many a book illustration, entirely defying the restrictions of a decorative principle, more…