¶ … Art The shift from Byzantine or Medieval art to the early Renaissance is perfectly demonstrated by examining the change in depictions of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus, or Madonna and Child, over time. What we see is a gradual tendency toward realistic depictions of human form, as a way of making religious art less remote and decorative, and more immediately related to actual human experience.

We can begin with the thirteenth-century Byzantine icon of the Madonna and Child on a Curved Throne. The painting is, in some sense, a highly stylized representation of a familiar image. The figures of mother and child do not really seem to exist in real space: for example, the gold leaf that is used for the flat backdrop behind the Madonna and Child is also used (in a decorative but not particularly realistic fashion) to highlight the folds of the Madonna's garments. Where we would expect light and shading around her knees, instead we get an excess of gold leaf, as though bright light were hitting her knees and trickling into the folds of her robe. Darker pigment here is not used for realistic depiction of light and shadow but...

The weird floating circular cameo portraits to either side of her head give a further sense of highly formal, stylized, decorative un-realism. It is also worth noting that the Christ Child here in no way attempts a realistic depiction of a human baby: his proportions are odd, he looks like a dwarf or miniaturized adult.
It is therefore astonishing to see, slowly, human reality emerging from Italian imitations of this Byzantine iconography. Cimabue's Madonna of the Holy Trinity is still toying with elements of stylization we see in the Byzantine depiction: the Virgin's garment still has its folds defined with decorative gold leaf. But the figure is now facing the viewer, and the painting seems a little more open and a little less flattened and artificial. Duccio's Maesta likewise retains elements of stylization while starting to discover elements of realism. The gold leaf to indicate the folds of the Virgin's clothing is finally absent, and instead we see the cloth represented in terms of actual light and shade. The Christ Child now begins to resemble a human infant. By the time we reach Giotto, however,…