The Black Plague in the Face of Religious Art History of Italy - Report Example

How does one tell his/her story or the story of his/her people? It will be logical to say that one must look at documents in the archives section of a library to get the answer to this question. In understanding the history of past events, the aid of looking at various sources of data is necessary. While history as a discipline provides ample information for us, one must also look at other forms such as those that one sees in the arts and literature. Even if a writer has his own peculiarity in writing, and an artist has his own way of abstracting things through his paintings, one cannot disregard the fact that these bodies of knowledge can provide people with the knowledge of the world.

Though science as a body of knowledge is carefully documenting what is happening in reality, those in the humanities able to project this reality in another medium (not necessarily experimentation but more of reflective and personal experiences such as paintings, dance, music, etc.).Why do we emphasize this point at an initial part of the paper? It is to show in what sense can the analysis of paintings able to provide us patches of social realities that would help us understand the course of the event in the past, particularly our topic which is the extent and scope of the Black Death’s influence on religious painting in Italy during the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries.

For the past centuries, scientists, writers, philosophers, artists, etc. have tried to understand how humans have suffered various forms of disasters, from floods, wrathful volcanoes, drought, famine, plague among others. While these are events that people do not want to recall, remnants of the past are seen visibly around us, in the form of arts. The adaptability of human beings traverses these sufferings. The arts do not only serve us in the aesthetic sense rather it tell our stories. These stories may not be necessarily happy but the good thing about it is that we are learning from these experiences.

Among the sob stories that human beings encounter in history is that of the Black Plague.