Painting and sculpture

Artists in the Middle Ages worked for the Church. They painted pictures of Jesus and the saints on canvas, or wood, or on church walls. Then, between 1400 and 1500, there came a change. Artists in Italy began painting portraits of the people of their time. Their subjects, of course, were the rich - lords and ladies, merchants and their wives.

The new fashion spread to the rest of Europe. Painters from Italy and Germany came to England to paint Henry VIII and his wives. Nobles and gentry copied the king. They too wanted to see themselves and their families on canvas.

All the best painters came from abroad, though. There were not many great English portrait painters before the year 1700. What the English were good at was miniatures. These were small portraits that men and women hung in lockets around their necks.

Sculptors, like painters, had worked mainly for the Church. But at the Reformation, stone carvings of saints were removed. In the 1640s and 1650s, the Puritans, who hated ornaments in churches, destroyed still more. But sculpture made a come-back. By 1750 the lords and gentry were filling their houses and gardens with sculptures, most of them from abroad.

Walter Robson: Crown, Parliament and People; Oxford University Press, 1992/2002, page 92 f.