Gothic Church Artwork: Stained Glass and Sculpture

With the consolidation of power between Church and nascent Medieval monarchies having been achieved in the Romanesque Period, the Gothic brought with it a marked "softening" in the images of authority and devotion; whether these were royal images of religious, their functions and images became identical. At the same time,a greater recovery of Greco-Roman Classical conventions in art occurred. We can see this in Gothic sculpture's emerging from reliefs to the round, the distribution of weight in the distinctive Gothic S-curve and the first glimmers of contrapposto, and an unprecedented degree of individualism which approaches portraiture.