The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in western Europe were a period of political turmoil, geographic exploration, and enormous artistic production. The discovery of the Americas and trade with Byzantium and the Far East enriched the cultural base of the West. In fifteenth-century Italy, artists pursued humanism, cultivated fame, and wrote treatises on art theory. Biographies and autobiographies of artists and social and moral satires were written, and science became increasingly empirical, all of which reflected an interest in human nature and human behavior. Linear perspective, in contrast to Far Eastern perspective systems and to previous Western systems, was designed to make a painting or a relief resemble a window. Through this fictive "window," viewers could observe nature represented mathematically.
In Rome, popes financed the arts, especially the New Saint Peter's, and largely determined the course of High Renaissance patronage. In northern Europe, objections to Church corruption launched the Reformation, which led to the establishment of the Protestant Church. Within the Catholic Church, calls for reform led to the Counter-Reformation, which demanded a new emphasis on spirituality and mysticism in all the arts. The development of printmaking and the perfection of movable type made images and texts more widely available than ever before.