Topic > Paganism in Greek, Roman, and Greco-Roman Religions

As Michelangelo once said, "Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the sculptor's job to discover it" ("Michelangelo Quotes"). During the Greek/Roman period there was little prosperity and for the first citizens who lived in this period one of the only values ​​were personal religious beliefs/ideas, mostly pagan. The expression of these beliefs/ideas was most commonly depicted through paintings, sculptures, and buildings. During the Renaissance, prosperity grew steadily but slowly. This growth was however accompanied by a flowering of philosophy, literature and above all art. Renaissance arts mainly represented the beliefs of Christianity. Considering the years that passed from the Greco-Roman age to the Renaissance, in both times art was still considered one of the great prosperity of life. Against the backdrop of different political stability and states of prosperity, both time periods were united by the importance of personal desires and beliefs. Although the Renaissance and the Greek/Roman periods were different in many ways, the two periods had similarities including the expression of the human form, body confidence, and different religious beliefs. Paganism had three main beliefs in the Greek/Roman period. periods of time. The first is the sense of pity. Piety means the natural religious instinct to respect something greater than yourself, and that humility plays a role in understanding man's subordinate place in the grand scheme of things. Moderation and temperance went hand in hand with this. In classical civilizations, some had the mottos “Nothing too much” and “Know thyself.” For man, whether pagan or Christian, moral rules were absolute. They were unyielding and unquestionable. These…middle of paper…hard times of both time periods did not tend to lose the light of standing in what they believed in spiritually and physically. The expression and love for art seemed to grow more and more as the years went by. Although pagan and Christian practices had their fair share of differences, they were similar in some ways. Both religious theologies believed in standing your ground, protecting what is yours, and helping your neighbor. In contrast, pagans believed in a more hostile aspect of protecting what was theirs, while Christians preferred to take a more compromising approach. As Leonardo Da Vinci once said: “Where if the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art”. The wonder of the human form, self-confidence, and differing views of religious preference made the Greco-Roman and Renaissance periods differential but similar..