In Western Europe in the early Middle Ages a painting was generally expected to tell a story or illustrate a theme. The people and objects in a picture were intended to represent the people and objects in the story; but that did not mean they had to look exactly as those people and objects would have looked in real life. On the contrary, to tell a story effectively, the important items in the story had to be displayed prominently in the painting, regardless of whether they would have looked prominent in actuality. To organise a picture so that it "looked like real life" would have detracted from its effectiveness as a medium for story-telling.
This meant, for example, that the size of a person in a picture would not depend on how that person actually looked in comparison with other people but on their importance in the narrative. Important people would be painted larger, unimportant people smaller. The size of buildings and natural objects would generally be reduced in comparison with the people depicted: the important thing was that they should be clearly identifiable, not that they should be visually similar.
Telling a story could mean describing a number of different incidents, and all these incidents might occur together in a mediaeval painting. Just as the most important personages would figure most prominently, so would the most important events. Thus a mediaeval painting might consist of a number of separate scenes, assembled, not in accordance with how they would appear to a person actually viewing them, but in accordance with the needs of the narrative and, beyond that, with the formal, pictorial criteria of balance and harmony.
We may presume that there were both secular and religious paintings, the secular ones in the castles and palaces, the religious ones in the churches and monasteries. However, if this was so, the bulk of the secular paintings have been destroyed and there is little we can say about them. This is not surprising. In the numerous wars that have ravaged Europe throughout the centuries churches were more likely to be spared than castles; moreover, secular paintings would tend to be destroyed when their style went out of fashion, whereas religious paintings would be held in some degree of veneration and so preserved. For this reason most of the stories and themes illustrated in surviving mediaeval paintings are from the Bible and the lives of the saints.
As the Middle Ages progressed, the function performed by religious paintings gradually changed. As the population of Europe became progressively Christianised, the biblical stories became better and better known, and consequently the need to use pictures to tell them became less urgent. Gradually the importance of the picture ceased to be to tell the story; instead people had to be shown how these stories fitted into their own everyday lives. The stories had to be made real.
If you are using a picture to tell a story, the simple way to make the story more real is to make the people and objects in the picture appear more real. In this way the spectators can identify themselves more closely with the people and situations represented. This happened rather differently in Northern Europe and Italy. In Northern Europe mediaeval painters brought ever greater precision to the depiction of the different objects and textures portrayed in a painting - furs, silks, the sheen of metal, the hanging of drapery. In Italy painters were concerned to make the human figures in their paintings more realistic. The techniques of modelling and foreshortening found in classical art were revived and used to create an illusion, not just of the three-dimensional reality of the people depicted, but also of their real emotions and expressions.
(The emphasis of Italian artists on the human figure and of Northern artists on natural and man-made objects offers a curious parallel to a similar division in music. From the time of the Roman Empire to the present day, Italian musicians have emphasised the human voice while Northern musicians have favoured instruments. We will see similar dichotomies between north and south throughout this narrative.)
Nevertheless, despite these technical innovations there was a limit to the aspirations of the mediaeval artist towards realism. For instance, although Giotto could create the illusion of a shallow space he did not attempt to depict anything deeper. His realistic figures are generally set against a background of plain colour, which may resemble the sky but is in technique little different from the gold background of Byzantine icons. Anything in the picture apart from the human figures themselves is treated conventionally. Buildings and animals, being less significant, are depicted as smaller than life; landscapes are limited to a few stylised trees and rocks. Altogether, Giotto's paintings resemble a group of people painted with great realism against a stylised stage set.
In the years around 1400 the Northern and Italian currents fused in what is known as the International Gothic style. Artists throughout Europe were able to create convincing human figures and depict a wide variety of objects and textures. The human figures might be set against a conventional plain background or they might be set against a "landscape" of stylised trees and buildings. Such a landscape would roughly follow the principle that the further away an object was the smaller it should appear, although this principle was not carried out with any serious attempt at consistency. Likewise the size of people and objects in the picture was increasingly influenced more by their apparent size in life than their importance in the story, although, again, there was no consistency in this.
Large parts of the painting were now devoted to "details" that the painter took care to render as exactly as possible, and these sections of the painting became increasingly predominant. Inexorably painters were moving towards the idea that a picture should not just represent a collection of realistic objects or a realistic group of people set against a conventional background; it should represent a view of reality in which the whole of the picture would be governed by the demands of realistic representation. One step further and this threshold would have been crossed. The mediaeval concept of a painting would have gone and the new Renaissance principles would take over.
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