The Middle Ages (careful the adjective “medieval” is really tricky to spell!) was a period of about a thousand years, from the end of the Roman empire at about 400 A.D. to the beginning of the Renaissance around 1400.
So the Middle Ages comes in the MIDDLE of Ancient Greece and Rome and the Renaissance.

Like this:
Classical Antiquity
500 B.C. – 400 A.D.

The Middle Ages
400 A.D. – 1400

The Renaissance
1400s-1500s

The people who lived during this period did not know that they lived in the middle of anything! It was the people of the Renaissance who called it the Middle Ages – as a way of calling it an unimportant period that came between them (they liked themselves very much!) and the Ancient Greeks and Romans.

Petrarch (a writer and philosopher who lived in the early 1300s) described this period as the “Dark Ages” because to him it seemed to be a period of decline for human achievement, especially when he compared it to the vast cultural wealth of the Ancient Greeks and Romans. And lets face it, even the name “middle ages” has a pejorative feeling to it! After all, if you were the middle child how would you like to be called “middle,” instead of having your own name?

Of course, the period of the Middle Ages was not without its great works of art and literature, but they were different than what Petrarch valued. The works of art created in the Middle Ages were almost exclusively focused on the teachings of the Church. It was during the Middle Ages that Christianity spread among the migrating groups of people who began to settle in Europe. It is important to remember that during the Middle Ages the clergy (the monks and priests) were the only ones who could read and write. Almost every work of art created during this period was religious in nature. And although many beautiful works of art were created during the Middle Ages, we know the names of the artists only rarely, because it would have been sinful to take pride in something you created, when it was, after all, created with the help of God, for the Church itself.

Here are some common questions:

1. What do B.C. and A.D. mean?
B.C. stands for “Before Christ” and A.D. stands for (no, not “After Death”!) Anno Domini, which means “In the year of our Lord” in Latin.

2. Isn’t it strange that we count time backwards before Christ, and forwards after Christ?
Who made up this way of counting time anyway? Isn’t it a very Christian-centered way of doing things? It’s like dividing all of humanity between those who came before Christ and those who came after. But that’s exactly the way the monk who made up this way of counting time thought about things. There are other initials we can use instead of these, since we live in multicultural world not necessarily centered on Christian belief. We can also use “B.C.E” (Before the Common Era) instead of B.C. and “C.E.” (Common Era) instead of A.D. Some people and places that are not Christian use these initials instead of the traditional ones.

3. What happened in 400 A.D. to end the period of Classical Antiquity and begin the Middle Ages?
Between 300 and 400 A.D. the Roman Empire falls due to invasions of migrating peoples (remember the Huns, Visigoths and Ostrogoths?) into the empire. There were also pressures from within the Empire. Remember that the Roman Empire was enormous, comprising Western Europe, parts of Eastern Europe, North Africa, as well as Palestine). In the early 300s, a Roman Emperor named Constantine converted to Christianity, and soon after that Christianity became the only legal religion in the empire.
Van Eyck, The Madonna and the Canon Van der Paele
4. How did buying a work of art work before the modern era? For artists in the period before the modern era (before about 1800 or so), life was really different for artists than it is now. In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, works of art were commissioned: that is, they were ordered by a patron (the person paying for the work of art), and then made to order. A patron usually entered into a contract with an artist that specified how much he would be paid, what kinds of materials would be used, how long it would take to complete, and what the subject of the work would be. Not what we would consider artistic freedom, huh? It did have its advantages though. You didn’t paint something and then just hope it would sell, like artists do now! Patrons often asked to be included in the painting they had commissioned. When they appear in a religious painting we usually call them donors. In this painting, the donor is shown kneeling on the right before the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child.