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because italy is next to the sea which provided trade routes.

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because italy is next to the sea which provided trade routes.

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There were different types of arts from different themes for example one of them was 3-D.

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There were different types of arts from different themes for example one of them was 3-D.

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A very well-known artist and influencer.

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A very well-known artist and influencer.

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A writer and very smart person that wrote things that became very famous.

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A writer and very smart person that wrote things that became very famous.

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A time period where art and curiosity took place and new things were discovered or reexamined.

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A time period where art and curiosity took place and new things were discovered or reexamined.

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Because there was a lot of art and wealth in the area

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Because there was a lot of art and wealth in the area

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A time period where art took place of a new generation.-Axel

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A time period where art took place of a new generation.-Axel

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he was a writer and a scholar, and wrote a book called "the prince" it was based on his political experiences. -cheyenne

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he was a writer and a scholar, and wrote a book called "the prince" it was based on his political experiences. -cheyenne

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He did the sistine chapel painting that was amazing, and was by far the best artist in this time period -cheyenne. 

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He did the sistine chapel painting that was amazing, and was by far the best artist in this time period -cheyenne. 

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He was one of the greatest artists and influencers in this time. -cheyenne

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He was one of the greatest artists and influencers in this time. -cheyenne

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3d arts was popular, also the art being more realistic in thid time period was a technique

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3d arts was popular, also the art being more realistic in thid time period was a technique

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It was a time period in which the specifs of art and curiosity took place in a new era called the renissance -cheyenne

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It was a time period in which the specifs of art and curiosity took place in a new era called the renissance -cheyenne

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there was much of concentration, wealth and power there. -cheyenne

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there was much of concentration, wealth and power there. -cheyenne

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He wrote a lot of things nut the best thing he wrote was a book about political stuff like that's wild.

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Best art man no competition, dude made a whole 6,000 square foot painting and started to grow mold. Amazing sculptor and architect.

Melano

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Probably the best known artist of the time although he's not as good as Michelangelo I think.

Melano

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Michleangelo was an artist who made many paintings and sculptures that were inspired by his childhood. -Dinora L

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Leonardo was a popular artist during the Renaissance mostly known for his famous peace of art known as The Mona Lesa. -Dinora L

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A popular type of art was the 3D types that were realist because realistic art was the most popular back then -Dinora L

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michelangelo he was another man that was like leo he was a really good arties --tito

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leo was an amazing arties that live during the renaissanes and was consiterd one of the best arties during that time he made alot of art but one of his most famous art peace would be the mona lesa --tito

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the techniques had a huge inprovement  with people being able to draw a person in a land scape and other thing  like it --tito

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it was a time when there was a boost in art and other things like it--tito

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because there was alot of power and money there --tito

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Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian Renaissance diplomat, philosopher and writer, best known for The Prince, written in 1513. He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy or political science.

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Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli was an Italian Renaissance diplomat, philosopher and writer, best known for The Prince, written in 1513. He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy or political science.

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Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known best as simply Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet of the High Renaissance born in the Republic of Florence, who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art.

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Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known best as simply Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet of the High Renaissance born in the Republic of Florence, who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art.

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Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time.

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Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time.

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He was a writer and a scholar. His book "The Prince" reflected on his political experience and his knowledge on ancient Roman history.

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Michelangelo was another talented artist just like Leonardo da Vinci and was often called " melancholy genius". His work showed many of his struggles. He was not only an artist but a sculptor, engineer, painter, architect, and my favorite, a poet.

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Machiavelli was a diplomat he was a good writer. He wrote a guide for rulers on how they could maintain and gain power.-marisse

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niccolò prince renaissance donald trump's 1469 1527 nicolo machiavelli dei machiavelli political makaveli

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Michelangelo was an italin artist so did many paintings and sculptures. The insperation behind is art all came from his bad childhood.-marisse

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di lodovico buonarroti simoni sculpture rome paintings sistine michael angelo renaissance vatican artwork florence italy

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Leonardo da Vinci was a very talented artist. Most of his art work was landscapes of nature and of his muses. Da Vinci's art was very realistic and was the one who painted the famous art of Mona Lisa.

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Search ResultsFeatured snippet from the webThere are four significantly different modes of techniques in the Renaissance paintings which are Cangiante, Chiaroscuro, Sfumato and Unione.

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Search ResultsFeatured snippet from the webThere are four significantly different modes of techniques in the Renaissance paintings which are Cangiante, Chiaroscuro, Sfumato and Unione.

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During the renaissance

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Leonardo was an artist he was considerd on eof the bets at that time. He painted the Mona lisa which is one of the most popular paintings.-marisse

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leonardo da vinci paintings - Google Search

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mona lisa portrait art self portrait famous paintings vinci salvator mundi wikipedia 500th anniversary famous artworks exhibition

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wrote a guide for rulers on how to gain and maintain power.  Did not discuss leadership in terms of high ideals. Daniel Leon

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The Renaissance was a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries.

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The Renaissance was a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries.

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They made about 4 different types of art one being 3D art. The realistic art was much more popular than other paintings.

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How to recognize Italian Renaissance art

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Michelangelo an artist who had many talents he is called melancholy genius because he works reflects his many life-long spiritual and artistic struggles. Daniel Leon

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He was an Italian renaissance diplomat and writer best known for the prince. -Karen Ramirez

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Leonardo an endless curiosity that fed a genius for invention. Made the Mona Lisa. made sketches of nature. Daniel Leon

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The Renaissance was a time period where alot of things changed such as social, political, economic and cultural. It was known as a "rebirth". -Dinora L

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He was an Italian sculptor,painter and he did many great known sculptures. -Karen Ramirez

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THE SISTINE CHAPEL-(With Surprising Michelangelo Facts!)

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The reason for Italy as the birthplace of the Renaissance was the concentration of wealth, power, and intellect in the Church.

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The reason for Italy as the birthplace of the Renaissance was the concentration of wealth, power, and intellect in the Church.

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The Renaissance started in Italy because there were small breaks in the Christendom atmosphere and environment that had previously shaped Italy, which led to a freedom and independence. This newfound freedom and independence along with the presence of the ruins of Roman civilization led to the Renaissance.

The Renaissance began first in the Italian city-states. These city-states had wealth from commerce and trade that were present in the Middle Ages. Venice was known for its transportation in the silk trade and the spice trade. Many merchants from India and China came in helping to bring along new ideas.

The Renaissance was able to grow continuously, thanks largely in part to the wealthy bankers in this area. These bankers patronized the arts by employing famous painters, architects and sculptors. Italy also developed an appreciation for the classical age and was able to truly live in that appreciation as Italy had many remnants from the classical age through the Romans. There was the Roman's road network, their public buildings, their monuments and their aqueducts system to be admired and researched.

Italy is also thought to have been a country that could stimulate the individualism and creativity seen in the Italian Renaissance due to its small size. It was a much smaller city-state compared to those countries surrounding it.

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The Renaissance started in Italy because there were small breaks in the Christendom atmosphere and environment that had previously shaped Italy, which led to a freedom and independence. This newfound freedom and independence along with the presence of the ruins of Roman civilization led to the Renaissance.

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Renaissance art, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature produced during the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries in Europe under the combined influences of an increased awareness of nature, a revival of classical learning, and a more individualistic view of man. Scholars no longer believe that the Renaissance marked an abrupt break with medieval values, as is suggested by the French word renaissance, literally "rebirth." Rather, historical sources suggest that interest in nature, humanistic learning, and individualism were already present in the late medieval period and became dominant in 15th- and 16th-century Italy concurrently with social and economic changes such as the secularization of daily life, the rise of a rational money-credit economy, and greatly increased social mobility.

In Italy the Renaissance proper was preceded by an important "proto-renaissance" in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, which drew inspiration from Franciscan radicalism. St. Francis had rejected the formal Scholasticism of the prevailing Christian theology and gone out among the poor praising the beauties and spiritual value of nature. His example inspired Italian artists and poets to take pleasure in the world around them. The most famous artist of the proto-renaissance period, Giotto di Bondone (1266/67 or 1276-1337), reveals a new pictorial style that depends on clear, simple structure and great psychological penetration rather than on the flat, linear decorativeness and hierarchical compositions of his predecessors and contemporaries, such as the Florentine painter Cimabue and the Siennese painters Duccio and Simone Martini. The great poet Dante lived at about the same time as Giotto, and his poetry shows a similar concern with inward experience and the subtle shades and variations of human nature. Although his Divine Comedy belongs to the Middle Ages in its plan and ideas, its subjective spirit and power of expression look forward to the Renaissance. Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio also belong to this proto-renaissance period, both through their extensive studies of Latin literature and through their writings in the vernacular. Unfortunately, the terrible plague of 1348 and subsequent civil wars submerged both the revival of humanistic studies and the growing interest in individualism and naturalism revealed in the works of Giotto and Dante. The spirit of the Renaissance did not surface again until the beginning of the 15th century.

In 1401 a competition was held at Florence to award the commission for bronze doors to be placed on the Baptistery of San Giovanni. Defeated by the goldsmith and painter Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello left for Rome, where they immersed themselves in the study of ancient architecture and sculpture. When they returned to Florence and began to put their knowledge into practice, the rationalized art of the ancient world was reborn. The founder of Renaissance painting was Masaccio (1404-28). The intellectuality of his conceptions, the monumentality of his compositions, and the high degree of naturalism in his works mark Masaccio as a pivotal figure in Renaissance painting. The succeeding generation of artists- Piero della Francesca, Pollaiuolo, and Andrea del Verrocchio-pressed forward with researches into linear and aerial perspective and anatomy, developing a style of scientific naturalism.

The situation in Florence was uniquely favourable to the arts. The civic pride of Florentines found expression in statues of the patron saints commissioned from Ghiberti and Donatello for niches in the grain-market guildhall known as Or San Michele, and in the largest dome built since antiquity, placed by Brunelleschi on the Florence cathedral. The cost of construction and decoration of palaces, churches, and monasteries was underwritten by wealthy merchant families.

Principal among these were the Medici, who dominated Florence from 1434, when the first pro-Medici government was elected, until 1492, when Lorenzo de Medici died. During their ascendancy the Medici subsidized virtually the entire range of humanistic and artistic activities associated with the Renaissance. Cosimo (1389-1464), made wealthy by his trading profits as the papal banker, was a scholar who founded the Neoplatonic academy and collected an extensive library. He gathered around him the foremost writers and classical scholars of his day, among them Marsilio Ficino, the Neoplatonist who served as the tutor of Lorenzo de Medici, Cosimo's grandson. Lorenzo (1449-92) became the centre of a group of artists, poets, scholars, and musicians who believed in the Neoplatonic ideal of a mystical union with God through the contemplation of beauty. Less naturalistic and more courtly than the prevailing spirit of the first half of the Quattrocento, this aesthetic philosophy was elucidated by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, incarnated in painting by Sandro Botticelli, and expressed in poetry by Lorenzo himself. Lorenzo also collaborated with the organist and choirmaster of the Florence cathedral, Heinrich Isaac, in the composition of lively secular choral music which anticipated the madrigal, a characteristic form of the High Renaissance.

The Medici traded in all of the major cities in Europe, and one of the most famous masterpieces of Northern Renaissance art, the Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes ( c. 1476; Uffizi, Florence), was commissioned by their agent, Tommaso Portinari. Instead of being painted with the customary tempera of the period, the work is painted with translucent oil glazes that produce brilliant jewel-like colour and a glossy surface. Early Northern Renaissance painters were more concerned with the detailed reproduction of objects and their symbolic meaning than with the study of scientific perspective and anatomy even after these achievements became widely known. On the other hand, central Italian painters began to adopt the oil painting medium soon after the Portinari Altarpiece was brought to Florence in 1476.

High Renaissance art, which flourished for about 35 years, from the early 1490s to 1527, when Rome was sacked by imperial troops, revolves around three towering figures: Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Michelangelo (1475-1564), and Raphael (1483-1520). Each of the three embodies an important aspect of the period: Leonardo was the ultimate Renaissance man, a solitary genius to whom no branch of study was foreign; Michelangelo emanated creative power, conceiving vast projects that drew for inspiration on the human body as the ultimate vehicle for emotional expression; Raphael created works that perfectly expressed the classical spirit-harmonious, beautiful, and serene.

Although Leonardo was recognized in his own time as a great artist, his restless researches into anatomy, the nature of flight, and the structure of plant and animal life left him little time to paint. His fame rests mainly on a few completed paintings; among them are the Mona Lisa (1503-05, Louvre), The Virgin of the Rocks (1483-86, Louvre), and the sadly deteriorated fresco The Last Supper (1495-98; restored 1978-99; Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan).

Michelangelo's early sculpture, such as the Pietà (1499; St. Peter's, Rome) and the David (1501-04; Accademia, Florence), reveals a breathtaking technical ability in concert with a disposition to bend rules of anatomy and proportion in the service of greater expressive power. Although Michelangelo thought of himself first as a sculptor, his best known work is the giant ceiling fresco of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, Rome. It was completed in four years, from 1508 to 1512, and presents an incredibly complex but philosophically unified composition that fuses traditional Christian theology with Neoplatonic thought.

Raphael's greatest work, School of Athens (1508-11), was painted in the Vatican at the same time that Michelangelo was working on the Sistine Chapel. In this large fresco Raphael brings together representatives of the Aristotelian and Platonic schools of thought. Instead of the densely packed, turbulent surface of Michelangelo's masterpiece, Raphael places his groups of calmly conversing philosophers and artists in a vast court with vaults receding into the distance. Raphael was initially influenced by Leonardo, and he incorporated the pyramidal composition and beautifully modelled faces of The Virgin of the Rocks into many of his own paintings of the Madonna. He differed from Leonardo, however, in his prodigious output, his even temperament, and his preference for classical harmony and clarity.

The creator of High Renaissance architecture was Donato Bramante (1444-1514), who came to Rome in 1499 when he was 55. His first Roman masterpiece, the Tempietto (1502) at S. Pietro in Montorio, is a centralized dome structure that recalls classical temple architecture. Pope Julius II (reigned 1503-13) chose Bramante to be papal architect, and together they devised a plan to replace the 4th-century Old St. Peter's with a new church of gigantic dimensions. The project was not completed, however, until long after Bramante's death.

Humanistic studies continued under the powerful popes of the High Renaissance, Julius II and Leo X, as did the development of polyphonic music. The Sistine Choir, which performed at services when the pope officiated, drew musicians and singers from all of Italy and northern Europe. Among the most famous composers who became members were Josquin des Prez ( c. 1450-1521) and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina ( c. 1525-94).

The Renaissance as a unified historical period ended with the fall of Rome in 1527. The strains between Christian faith and classical humanism led to Mannerism in the latter part of the 16th century. Great works of art animated by the Renaissance spirit, however, continued to be made in northern Italy and in northern Europe.

Seemingly unaffected by the Mannerist crisis, northern Italian painters such as Correggio (1494-1534) and Titian (1488/90-1576) continued to celebrate both Venus and the Virgin Mary without apparent conflict. The oil medium, introduced to northern Italy by Antonello da Messina and quickly adopted by Venetian painters who could not use fresco because of the damp climate, seemed particularly adapted to the sanguine, pleasure-loving culture of Venice. A succession of brilliant painters- Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese-developed the lyrical Venetian painting style that combined pagan subject matter, sensuous handling of colour and paint surface, and a love of extravagant settings. Closer in spirit to the more intellectual Florentines of the Quattrocento was the German painter Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), who experimented with optics, studied nature assiduously, and disseminated his powerful synthesis of Renaissance and Northern Gothic styles through the Western world by means of his engravings and woodcuts.

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Renaissance art | Definition, Characteristics, Style, Examples, & Facts

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Renaissance art, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and literature produced during the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries in Europe under the combined influences of an increased awareness of nature, a revival of classical learning, and a more individualistic view of man.

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Niccolo Machiavelli was a diplomat, and he wrote a book on how to attain power. However, a lot of Machiavelli's advice was quite controversial, putting him under criticism. In fact, his name is the root of the word "Machiavellian."
Ada Santos

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The painters of the renaissance devolved perspective to realistically depict 3d objects in a 3d space. Now perspective is a major fundamental within illustration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projective_geometry

Melano

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He was an artist he was considered one of the greatest painters of all time. he painted the Mona Lisa painting one of the most famous paintings.- Karen Ramirez

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The Italian Renaissance ( Italian: Rinascimento [rinaʃʃiˈmento]) was a period in Italian history covering the 15th and 16th centuries. The period is known for the initial development of the broader Renaissance culture that spread across Western Europe and marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. Proponents of a "long Renaissance" argue that it started around the year 1300 and lasted until about 1600. In some fields, a Proto-Renaissance, beginning around 1250, is typically accepted. The French word renaissance (corresponding to rinascimento in Italian) means "rebirth", and defines the period as one of cultural revival and renewed interest in Classical antiquity after the centuries during what Renaissance humanists labelled as the "Dark Ages". The Italian Renaissance historian Giorgio Vasari used the term rinascita ("rebirth") in his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects in 1550, but the concept became widespread only in the 19th century, after the work of scholars such as Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt.

The Renaissance began in Tuscany in Central Italy and centred in the city of Florence. The Florentine Republic, one of the several city-states of the peninsula, rose to economic and political prominence by providing credit for European monarchs and by laying down the groundwork for developments in capitalism and in banking. Renaissance culture later spread to Venice, the heart of a Mediterranean empire and in control of the trade routes with the east since its participation in the Crusades and following the journeys of Marco Polo between 1271 and 1295. Thus Italy renewed contact with the remains of ancient Greek culture, which provided humanist scholars with new texts. Finally the Renaissance had a significant effect on the Papal States and on Rome, largely rebuilt by humanist and Renaissance popes, such as Julius II ( r. 1503-1513) and Leo X ( r. 1513-1521), who frequently became involved in Italian politics, in arbitrating disputes between competing colonial powers and in opposing the Protestant Reformation, which started c.  1517.

Accounts of proto- Renaissance literature usually begin with the three great Italian writers of the 14th century: Dante Alighieri (Divine Comedy), Petrarch (Canzoniere), and Boccaccio (). Famous vernacular poets of the Renaissance include the epic authors Luigi Pulci (author of ), Matteo Maria Boiardo (Orlando Innamorato), Ludovico Ariosto (Orlando Furioso), and Torquato Tasso (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581). 15th-century writers such as the poet Poliziano (1454-1494) and the Platonist philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) made extensive translations from both Latin and Greek. In the early 16th century, Baldassare Castiglione laid out his vision of the ideal gentleman and lady in The Book of the Courtier (1528), while Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) cast a jaundiced eye on la verità effettuale della cosa 'the effectual truth of things' in , composed, in humanistic style, chiefly of parallel ancient and modern examples of virtù. Historians of the period include Machiavelli himself, his friend and critic Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540) and Giovanni Botero (The Reason of State, 1589). The Aldine Press, founded in 1494 by the printer Aldo Manuzio, active in Venice, developed Italic type and pocket editions that one could carry in one's pocket; it became the first to publish printed editions of books in Ancient Greek. Venice also became the birthplace of the commedia dell'arte.

Italian Renaissance art exercised a dominant influence on subsequent European painting and sculpture for centuries afterwards, with artists such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Michelangelo (1475-1564), Raphael (1483-1520), Donatello ( c. 1386-1466), Giotto ( c. 1267-1337), Masaccio (1401-1428), Fra Angelico ( c. 1395-1455), Piero della Francesca ( c. 1415-1492), Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448-1494), Perugino ( c. 1446-1523), Botticelli ( c. 1445-1510), and Titian ( c. 1488-1576). Italian Renaissance architecture had a similar Europe-wide impact, as practised by Brunelleschi (1377-1446), Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), Andrea Palladio (1508-1580), and Bramante (1444-1514). Their works include the Florence Cathedral (built from 1296 to 1436), St. Peter's Basilica (built 1506-1626) in Rome, and the Tempio Malatestiano (reconstructed from c. 1450) in Rimini, as well as several private residences. The musical era of the Italian Renaissance featured composers such as Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina ( c. 1525-1594), the Roman School and later the Venetian School, and the birth of opera through figures like Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) in Florence. In philosophy, thinkers such as Galileo, Machiavelli, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) and Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) emphasized naturalism and humanism, thus rejecting dogma and scholasticism.

By the Late Middle Ages ( c. 1300 onward), Latium, the former heartland of the Roman Empire, and southern Italy were generally poorer than the North. Rome was a city of ancient ruins, and the Papal States were loosely administered, and vulnerable to external interference, particularly by France, and later Spain. The Papacy was affronted when the Avignon Papacy was created in southern France as a consequence of pressure from King Philip the Fair of France. In the south, Sicily had for some time been under foreign domination, by the Arabs and then the Normans. Sicily had prospered for 150 years during the Emirate of Sicily and later for two centuries during the Norman Kingdom and the Hohenstaufen Kingdom, but had declined by the late Middle Ages.

In contrast, Northern and Central Italy had become far more prosperous, and it has been calculated that the region was among the richest in Europe. The Crusades had built trade links to the Levant, and the Fourth Crusade had done much to destroy the Byzantine Empire as a commercial rival to the Venetians and the Genoese. The main trade routes from the east passed through the Byzantine Empire or the Arab lands and onward to the ports of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice. Luxury goods bought in the Levant, such as spices, dyes, and silks were imported to Italy and then resold throughout Europe. Moreover, the inland city-states profited from the rich agricultural land of the Po valley. From France, Germany, and the Low Countries, through the medium of the Champagne fairs, land and river trade routes brought goods such as wool, wheat, and precious metals into the region. The extensive trade that stretched from Egypt to the Baltic generated substantial surpluses that allowed significant investment in mining and agriculture. By the 14th century, the city of Venice had become an emporium for lands as far as Cyprus; it boasted a naval fleet of over 5000 ships thanks to its arsenal, a vast complex of shipyards that was the first European facility to mass-produce commercial and military vessels. Genoa also had become a maritime power. Thus, while northern Italy was not richer in resources than many other parts of Europe, the level of development, stimulated by trade, allowed it to prosper. In particular, Florence became one of the wealthiest of the cities of Northern Italy, mainly due to its woollen textile production, developed under the supervision of its dominant trade guild, the Arte della Lana. Wool was imported from Northern Europe (and in the 16th century from Spain) and together with dyes from the east were used to make high-quality textiles.

The Italian trade routes that covered the Mediterranean and beyond were also major conduits of culture and knowledge. The recovery of lost Greek classics brought to Italy by refugee Byzantine scholars who migrated during and following the Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century were important in sparking the new linguistic studies of the Renaissance, in newly created academies in Florence and Venice. Humanist scholars searched monastic libraries for ancient manuscripts and recovered Tacitus and other Latin authors. The rediscovery of Vitruvius meant that the architectural principles of Antiquity could be observed once more, and Renaissance artists were encouraged, in the atmosphere of humanist optimism, to excel in the achievements of the Ancients, like Apelles, of whom they read.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD, the Catholic Church filled the subsequent vacuum. In the Middle Ages, the Church was considered to be conveying the will of God, and it regulated the standard of behaviour in life. A lack of literacy required most people to rely on the priest's explanation of the Bible and laws.

In the eleventh century, the Church persecuted many groups including pagans, Jews, and lepers in order to eliminate irregularities in society and strengthen its power. In response to the laity's challenge to Church authority, bishops played an important role, as they gradually lost control of secular authority, and to regain the power of discourse, they adopted extreme control methods, such as persecuting infidels.

The Church also collected wealth from believers in the Middle Ages, such as through the sale of indulgences. It also did not pay taxes, making the Church's wealth even more than some kings.

In the 13th century, much of Europe experienced strong economic growth. The trade routes of the Italian states linked with those of established Mediterranean ports and eventually the Hanseatic League of the Baltic and northern regions of Europe to create a network economy in Europe for the first time since the 4th century. The city-states of Italy expanded greatly during this period and grew in power to become de facto fully independent of the Holy Roman Empire; apart from the Kingdom of Naples, outside powers kept their armies out of Italy. During this period, the modern commercial infrastructure developed, with double-entry book-keeping, joint stock companies, an international banking system, a systematized foreign exchange market, insurance, and government debt. Florence became the centre of this financial industry and the gold florin became the main currency of international trade.

The new mercantile governing class, who gained their position through financial skill, adapted to their purposes the feudal aristocratic model that had dominated Europe in the Middle Ages. A feature of the High Middle Ages in Northern Italy was the rise of the urban communes which had broken from the control by bishops and local counts. In much of the region, the landed nobility was poorer than the urban patriarchs in the High Medieval money economy whose inflationary rise left land-holding aristocrats impoverished. The increase in trade during the early Renaissance enhanced these characteristics. The decline of feudalism and the rise of cities influenced each other; for example, the demand for luxury goods led to an increase in trade, which led to greater numbers of tradesmen becoming wealthy, who, in turn, demanded more luxury goods. This atmosphere of assumed luxury of the time created a need for the creation of visual symbols of wealth, an important way to show a family's affluence and taste.

This change also gave the merchants almost complete control of the governments of the Italian city-states, again enhancing trade. One of the most important effects of this political control was security. Those who grew extremely wealthy in a feudal state ran the constant risk of running afoul of the monarchy and having their lands confiscated, as famously occurred to Jacques Cœur in France. The northern states also kept many medieval laws that severely hampered commerce, such as those against usury, and prohibitions on trading with non-Christians. In the city-states of Italy, these laws were repealed or rewritten.

The 14th century saw a series of catastrophes that caused the European economy to go into recession. The Medieval Warm Period was ending as the transition to the Little Ice Age began. This climate change saw agricultural output decline significantly, leading to repeated famines, exacerbated by the rapid population growth of the earlier era. The Hundred Years' War between England and France disrupted trade throughout northwest Europe, most notably when, in 1345, King Edward III of England repudiated his debts, contributing to the collapse of the two largest Florentine banks, those of the Bardi and Peruzzi. In the east, war was also disrupting trade routes, as the Ottoman Empire began to expand throughout the region. Most devastating, though, was the Black Death that decimated the populations of the densely populated cities of Northern Italy and returned at intervals thereafter. Florence, for instance, which had a pre-plague population of 45,000 decreased over the next 47 years by 25-50%. Widespread disorder followed, including a revolt of Florentine textile workers, the , in 1378.

Portrait of Dante Alighieri by Cristofano dell'Altissimo, Uffizi Gallery Florence, 1552-1568

It was during this period of instability that authors such as Dante and Petrarch lived, and the first stirrings of Renaissance art were to be seen, notably in the realism of Giotto. Paradoxically, some of these disasters would help establish the Renaissance. The Black Death wiped out a third of Europe's population. The resulting labour shortage increased wages and the reduced population was therefore much wealthier, better fed, and, significantly, had more surplus money to spend on luxury goods. As incidences of the plague began to decline in the early 15th century, Europe's devastated population once again began to grow. The new demand for products and services also helped create a growing class of bankers, merchants, and skilled artisans. The horrors of the Black Death and the seeming inability of the Church to provide relief would contribute to a decline of church influence. Additionally, the collapse of the Bardi and Peruzzi banks would open the way for the Medici to rise to prominence in Florence. Roberto Sabatino Lopez argues that the economic collapse was a crucial cause of the Renaissance. According to this view, in a more prosperous era, businessmen would have quickly reinvested their earnings in order to make more money in a climate favourable to investment. However, in the leaner years of the 14th century, the wealthy found few promising investment opportunities for their earnings and instead chose to spend more on culture and art.

Unlike Roman texts, which had been preserved and studied in Western Europe since late antiquity, the study of ancient Greek texts was very limited in medieval Italy. Ancient Greek works on science, maths and philosophy had been studied since the High Middle Ages in Western Europe and in the Islamic Golden Age (normally in translation), but Greek literary, oratorical and historical works (such as Homer, the Greek dramatists, Demosthenes and Thucydides) were not studied in either the Latin or medieval Muslim worlds; in the Middle Ages these sorts of texts were only studied by Byzantine scholars. Some argue that the Timurid Renaissance in Samarkand was linked with the Ottoman Empire, whose conquests led to the migration of Greek scholars to Italy. One of the greatest achievements of Italian Renaissance scholars was to bring this entire class of Greek cultural works back into Western Europe for the first time since late antiquity.

Another popular explanation for the Italian Renaissance is the thesis, first advanced by historian Hans Baron, that states that the primary impetus of the early Renaissance was the long-running series of wars between Florence and Milan. By the late 14th century, Milan had become a centralized monarchy under the control of the Visconti family. Giangaleazzo Visconti, who ruled the city from 1378 to 1402, was renowned both for his cruelty and for his abilities, and set about building an empire in Northern Italy. He launched a long series of wars, with Milan steadily conquering neighbouring states and defeating the various coalitions led by Florence that sought in vain to halt the advance. This culminated in the 1402 siege of Florence when it looked as though the city was doomed to fall, before Giangaleazzo suddenly died and his empire collapsed.

Baron's thesis suggests that during these long wars, the leading figures of Florence rallied the people by presenting the war as one between the free republic and a despotic monarchy, between the ideals of the Greek and Roman Republics and those of the Roman Empire and Medieval kingdoms. For Baron, the most important figure in crafting this ideology was Leonardo Bruni. This time of crisis in Florence was the period when the most influential figures of the early Renaissance were coming of age, such as Ghiberti, Donatello, Masolino, and Brunelleschi. Inculcated with this republican ideology they later went on to advocate republican ideas that were to have an enormous impact on the Renaissance.

Pandolfo Malatesta (1417-1468), lord of Rimini, by Piero della Francesca. Malatesta was a capable condottiere, following the tradition of his family. He was hired by the Venetians to fight against the Turks (unsuccessfully) in 1465, and was the patron of Leone Battista Alberti, whose Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini is one of the first entirely classical buildings of the Renaissance.

The first part of the Renaissance saw almost constant warfare on land and sea as the city-states vied for preeminence. On land, these wars were primarily fought by armies of mercenaries known as condottieri, bands of soldiers drawn from around Europe, but especially Germany and Switzerland, led largely by Italian captains. The mercenaries were not willing to risk their lives unduly, and war became one largely of sieges and manoeuvring, occasioning few pitched battles. It was also in the interest of mercenaries on both sides to prolong any conflict, to continue their employment. Mercenaries were also a constant threat to their employers; if not paid, they often turned on their patron. If it became obvious that a state was entirely dependent on mercenaries, the temptation was great for the mercenaries to take over the running of it themselves-this occurred on a number of occasions. Neutrality was maintained with France, which found itself surrounded by enemies when Spain disputed Charles VIII's claim to the Kingdom of Naples. Peace with France ended when Charles VIII invaded Italy to take Naples.

At sea, Italian city-states sent many fleets out to do battle. The main contenders were Pisa, Genoa, and Venice, but after a long conflict, the Genoese succeeded in reducing Pisa. Venice proved to be a more powerful adversary, and with the decline of Genoese power during the 15th century Venice became pre-eminent on the seas. In response to threats from the landward side, from the early 15th century Venice developed an increased interest in controlling the terrafirma as the Venetian Renaissance opened.

On land, decades of fighting saw Florence, Milan, and Venice emerge as the dominant players, and these three powers finally set aside their differences and agreed to the Peace of Lodi in 1454, which saw relative calm brought to the region for the first time in centuries. This peace would hold for the next forty years, and Venice's unquestioned hegemony over the sea also led to unprecedented peace for much of the rest of the 15th century. At the beginning of the 15th century, adventurers and traders such as Niccolò Da Conti (1395-1469) travelled as far as Southeast Asia and back, bringing fresh knowledge on the state of the world, presaging further European voyages of exploration in the years to come.

Until the late 14th century, prior to the Medici, Florence's leading family were the House of Albizzi. In 1293 the Ordinances of Justice were enacted which effectively became the constitution of the Republic of Florence throughout the Italian Renaissance. The city's numerous luxurious palazzi were becoming surrounded by townhouses, built by the ever prospering merchant class. In 1298, one of the leading banking families of Europe, the Bonsignoris, were bankrupted and so the city of Siena lost her status as the banking centre of Europe to Florence.

Portrait of Cosimo de' Medici by Jacopo Pontormo (ca. 1518-1520)

The main challengers of the Albizzi family were the Medicis, first under Giovanni de' Medici, and later under his son Cosimo de' Medici. The Medici controlled the Medici bank-then Europe's largest bank-and an array of other enterprises in Florence and elsewhere. In 1433, the Albizzi managed to have Cosimo exiled. The next year, however, saw a pro-Medici Signoria elected and Cosimo returned. The Medici became the town's leading family, a position they would hold for the next three centuries. Florence organized the trade routes for commodities between England and the Netherlands, France, and Italy. By the middle of the century, the city had become the banking capital of Europe and thereby obtained vast riches. In 1439, Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaiologos attended a council in Florence in an attempt to unify the Eastern and Western Churches. This brought books and, especially after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, an influx of scholars to the city. Ancient Greece began to be studied with renewed interest, especially the Neoplatonic school of thought, which was the subject of an academy established by the Medici.

Florence remained a republic until 1532 (see Duchy of Florence), traditionally marking the end of the High Renaissance in Florence, but the instruments of republican government were firmly under the control of the Medici and their allies, save during the intervals after 1494 and 1527. Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici rarely held official posts but were the unquestioned leaders. Cosimo was highly popular among the citizenry, mainly for bringing an era of stability and prosperity to the town. One of his most important accomplishments was negotiating the Peace of Lodi with Francesco Sforza ending the decades of war with Milan and bringing stability to much of Northern Italy. Cosimo was also an important patron of the arts, directly and indirectly, by the influential example he set.

Cosimo was succeeded by his sickly son Piero de' Medici, who died after five years in charge of the city. In 1469 the reins of power passed to Cosimo's 21-year-old grandson Lorenzo, who would become known as "Lorenzo the Magnificent." Lorenzo was the first of the family to be educated from an early age in the humanist tradition and is best known as one of the Renaissance's most important patrons of the arts. Lorenzo reformed Florence's ruling council from 100 members to 70, formalizing the Medici rule. The republican institutions continued, but they lost all power. Lorenzo was less successful than his illustrious forebears in business, and the Medici commercial empire was slowly eroded. Lorenzo continued the alliance with Milan, but relations with the papacy soured, and in 1478, Papal agents allied with the Pazzi family in an attempt to assassinate Lorenzo. Although the Pazzi conspiracy failed, Lorenzo's young brother, Giuliano, was killed, and the failed assassination led to a war with the Papacy and was used as justification to further centralize power in Lorenzo's hands.

Leonardo da Vinci, Italian Renaissance Man, 1512

In 1417 the Papacy returned to Rome, but that once-imperial city remained poor and largely in ruins through the first years of the Renaissance. The great transformation began under Pope Nicholas V, who became pontiff in 1447. He launched a dramatic rebuilding effort that would eventually see much of the city renewed. The humanist scholar Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini became Pope Pius II in 1458. As the papacy fell under the control of wealthy families, such as the Medici and the Borgias, the spirit of Renaissance art and philosophy came to dominate the Vatican. Pope Sixtus IV continued Nicholas' work, most famously ordering the construction of the Sistine Chapel. The popes also became increasingly secular rulers as the Papal States were forged into a centralized power by a series of "warrior popes".

The nature of the Renaissance also changed in the late 15th century. The Renaissance ideal was fully adopted by the ruling classes and the aristocracy. In the early Renaissance artists were seen as craftsmen with little prestige or recognition. By the later Renaissance, the top figures wielded great influence and could charge great fees. A flourishing trade in Renaissance art developed. While in the early Renaissance many of the leading artists were of lower- or middle-class origins, increasingly they became aristocrats.

As a cultural movement, the Italian Renaissance affected only a small part of the population. Italy was the most urbanized region of Europe, but three-quarters of the people were still rural peasants. For this section of the population, life remained essentially unchanged from the Middle Ages. Classic feudalism had never been prominent in Northern Italy, and most peasants worked on private farms or as sharecroppers. Some scholars see a trend towards refeudalization in the later Renaissance as the urban elites turned themselves into landed aristocrats.

The situation differed in the cities. These were dominated by a commercial elite; as exclusive as the aristocracy of any Medieval kingdom. This group became the main patrons of and audience for Renaissance culture. Below them, there was a large class of artisans and guild members who lived comfortable lives and had significant power in the republican governments. This was in sharp contrast to the rest of Europe where artisans were firmly in the lower class. Literate and educated, this group participated in the Renaissance culture. The largest section of the urban population was the urban poor of semi-skilled workers and the unemployed. Like the peasants, the Renaissance had little effect on them. Historians debate how easy it was to move between these groups during the Italian Renaissance. Examples of individuals who rose from humble beginnings can be instanced, but Burke notes two major studies in this area that have found that the data do not clearly demonstrate an increase in social mobility. Most historians feel that early in the Renaissance social mobility was quite high, but that it faded over the course of the 15th century. Inequality in society was very high. An upper-class figure would control hundreds of times more income than a servant or labourer. Some historians see this unequal distribution of wealth as important to the Renaissance, as art patronage relies on the very wealthy.

The Renaissance was not a period of great social or economic change, only of cultural and ideological development. It only touched a small fraction of the population, and in modern times this has led many historians, such as any that follow historical materialism, to reduce the importance of the Renaissance in human history. These historians tend to think in terms of " Early Modern Europe" instead. Roger Osborne argues that "The Renaissance is a difficult concept for historians because the history of Europe quite suddenly turns into a history of Italian painting, sculpture and architecture."

Giulio Clovio, Adoration of the Magi and Solomon Adored by the Queen of Sheba from the Farnese Hours, 1546

The end of the Italian Renaissance is as imprecisely marked as its starting point. For many, the rise to power in Florence of the austere monk Girolamo Savonarola in 1494-1498 marks the end of the city's flourishing; for others, the triumphant return of the Medici family to power in 1512 marks the beginning of the late phase in the Renaissance arts called Mannerism. Other accounts trace the end of the Italian Renaissance to the French invasions of the early 16th century and the subsequent conflict between France and Spanish rulers for control of Italian territory. Savonarola rode to power on a widespread backlash over the secularism and indulgence of the Renaissance. His brief rule saw many works of art destroyed in the " Bonfire of the Vanities" in the centre of Florence. With the Medici returned to power, now as Grand Dukes of Tuscany, the counter-movement in the church continued. In 1542 the Sacred Congregation of the Inquisition was formed and a few years later the Index Librorum Prohibitorum banned a wide array of Renaissance works of literature, which marks the end of the illuminated manuscript together with Giulio Clovio, who is considered the greatest illuminator of the Italian High Renaissance, and arguably the last very notable artist in the long tradition of the illuminated manuscript, before some modern revivals.

Under the suppression of the Catholic Church and the ravages of war, humanism became "akin to heresy".

Equally important was the end of stability with a series of foreign invasions of Italy known as the Italian Wars that would continue for several decades. These began with the 1494 invasion by France that wreaked widespread devastation on Northern Italy and ended the independence of many of the city-states. Most damaging was the 6 May 1527, Spanish and German troops' sacking Rome that for two decades all but ended the role of the Papacy as the largest patron of Renaissance art and architecture.

While the Italian Renaissance was fading, the Northern Renaissance adopted many of its ideals and transformed its styles. A number of Italy's greatest artists chose to emigrate. The most notable example was Leonardo da Vinci, who left for France in 1516, but teams of lesser artists invited to transform the Château de Fontainebleau created the School of Fontainebleau that infused the style of the Italian Renaissance in France. From Fontainebleau, the new styles, transformed by Mannerism, brought the Renaissance to the Low Countries and thence throughout Northern Europe.

This spread north was also representative of a larger trend. No longer was the Mediterranean Europe's most important trade route. In 1498, Vasco da Gama reached India, and from that date the primary route of goods from the Orient was through the Atlantic ports of Lisbon, Seville, Nantes, Bristol, and London.

The thirteenth-century Italian literary revolution helped set the stage for the Renaissance. Before the Renaissance, the Italian language was not the literary language in Italy. It was only in the 13th century that Italian authors began writing in their native language rather than Latin, French, or Provençal. The 1250s saw a major change in Italian poetry as the Dolce Stil Novo ( Sweet New Style, which emphasized Platonic rather than courtly love) came into its own, pioneered by poets like Guittone d'Arezzo and Guido Guinizelli. Especially in poetry, major changes in Italian literature had been taking place decades before the Renaissance truly began.

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), the author of The Prince and prototypical Renaissance man. Detail from a portrait by Santi di Tito.

With the printing of books initiated in Venice by Aldus Manutius, an increasing number of works began to be published in the Italian language in addition to the flood of Latin and Greek texts that constituted the mainstream of the Italian Renaissance. The source for these works expanded beyond works of theology and towards the pre-Christian eras of Imperial Rome and Ancient Greece. This is not to say that no religious works were published in this period: Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy reflects a distinctly medieval world view. Christianity remained a major influence for artists and authors, with the classics coming into their own as a second primary influence.

In the early Italian Renaissance, much of the focus was on translating and studying classic works from Latin and Greek. Renaissance authors were not content to rest on the laurels of ancient authors, however. Many authors attempted to integrate the methods and styles of the ancient Greeks into their own works. Among the most emulated Romans are Cicero, Horace, Sallust, and Virgil. Among the Greeks, Aristotle, Homer, and Plato were now being read in the original for the first time since the 4th century, though Greek compositions were few.

The literature and poetry of the Renaissance were largely influenced by the developing science and philosophy. The humanist Francesco Petrarch, a key figure in the renewed sense of scholarship, was also an accomplished poet, publishing several important works of poetry. He wrote poetry in Latin, notably the Punic War epic , but is today remembered for his works in the Italian vernacular, especially the Canzoniere, a collection of love sonnets dedicated to his unrequited love Laura. He was the foremost writer of Petrarchan sonnets, and translations of his work into English by Thomas Wyatt established the sonnet form in that country, where it was employed by William Shakespeare and countless other poets.

Petrarch's disciple, Giovanni Boccaccio, became a major author in his own right. His major work was the , a collection of 100 stories told by ten storytellers who have fled to the outskirts of Florence to escape the black plague over ten nights. The Decameron in particular and Boccaccio's work, in general, were a major source of inspiration and plots for many English authors in the Renaissance, including Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare.

Aside from Christianity, classical antiquity, and scholarship, a fourth influence on Renaissance literature was politics. The political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli's most famous works are Discourses on Livy, Florentine Histories and finally , which has become so well known in modern societies that the word Machiavellian has come to refer to the cunning and ruthless actions advocated by the book. Along with many other Renaissance works, The Prince remains a relevant and influential work of literature today.

Many Italian Renaissance humanists also praised and affirmed the beauty of the body in poetry and literature. In Baldassare Rasinus's panegyric for Francesco Sforza, Rasinus considered that beautiful people usually have virtue. In northern Italy, humanists had discussions about the connection between physical beauty and inner virtues. In Renaissance Italy, virtue and beauty were often linked together to praise men.

Petrarch, from the Cycle of Famous Men and Women. ca. 1450. Detached fresco. 247 cm × 153 cm (97.24 in × 60.24 in). Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy. Artist: Andrea di Bartolo di Bargilla (ca. 1423-1457).

One role of Petrarch is as the founder of a new method of scholarship, Renaissance humanism.

Petrarch encouraged the study of the Latin classics and carried his copy of Homer about, at a loss to find someone to teach him to read Greek. An essential step in the classic humanist education being propounded by scholars like Pico della Mirandola was the hunting down of lost or forgotten manuscripts that were known only by reputation. These endeavours were greatly aided by the wealth of Italian patricians, merchant-princes and despots, who would spend substantial sums building libraries. Discovering the past had become fashionable and it was a passionate affair pervading the upper reaches of society. I go, said Cyriac of Ancona, I go to awake the dead. As the Greek works were acquired, manuscripts found, libraries and museums formed, the age of the printing press was dawning. The works of Antiquity were translated from Greek and Latin into the contemporary modern languages throughout Europe, finding a receptive middle-class audience, which might be, like Shakespeare, "with little Latin and less Greek".

While concern for philosophy, art, and literature all increased greatly in the Renaissance, the period is usually seen as one of scientific backwardness. The reverence for classical sources further enshrined the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of the universe. Humanism stressed that nature came to be viewed as an animate spiritual creation that was not governed by laws or mathematics. At the same time, philosophy lost much of its rigour as the rules of logic and deduction were seen as secondary to intuition and emotion.

During the Renaissance, great advances occurred in geography, astronomy, chemistry, physics, mathematics, manufacturing, anatomy and engineering. The collection of ancient scientific texts began in earnest at the start of the 15th century and continued up to the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, and the invention of printing democratized learning and allowed a faster propagation of new ideas. Although humanists often favoured human-centred subjects like politics and history over study of natural philosophy or applied mathematics, many others went beyond these interests and had a positive influence on mathematics and science by rediscovering lost or obscure texts and by emphasizing the study of original languages and the correct reading of texts.

Italian universities such as Padua, Bologna and Pisa were scientific centres of renown and with many northern European students, the science of the Renaissance spread to Northern Europe and flourished there as well. Figures such as Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo made contributions to scientific thought and experimentation, paving the way for the scientific revolution that later flourished in Northern Europe. Bodies were also stolen from gallows and examined by many like Andreas Vesalius, a professor of anatomy. This allowed him to create more accurate skeleton models by making more than 200 corrections to the works of Galen who dissected animals.

Mathematics

Major developments in mathematics include the spread of algebra throughout Europe, especially Italy. Luca Pacioli published a book on mathematics at the end of the fifteenth century, in which he first published positive and negative signs. Basic mathematical symbols were introduced by Simon Stevin in the 16th and early 17th centuries. Symbolic algebra was established by the French mathematician François Viete in the 16th century. He published "Introduction to Analytical Methods" in 1591, systematically sorting out algebra, and for the first time consciously using letters to represent unknown and known numbers. In his other book "On the Recognition and Correction of Equations", Viete improved the solution of the third-degree and fourth-degree equations, and also established the relationship between the roots and coefficients of quadratic and cubic equations, which is called "Viete's formulas" now. Trigonometry also achieved greater development during the Renaissance. The German mathematician Regiomontanus's "On Triangles of All Kinds" was Europe's first trigonometric work independent of astronomy. The book systematically elaborated plane triangles and spherical triangles, as well as a very precise table of trigonometric functions.

Detail of The Last Judgment by Michelangelo, 1536-1541

In painting, the Late Medieval painter Giotto di Bondone, or Giotto, helped shape the artistic concepts that later defined much of the Renaissance art. The key ideas that he explored - classicism, the illusion of three-dimensional space and a realistic emotional context - inspired other artists such as Masaccio, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. He was not the only Medieval artist to develop these ideas, however; the artists Pietro Cavallini and Cimabue both influenced Giotto's use of statuesque figures and expressive storylines.

The frescos of Florentine artist Masaccio are generally considered to be among the earliest examples of Italian Renaissance art. Masaccio incorporated the ideas of Giotto, Donatello and Brunelleschi into his paintings, creating mathematically precise scenes that give the impression of three-dimensional space. The Holy Trinity fresco in the Florentine church of Santa Maria Novella, for example, looks as if it is receding at a dramatic angle into the dark background, while single-source lighting and foreshortening appear to push the figure of Christ into the viewer's space.

While mathematical precision and classical idealism fascinated painters in Rome and Florence, many Northern artists in the regions of Venice, Milan and Parma preferred highly illusionistic scenes of the natural world. The period also saw the first secular (non-religious) themes. There has been much debate as to the degree of secularism in the Renaissance, which had been emphasized by early 20th-century writers like Jacob Burckhardt based on, among other things, the presence of a relatively small number of mythological paintings. Those of Botticelli, notably The Birth of Venus and , are now among the best known, although he was deeply religious (becoming a follower of Savonarola) and the great majority of his output was of traditional religious paintings or portraits.

David by Donatello, 1440s

In sculpture, the Florentine artist Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, or Donatello, was among the earliest sculptors to translate classical references into marble and bronze. His second sculpture of was the first free-standing bronze nude created in Europe since the Roman Empire.

The period known as the High Renaissance of painting was the culmination of the varied means of expression and various advances in painting technique, such as linear perspective, the realistic depiction of both physical and psychological features, and the manipulation of light and darkness, including tone contrast, (softening the transition between colours) and chiaroscuro (contrast between light and dark), in a single unifying style which expressed total compositional order, balance and harmony. In particular, the individual parts of the painting had a complex but balanced and well-knit relationship to the whole. The most famous painters from this phase are Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo and their images, including Leonardo's The Last Supper and , Raphael's The School of Athens and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Ceiling are the masterpieces of the period and among the most widely known works of art in the world.

High Renaissance painting evolved into Mannerism, especially in Florence. Mannerist artists, who consciously rebelled against the principles of High Renaissance, tend to represent elongated figures in illogical spaces. Modern scholarship has recognized the capacity of Mannerist art to convey strong (often religious) emotion where the High Renaissance failed to do so. Some of the main artists of this period are Pontormo, Bronzino, Rosso Fiorentino, Parmigianino and Raphael's pupil Giulio Romano.

Bramante's Tempietto in San Pietro in Montorio, Rome, 1502

In Florence, the Renaissance style was introduced with a revolutionary but incomplete monument by Leone Battista Alberti. Some of the earliest buildings showing Renaissance characteristics are Filippo Brunelleschi's church of San Lorenzo and the Pazzi Chapel. The interior of Santo Spirito expresses a new sense of light, clarity and spaciousness, which is typical of the early Italian Renaissance. Its architecture reflects the philosophy of Renaissance humanism, the enlightenment and clarity of mind as opposed to the darkness and spirituality of the Middle Ages. The revival of classical antiquity can best be illustrated by the Palazzo Rucellai. Here the pilasters follow the superposition of classical orders, with Doric capitals on the ground floor, Ionic capitals on the piano nobile and Corinthian capitals on the uppermost floor. Soon, Renaissance architects favoured grand, large domes over tall and imposing spires, doing away with the Gothic style of the predating ages.

In Mantua, Alberti ushered in the new antique style, though his culminating work, Sant'Andrea, was not begun until 1472, after the architect's death.

The High Renaissance, as we call the style today, was introduced to Rome with Donato Bramante's Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio (1502) and his original centrally planned St. Peter's Basilica (1506), which was the most notable architectural commission of the era, influenced by almost all notable Renaissance artists, including Michelangelo and Giacomo della Porta. The beginning of the late Renaissance in 1550 was marked by the development of a new column order by Andrea Palladio. Giant order columns that were two or more stories tall decorated the facades.

During the Italian Renaissance, mathematics was developed and spread widely. As a result, some Renaissance architects used mathematical knowledge like calculation in their drawings, such as Baldassarre Peruzzi.

In Italy, during the 14th century, there was an explosion of musical activity that corresponded in scope and level of innovation to the activity in the other arts. Although musicologists typically group the music of the Trecento (music of the 14th century) with the late medieval period, it included features which align with the early Renaissance in important ways: an increasing emphasis on secular sources, styles and forms; a spreading of culture away from ecclesiastical institutions to the nobility, and even to the common people; and quick development of entirely new techniques. The principal forms were the Trecento madrigal, the caccia, and the ballata. Overall, the musical style of the period is sometimes labelled as the "Italian ars nova." From the early 15th century to the middle of the 16th century, the centre of innovation in religious music was in the Low Countries, and a flood of talented composers came to Italy from this region. Many of them sang in either the papal choir in Rome or the choirs at the numerous chapels of the aristocracy, in Rome, Venice, Florence, Milan, Ferrara and elsewhere; and they brought their polyphonic style with them, influencing many native Italian composers during their stay.

Claudio Monteverdi by Bernardo Strozzi (c. 1630)

By the late 16th century, Italy was the musical centre of Europe. Almost all of the innovations which were to define the transition to the Baroque period originated in northern Italy in the last few decades of the century. In Venice, the polychoral productions of the Venetian School, and associated instrumental music, moved north into Germany; in Florence, the Florentine Camerata developed monody, the important precursor to opera, which itself first appeared around 1600; and the avant-garde, manneristic style of the Ferrara school, which migrated to Naples and elsewhere through the music of Carlo Gesualdo, was to be the final statement of the polyphonic vocal music of the Renaissance.

Any unified theory of a renaissance, or cultural overhaul, during the European early modern period, is overwhelmed by a massive volume of differing historiographical approaches. Historians like Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) have often romanticized the enlightened vision that Italian Renaissance writers have promulgated concerning their own narrative of denouncing the fruitlessness of the Middle Ages. By promoting the Renaissance as the definitive end to the "stagnant" Middle Ages, the Renaissance has acquired the powerful and enduring association with progress and prosperity for which Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is most responsible. Modern scholars have objected to this prevailing narrative, citing the medieval period's own vibrancy and key continuities that link, rather than divide, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Elizabeth Lehfeldt (2005) points to the Black Death as a turning point in Europe that set in motion several movements that were gaining massive traction in the years before, and has accounted for many subsequent events and trends in Western civilization, such as the Reformation. Rather than see this as a distinct cutoff between eras of history, the rejuvenated approach to studying the Renaissance aims to look at this as a catalyst that accelerated trends in art and science that were already well developed. For example, Danse Macabre, the artistic movement using death as the focal point, is often credited as a Renaissance trend, yet Lehfeldt argues that the emergence of Gothic art during medieval times was morphed into Danse Macabre after the Black Death swept over Europe.

Recent historians who take a more revisionist perspective, such as Charles Haskins (1860-1933), identify the hubris and nationalism of Italian politicians, thinkers, and writers as the cause of the distortion of the attitude towards the early modern period. In The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927), Haskins asserts that it is human nature to draw stark divides in history to better understand the past. However, it is essential to understand history as continuous and constantly building off of the past. Haskins was one of the leading scholars in this school of thought, and it was his (along with several others) belief that the building blocks for the Italian Renaissance were all laid during the Middle Ages, calling on the rise of towns and bureaucratic states in the late 11th century as proof of the significance of this "pre-renaissance." The flow of history that he describes paints the Renaissance as a continuation of the Middle Ages that may not have been as positive of a change as popularly imagined. Many historians after Burckhardt have argued that the regression of the Latin language, economic recession, and social inequality during the Renaissance have been intentionally glossed over by previous historians in order to promote the mysticism of the era.

Burckhardt famously described the Middle Ages as a period that was "seen clad in strange hues", promoting the idea that this era was inherently dark, confusing, and unprogressive. The term middle ages was first referred to by humanists such as Petrarch and Biondo, during the late 15th century, describing it as a period connecting an important beginning and an important end, and as a placeholder for the history that exists between both sides of the period. This period was eventually referred to as the "dark" ages in the 19th century by English historians, which has further tainted the narrative of medieval times in favour of promoting a positive feeling of individualism and humanism that spurred from the Renaissance.

Baker, Nicholas Scott. The Fruit of Liberty: Political Culture in the Florentine Renaissance, 1480-1550. Harvard University Press, 2013.

Baron, Hans. The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.

Bayer, A. (2004). Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 9781588391162.

Bayer, A., ed. (2008). Art and love in Renaissance Italy. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 9780300124118.

Burckhardt, Jacob. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. 1878 (online).

Burke, Peter. The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Capra, Fritjof (2008). The Science of Leonardo. Inside the Mind of the Great Genius of the Renaissance. Doubleday, ISBN 978-0-385-51390-6.

Ceriani Sebregondi, Giulia. On Architectural Practice and Arithmetic Abilities in Renaissance Italy. Architectural Histories, vol. 3, no. 1, 2015 (online).

Cronin, Vincent:

Hagopian, Viola L. "Italy", in Stanley Sadie (ed.). The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980.

Hay, Denys. The Italian Renaissance in Its Historical Background. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Jensen, De Lamar. Renaissance Europe. 1992.

Jurdjevic, Mark. "Hedgehogs and Foxes: The Present and Future of Italian Renaissance Intellectual History", in Past & Present 195 (2007), p. 241-268.

Keele, Kenneth D.; Roberts, Jane (1983). Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomical Drawings from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 0-87099-362-3.

Lopez, Robert Sabatino. The Three Ages of the Italian Renaissance. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970.

Pullan, Brian S. History of Early Renaissance Italy. London: Lane, 1973.

Raffini, Christine. Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione: Philosophical, Aesthetic, and Political Approaches in Renaissance Platonism. Renaissance and Baroque Studies and Texts 21, Peter Lang Publishing, 1998, ISBN 0-8204-3023-4.

Ruggiero, Guido. The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento. Cambridge University Press, 2015 (online review).

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The Italian Renaissance ( Italian: Rinascimento [rinaʃʃiˈmento]) was a period in Italian history covering the 15th and 16th centuries. The period is known for the initial development of the broader Renaissance culture that spread across Western Europe and marked the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity.

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Michelangelo was the artist of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the sculpture "David." Sadly, the inspiration behind most of his art reflected a bad childhood and hard life.
Ada Santos

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The Renaissance was an era where many things were changed like political, social,economic and cultural. 

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The Renaissance was an era where many things were changed like political, social,economic and cultural. 

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renaissance began in Italy because of the money that was there and of the location there was plenty of resources and it was in a good time to start thing off ---ernesto

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According to page 48, the Renaissance was a time of creativity and great change in many areas. Renaissance means giving something a new meaning or look.

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Florence and the Renaissance: Crash Course European History #2

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The Renaissance was a political and economic ¨rebirth¨- Anthony Anaya

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Florence, birthplace of the Italian Renaissance. The architectural perspective and new systems of banking and accounting were introduced during the time.

The Renaissance ( rin-AY-sənss, REN-ə-sahnss) is a period in history and a cultural movement marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity, covering the 15th and 16th centuries and characterized by an effort to revive and surpass the ideas and achievements of classical antiquity; it occurred after the crisis of the Late Middle Ages and was associated with great social change in most fields and disciplines, including art, architecture, politics, literature, exploration and science. In addition to the standard periodization, proponents of a "long Renaissance" may put its beginning in the 14th century and its end in the 17th century.

The traditional view focuses more on the Renaissance's early modern aspects and argues that it was a break from the past, but many historians today focus more on its medieval aspects and argue that it was an extension of the Middle Ages. The beginnings of the period-the early Renaissance of the 15th century and the Italian Proto-Renaissance from around 1250 or 1300-overlap considerably with the Late Middle Ages, conventionally dated to c.  1350-1500, and the Middle Ages themselves were a long period filled with gradual changes, like the modern age; as a transitional period between both, the Renaissance has close similarities to both, especially the late and early sub-periods of either.

The Renaissance's intellectual basis was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that "man is the measure of all things". Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the revived knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform across Europe: the first traces appear in Italy as early as the late 13th century, in particular with the writings of Dante and the paintings of Giotto.

As a cultural movement, the Renaissance encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch; the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting; and gradual but widespread educational reform. In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, and in science to an increased reliance on observation and inductive reasoning. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual and social scientific pursuits, as well as the introduction of modern banking and the field of accounting, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man".

The Renaissance began in Florence, one of the many states of Italy. Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors, including Florence's social and civic peculiarities at the time: its political structure, the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici, and the migration of Greek scholars and their texts to Italy following the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. Other major centers were Venice, Genoa, Milan, Rome during the Renaissance Papacy, and Naples. From Italy, the Renaissance spread throughout Europe and also to American, African and Asian territories ruled by the European colonial powers of the time or where Christian missionaries were active.

The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and in line with general skepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual cultural heroes as "Renaissance men", questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation. Some observers have questioned whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity, while social and economic historians, especially of the longue durée, have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a thousand ties".

The term rinascita ("rebirth") first appeared in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (c. 1550), anglicized as the Renaissance in the 1830s. The word has also been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance (8th and 9th centuries), Ottonian Renaissance (10th and 11th century), and the Renaissance of the 12th century.

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period. Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, its influence was felt in art, architecture, philosophy, literature, music, science, technology, politics, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, and searched for realism and human emotion in art.

Renaissance humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini sought out in Europe's monastic libraries the Latin literary, historical, and oratorical texts of antiquity, while the fall of Constantinople (1453) generated a wave of émigré Greek scholars bringing precious manuscripts in ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity in the West. It was in their new focus on literary and historical texts that Renaissance scholars differed so markedly from the medieval scholars of the Renaissance of the 12th century, who had focused on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural sciences, philosophy, and mathematics, rather than on such cultural texts.

Portrait of a Young Woman (c. 1480-85) (Simonetta Vespucci) by Sandro Botticelli

In the revival of neoplatonism, Renaissance humanists did not reject Christianity; on the contrary, many of the Renaissance's greatest works were devoted to it, and the Church patronized many works of Renaissance art. But a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached religion that was reflected in many other areas of cultural life. In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, were brought back from Byzantium to Western Europe and engaged Western scholars for the first time since late antiquity. This new engagement with Greek Christian works, and particularly the return to the original Greek of the New Testament promoted by humanists Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, helped pave the way for the Reformation.

Well after the first artistic return to classicism had been exemplified in the sculpture of Nicola Pisano, Florentine painters led by Masaccio strove to portray the human form realistically, developing techniques to render perspective and light more naturally. Political philosophers, most famously Niccolò Machiavelli, sought to describe political life as it really was, that is to understand it rationally. A critical contribution to Italian Renaissance humanism, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote De hominis dignitate ( Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486), a series of theses on philosophy, natural thought, faith, and magic defended against any opponent on the grounds of reason. In addition to studying classical Latin and Greek, Renaissance authors also began increasingly to use vernacular languages; combined with the introduction of the printing press, this allowed many more people access to books, especially the Bible.

In all, the Renaissance can be viewed as an attempt by intellectuals to study and improve the secular and worldly, both through the revival of ideas from antiquity and through novel approaches to thought. Hans Kohn describes it as an age where "Men looked for new foundations"; some like Erasmus and Thomas More envisioned new reformed spiritual foundations, others. in the words of Machiavelli, una lunga sperienza delle cose moderne ed una continua lezione delle antiche (a long experience with modern life and a continuous learning from antiquity).

Some scholars, such as Rodney Stark, play down the Renaissance in favor of the earlier innovations of the Italian city-states in the High Middle Ages, which married responsive government, Christianity and the birth of capitalism. This analysis argues that, whereas the great European states (France and Spain) were absolute monarchies, and others were under direct Church control, the independent city-republics of Italy took over the principles of capitalism invented on monastic estates and set off a vast unprecedented Commercial Revolution that preceded and financed the Renaissance.

Leon Poliakov offers a critical view in his seminal study of European racist thought: The Aryan Myth. According to Poliakov, the use of ethnic origin myths are first used by Renaissance humanists "in the service of a new born chauvinism".

Many argue that the ideas characterizing the Renaissance had their origin in Florence at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, in particular with the writings of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Petrarch (1304-1374), as well as the paintings of Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337). Some writers date the Renaissance quite precisely; one proposed starting point is 1401, when the rival geniuses Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi competed for the contract to build the bronze doors for the Baptistery of the Florence Cathedral (Ghiberti then won). Others see more general competition between artists and polymaths such as Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Masaccio for artistic commissions as sparking the creativity of the Renaissance.

Yet it remains much debated why the Renaissance began in Italy, and why it began when it did. Accordingly, several theories have been put forward to explain its origins. Peter Rietbergen posits that various influential Proto-Renaissance movements started from roughly 1300 onwards across many regions of Europe.

Latin and Greek phases of Renaissance humanism

In stark contrast to the High Middle Ages, when Latin scholars focused almost entirely on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural science, philosophy and mathematics, Renaissance scholars were most interested in recovering and studying Latin and Greek literary, historical, and oratorical texts. Broadly speaking, this began in the 14th century with a Latin phase, when Renaissance scholars such as Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), Niccolò de' Niccoli (1364-1437), and Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) scoured the libraries of Europe in search of works by such Latin authors as Cicero, Lucretius, Livy, and Seneca. By the early 15th century, the bulk of the surviving such Latin literature had been recovered; the Greek phase of Renaissance humanism was under way, as Western European scholars turned to recovering ancient Greek literary, historical, oratorical and theological texts.

Unlike with Latin texts, which had been preserved and studied in Western Europe since late antiquity, the study of ancient Greek texts was very limited in medieval Western Europe. Ancient Greek works on science, mathematics, and philosophy had been studied since the High Middle Ages in Western Europe and in the Islamic Golden Age (normally in translation), but Greek literary, oratorical and historical works (such as Homer, the Greek dramatists, Demosthenes and Thucydides) were not studied in either the Latin or medieval Islamic worlds; in the Middle Ages these sorts of texts were only studied by Byzantine scholars. Some argue that the Timurid Renaissance in Samarkand and Herat, whose magnificence toned with Florence as the center of a cultural rebirth, were linked to the Ottoman Empire, whose conquests led to the migration of Greek scholars to Italian cities. One of the greatest achievements of Renaissance scholars was to bring this entire class of Greek cultural works back into Western Europe for the first time since late antiquity.

Muslim logicians, most notably Avicenna and Averroes, had inherited Greek ideas after they had invaded and conquered Egypt and the Levant. Their translations and commentaries on these ideas worked their way through the Arab West into Iberia and Sicily, which became important centers for this transmission of ideas. Between the 11th and 13th centuries, many schools dedicated to the translation of philosophical and scientific works from Classical Arabic to Medieval Latin were established in Iberia, most notably the Toledo School of Translators. This work of translation from Islamic culture, though largely unplanned and disorganized, constituted one of the greatest transmissions of ideas in history.

The movement to reintegrate the regular study of Greek literary, historical, oratorical, and theological texts back into the Western European curriculum is usually dated to the 1396 invitation from Coluccio Salutati to the Byzantine diplomat and scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1355-1415) to teach Greek in Florence. This legacy was continued by a number of expatriate Greek scholars, from Basilios Bessarion to Leo Allatius.

Social and political structures in Italy

The unique political structures of Italy during the Late Middle Ages have led some to theorize that its unusual social climate allowed the emergence of a rare cultural efflorescence. Italy did not exist as a political entity in the early modern period. Instead, it was divided into smaller city-states and territories: the Neapolitans controlled the south, the Florentines and the Romans at the center, the Milanese and the Genoese to the north and west respectively, and the Venetians to the east. 15th-century Italy was one of the most urbanized areas in Europe. Many of its cities stood among the ruins of ancient Roman buildings; it seems likely that the classical nature of the Renaissance was linked to its origin in the Roman Empire's heartland.

Historian and political philosopher Quentin Skinner points out that Otto of Freising (c. 1114-1158), a German bishop visiting north Italy during the 12th century, noticed a widespread new form of political and social organization, observing that Italy appeared to have exited from feudalism so that its society was based on merchants and commerce. Linked to this was anti-monarchical thinking, represented in the famous early Renaissance fresco cycle The Allegory of Good and Bad Government by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (painted 1338-1340), whose strong message is about the virtues of fairness, justice, republicanism and good administration. Holding both Church and Empire at bay, these city republics were devoted to notions of liberty. Skinner reports that there were many defences of liberty such as the Matteo Palmieri (1406-1475) celebration of Florentine genius not only in art, sculpture and architecture, but "the remarkable efflorescence of moral, social and political philosophy that occurred in Florence at the same time".

Even cities and states beyond central Italy, such as the Republic of Florence at this time, were also notable for their merchant republics, especially the Republic of Venice. Although in practice these were oligarchical, and bore little resemblance to a modern democracy, they did have democratic features and were responsive states, with forms of participation in governance and belief in liberty. The relative political freedom they afforded was conducive to academic and artistic advancement. Likewise, the position of Italian cities such as Venice as great trading centres made them intellectual crossroads. Merchants brought with them ideas from far corners of the globe, particularly the Levant. Venice was Europe's gateway to trade with the East, and a producer of fine glass, while Florence was a capital of textiles. The wealth such business brought to Italy meant large public and private artistic projects could be commissioned and individuals had more leisure time for study.

Black Death

Pieter Bruegel's The Triumph of Death (c. 1562) reflects the social upheaval and terror that followed the plague that devastated medieval Europe.

One theory that has been advanced is that the devastation in Florence caused by the Black Death, which hit Europe between 1348 and 1350, resulted in a shift in the world view of people in 14th century Italy. Italy was particularly badly hit by the plague, and it has been speculated that the resulting familiarity with death caused thinkers to dwell more on their lives on Earth, rather than on spirituality and the afterlife. It has also been argued that the Black Death prompted a new wave of piety, manifested in the sponsorship of religious works of art. However, this does not fully explain why the Renaissance occurred specifically in Italy in the 14th century. The Black Death was a pandemic that affected all of Europe in the ways described, not only Italy. The Renaissance's emergence in Italy was most likely the result of the complex interaction of the above factors.

The plague was carried by fleas on sailing vessels returning from the ports of Asia, spreading quickly due to lack of proper sanitation: the population of England, then about 4.2 million, lost 1.4 million people to the bubonic plague. Florence's population was nearly halved in the year 1347. As a result of the decimation in the populace the value of the working class increased, and commoners came to enjoy more freedom. To answer the increased need for labor, workers traveled in search of the most favorable position economically.

The demographic decline due to the plague had economic consequences: the prices of food dropped and land values declined by 30-40% in most parts of Europe between 1350 and 1400. Landholders faced a great loss, but for ordinary men and women it was a windfall. The survivors of the plague found not only that the prices of food were cheaper but also that lands were more abundant, and many of them inherited property from their dead relatives.

The spread of disease was significantly more rampant in areas of poverty. Epidemics ravaged cities, particularly children. Plagues were easily spread by lice, unsanitary drinking water, armies, or by poor sanitation. Children were hit the hardest because many diseases, such as typhus and congenital syphilis, target the immune system, leaving young children without a fighting chance. Children in city dwellings were more affected by the spread of disease than the children of the wealthy.

The Black Death caused greater upheaval to Florence's social and political structure than later epidemics. Despite a significant number of deaths among members of the ruling classes, the government of Florence continued to function during this period. Formal meetings of elected representatives were suspended during the height of the epidemic due to the chaotic conditions in the city, but a small group of officials was appointed to conduct the affairs of the city, which ensured continuity of government.

Cultural conditions in Florence

Lorenzo de' Medici, ruler of Florence and patron of arts (Portrait by Vasari)

It has long been a matter of debate why the Renaissance began in Florence, and not elsewhere in Italy. Scholars have noted several features unique to Florentine cultural life that may have caused such a cultural movement. Many have emphasized the role played by the Medici, a banking family and later ducal ruling house, in patronizing and stimulating the arts. Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-1492) was the catalyst for an enormous amount of arts patronage, encouraging his countrymen to commission works from the leading artists of Florence, including Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, and Michelangelo Buonarroti. Works by Neri di Bicci, Botticelli, da Vinci, and Filippino Lippi had been commissioned additionally by the Convent of San Donato in Scopeto in Florence.

The Renaissance was certainly underway before Lorenzo de' Medici came to power - indeed, before the Medici family itself achieved hegemony in Florentine society. Some historians have postulated that Florence was the birthplace of the Renaissance as a result of luck, i.e., because " Great Men" were born there by chance: Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli and Michelangelo were all born in Tuscany. Arguing that such chance seems improbable, other historians have contended that these "Great Men" were only able to rise to prominence because of the prevailing cultural conditions at the time.

Characteristics

In some ways, Renaissance humanism was not a philosophy but a method of learning. In contrast to the medieval scholastic mode, which focused on resolving contradictions between authors, Renaissance humanists would study ancient texts in the original and appraise them through a combination of reasoning and empirical evidence. Humanist education was based on the programme of Studia Humanitatis, the study of five humanities: poetry, grammar, history, moral philosophy, and rhetoric. Although historians have sometimes struggled to define humanism precisely, most have settled on "a middle of the road definition... the movement to recover, interpret, and assimilate the language, literature, learning and values of ancient Greece and Rome". Above all, humanists asserted "the genius of man ... the unique and extraordinary ability of the human mind".

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, writer of the famous Oration on the Dignity of Man, which has been called the "Manifesto of the Renaissance"[55]

Humanist scholars shaped the intellectual landscape throughout the early modern period. Political philosophers such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas More revived the ideas of Greek and Roman thinkers and applied them in critiques of contemporary government, following the Islamic steps of Ibn Khaldun. Pico della Mirandola wrote the "manifesto" of the Renaissance, the Oration on the Dignity of Man, a vibrant defence of thinking. Matteo Palmieri (1406-1475), another humanist, is most known for his work Della vita civile ("On Civic Life"; printed 1528), which advocated civic humanism, and for his influence in refining the Tuscan vernacular to the same level as Latin. Palmieri drew on Roman philosophers and theorists, especially Cicero, who, like Palmieri, lived an active public life as a citizen and official, as well as a theorist and philosopher and also Quintilian. Perhaps the most succinct expression of his perspective on humanism is in a 1465 poetic work La città di vita, but an earlier work, Della vita civile, is more wide-ranging. Composed as a series of dialogues set in a country house in the Mugello countryside outside Florence during the plague of 1430, Palmieri expounds on the qualities of the ideal citizen. The dialogues include ideas about how children develop mentally and physically, how citizens can conduct themselves morally, how citizens and states can ensure probity in public life, and an important debate on the difference between that which is pragmatically useful and that which is honest.

The humanists believed that it is important to transcend to the afterlife with a perfect mind and body, which could be attained with education. The purpose of humanism was to create a universal man whose person combined intellectual and physical excellence and who was capable of functioning honorably in virtually any situation. This ideology was referred to as the uomo universale, an ancient Greco-Roman ideal. Education during the Renaissance was mainly composed of ancient literature and history as it was thought that the classics provided moral instruction and an intensive understanding of human behavior.

Humanism and libraries

A unique characteristic of some Renaissance libraries is that they were open to the public. These libraries were places where ideas were exchanged and where scholarship and reading were considered both pleasurable and beneficial to the mind and soul. As freethinking was a hallmark of the age, many libraries contained a wide range of writers. Classical texts could be found alongside humanist writings. These informal associations of intellectuals profoundly influenced Renaissance culture. Some of the richest "bibliophiles" built libraries as temples to books and knowledge. A number of libraries appeared as manifestations of immense wealth joined with a love of books. In some cases, cultivated library builders were also committed to offering others the opportunity to use their collections. Prominent aristocrats and princes of the Church created great libraries for the use of their courts, called "court libraries", and were housed in lavishly designed monumental buildings decorated with ornate woodwork, and the walls adorned with frescoes (Murray, Stuart A.P.).

Renaissance art marks a cultural rebirth at the close of the Middle Ages and rise of the Modern world. One of the distinguishing features of Renaissance art was its development of highly realistic linear perspective. Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337) is credited with first treating a painting as a window into space, but it was not until the demonstrations of architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) and the subsequent writings of Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) that perspective was formalized as an artistic technique.

Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man (c. 1490) demonstrates the effect writers of Antiquity had on Renaissance thinkers. Based on the specifications in Vitruvius' De architectura (1st century BC), Leonardo tried to draw the perfectly proportioned man. (Museum Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice)

The development of perspective was part of a wider trend toward realism in the arts. Painters developed other techniques, studying light, shadow, and, famously in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, human anatomy. Underlying these changes in artistic method was a renewed desire to depict the beauty of nature and to unravel the axioms of aesthetics, with the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael representing artistic pinnacles that were much imitated by other artists. Other notable artists include Sandro Botticelli, working for the Medici in Florence, Donatello, another Florentine, and Titian in Venice, among others.

In the Netherlands, a particularly vibrant artistic culture developed. The work of Hugo van der Goes and Jan van Eyck was particularly influential on the development of painting in Italy, both technically with the introduction of oil paint and canvas, and stylistically in terms of naturalism in representation. Later, the work of Pieter Brueghel the Elder would inspire artists to depict themes of everyday life.

In architecture, Filippo Brunelleschi was foremost in studying the remains of ancient classical buildings. With rediscovered knowledge from the 1st-century writer Vitruvius and the flourishing discipline of mathematics, Brunelleschi formulated the Renaissance style that emulated and improved on classical forms. His major feat of engineering was building the dome of the Florence Cathedral. Another building demonstrating this style is the church of St. Andrew in Mantua, built by Alberti. The outstanding architectural work of the High Renaissance was the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica, combining the skills of Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, Sangallo and Maderno.

During the Renaissance, architects aimed to use columns, pilasters, and entablatures as an integrated system. The Roman orders types of columns are used: Tuscan and Composite. These can either be structural, supporting an arcade or architrave, or purely decorative, set against a wall in the form of pilasters. One of the first buildings to use pilasters as an integrated system was in the Old Sacristy (1421-1440) by Brunelleschi. Arches, semi-circular or (in the Mannerist style) segmental, are often used in arcades, supported on piers or columns with capitals. There may be a section of entablature between the capital and the springing of the arch. Alberti was one of the first to use the arch on a monumental. Renaissance vaults do not have ribs; they are semi-circular or segmental and on a square plan, unlike the Gothic vault, which is frequently rectangular.

Renaissance artists were not pagans, although they admired antiquity and kept some ideas and symbols of the medieval past. Nicola Pisano (c. 1220 - c. 1278) imitated classical forms by portraying scenes from the Bible. His Annunciation, from the Baptistry at Pisa, demonstrates that classical models influenced Italian art before the Renaissance took root as a literary movement.

Portrait of Luca Pacioli, father of accounting, painted by Jacopo de' Barbari,[c] 1495 (Museo di Capodimonte)

Applied innovation extended to commerce. At the end of the 15th century, Luca Pacioli published the first work on bookkeeping, making him the founder of accounting.

The rediscovery of ancient texts and the invention of the printing press in about 1440 democratized learning and allowed a faster propagation of more widely distributed ideas. In the first period of the Italian Renaissance, humanists favored the study of humanities over natural philosophy or applied mathematics, and their reverence for classical sources further enshrined the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of the universe. Writing around 1450, Nicholas Cusanus anticipated the heliocentric worldview of Copernicus, but in a philosophical fashion.

Science and art were intermingled in the early Renaissance, with polymath artists such as Leonardo da Vinci making observational drawings of anatomy and nature. Leonardo set up controlled experiments in water flow, medical dissection, and systematic study of movement and aerodynamics, and he devised principles of research method that led Fritjof Capra to classify him as the "father of modern science". Other examples of Da Vinci's contribution during this period include machines designed to saw marbles and lift monoliths, and new discoveries in acoustics, botany, geology, anatomy, and mechanics.

A suitable environment had developed to question classical scientific doctrine. The discovery in 1492 of the New World by Christopher Columbus challenged the classical worldview. The works of Ptolemy (in geography) and Galen (in medicine) were found to not always match everyday observations. As the Reformation and Counter-Reformation clashed, the Northern Renaissance showed a decisive shift in focus from Aristotelean natural philosophy to chemistry and the biological sciences (botany, anatomy, and medicine). The willingness to question previously held truths and search for new answers resulted in a period of major scientific advancements.

Some view this as a " scientific revolution", heralding the beginning of the modern age, others as an acceleration of a continuous process stretching from the ancient world to the present day. Significant scientific advances were made during this time by Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler. Copernicus, in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium ( On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), posited that the Earth moved around the Sun. De humani corporis fabrica ( On the Workings of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius, gave a new confidence to the role of dissection, observation, and the mechanistic view of anatomy.

Another important development was in the process for discovery, the scientific method, focusing on empirical evidence and the importance of mathematics, while discarding much of Aristotelian science. Early and influential proponents of these ideas included Copernicus, Galileo, and Francis Bacon. The new scientific method led to great contributions in the fields of astronomy, physics, biology, and anatomy.

Navigation and geography

During the Renaissance, extending from 1450 to 1650, every continent was visited and mostly mapped by Europeans, except the south polar continent now known as Antarctica. This development is depicted in the large world map Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula made by the Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu in 1648 to commemorate the Peace of Westphalia.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain seeking a direct route to India of the Delhi Sultanate. He accidentally stumbled upon the Americas, but believed he had reached the East Indies.

In 1606, the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon sailed from the East Indies in the VOC ship Duyfken and landed in Australia. He charted about 300 km of the west coast of Cape York Peninsula in Queensland. More than thirty Dutch expeditions followed, mapping sections of the north, west, and south coasts. In 1642-1643, Abel Tasman circumnavigated the continent, proving that it was not joined to the imagined south polar continent.

By 1650, Dutch cartographers had mapped most of the coastline of the continent, which they named New Holland, except the east coast which was charted in 1770 by James Cook.

The long-imagined south polar continent was eventually sighted in 1820. Throughout the Renaissance it had been known as Terra Australis, or 'Australia' for short. However, after that name was transferred to New Holland in the nineteenth century, the new name of 'Antarctica' was bestowed on the south polar continent.

From this changing society emerged a common, unifying musical language, in particular the polyphonic style of the Franco-Flemish school. The development of printing made distribution of music possible on a wide scale. Demand for music as entertainment and as an activity for educated amateurs increased with the emergence of a bourgeois class. Dissemination of chansons, motets, and masses throughout Europe coincided with the unification of polyphonic practice into the fluid style that culminated in the second half of the sixteenth century in the work of composers such as Palestrina, Lassus, Victoria, and William Byrd.

Alexander VI, a Borgia Pope infamous for his corruption

The new ideals of humanism, although more secular in some aspects, developed against a Christian backdrop, especially in the Northern Renaissance. Much, if not most, of the new art was commissioned by or in dedication to the Church. However, the Renaissance had a profound effect on contemporary theology, particularly in the way people perceived the relationship between man and God. Many of the period's foremost theologians were followers of the humanist method, including Erasmus, Huldrych Zwingli, Thomas More, Martin Luther, and John Calvin.

Adoration of the Magi and Solomon adored by the Queen of Sheba from the Farnese Hours (1546) by Giulio Clovio marks the end of the Italian Renaissance of illuminated manuscript together with the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

The Renaissance began in times of religious turmoil. The Late Middle Ages was a period of political intrigue surrounding the Papacy, culminating in the Western Schism, in which three men simultaneously claimed to be true Bishop of Rome. While the schism was resolved by the Council of Constance (1414), a resulting reform movement known as Conciliarism sought to limit the power of the pope. Although the papacy eventually emerged supreme in ecclesiastical matters by the Fifth Council of the Lateran (1511), it was dogged by continued accusations of corruption, most famously in the person of Pope Alexander VI, who was accused variously of simony, nepotism, and fathering children (most of whom were married off, presumably for the consolidation of power) while a cardinal.

Churchmen such as Erasmus and Luther proposed reform to the Church, often based on humanist textual criticism of the New Testament. In October 1517, Luther published the Ninety-five Theses, challenging papal authority and criticizing its perceived corruption, particularly with regard to instances of sold indulgences. The 95 Theses led to the Reformation, a break with the Roman Catholic Church that previously claimed hegemony in Western Europe. Humanism and the Renaissance therefore played a direct role in sparking the Reformation, as well as in many other contemporaneous religious debates and conflicts.

Pope Paul III came to the papal throne (1534-1549) after the sack of Rome in 1527, with uncertainties prevalent in the Catholic Church following the Reformation. Nicolaus Copernicus dedicated De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) to Paul III, who became the grandfather of Alessandro Farnese, who had paintings by Titian, Michelangelo, and Raphael, as well as an important collection of drawings, and who commissioned the masterpiece of Giulio Clovio, arguably the last major illuminated manuscript, the Farnese Hours.

Self-awareness

By the 15th century, writers, artists, and architects in Italy were well aware of the transformations that were taking place and were using phrases such as modi antichi (in the antique manner) or alle romana et alla antica (in the manner of the Romans and the ancients) to describe their work. In the 1330s Petrarch referred to pre-Christian times as antiqua (ancient) and to the Christian period as nova (new). From Petrarch's Italian perspective, this new period (which included his own time) was an age of national eclipse. Leonardo Bruni was the first to use tripartite periodization in his History of the Florentine People (1442). Bruni's first two periods were based on those of Petrarch, but he added a third period because he believed that Italy was no longer in a state of decline. Flavio Biondo used a similar framework in Decades of History from the Deterioration of the Roman Empire (1439-1453).

Humanist historians argued that contemporary scholarship restored direct links to the classical period, thus bypassing the Medieval period, which they then named for the first time the "Middle Ages". The term first appears in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas (middle times). The term rinascita (rebirth) first appeared, however, in its broad sense in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, 1550, revised 1568. Vasari divides the age into three phases: the first phase contains Cimabue, Giotto, and Arnolfo di Cambio; the second phase contains Masaccio, Brunelleschi, and Donatello; the third centers on Leonardo da Vinci and culminates with Michelangelo. It was not just the growing awareness of classical antiquity that drove this development, according to Vasari, but also the growing desire to study and imitate nature.

In the 15th century, the Renaissance spread rapidly from its birthplace in Florence to the rest of Italy and soon to the rest of Europe. The invention of the printing press by German printer Johannes Gutenberg allowed the rapid transmission of these new ideas. As it spread, its ideas diversified and changed, being adapted to local culture. In the 20th century, scholars began to break the Renaissance into regional and national movements.

"What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god!" - from William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Renaissance style and ideas were slow to penetrate England, and the Elizabethan era in the second half of the 16th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance. Many scholars see its beginnings in the early 16th century during the reign of Henry VIII.

The English Renaissance is different from the Italian Renaissance in several ways. The dominant art forms of the English Renaissance were literature and music. Visual arts in the English Renaissance were much less significant than in the Italian Renaissance. The English Renaissance period in art began far later than the Italian, which had moved into Mannerism by the 1530s.

In literature the later part of the 16th century saw the flowering of Elizabethan literature, with poetry heavily influenced by Italian Renaissance literature but Elizabethan theatre a distinctive native style. Writers include William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Christopher Marlowe (1564-593), Edmund Spenser (1552/1553-599), Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), and Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586). English Renaissance music competed with that in Europe with composers such as Thomas Tallis (1505-1585), John Taverner (c. 1490-1545), and William Byrd (c. 1539/40 or 1543-1623). Elizabethan architecture produced the large prodigy houses of courtiers, and in the next century Inigo Jones (1573-1652), who introduced Italianate architecture to England.

Château de Chambord (1519-1547), one of the most famous examples of Renaissance architecture

The word "Renaissance" is borrowed from the French language, where it means "re-birth". It was first used in the eighteenth century and was later popularized by French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874) in his 1855 work, Histoire de France (History of France).

In 1495 the Italian Renaissance arrived in France, imported by King Charles VIII after his invasion of Italy. A factor that promoted the spread of secularism was the inability of the Church to offer assistance against the Black Death. Francis I imported Italian art and artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, and built ornate palaces at great expense. Writers such as François Rabelais, Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, and Michel de Montaigne, painters such as Jean Clouet, and musicians such as Jean Mouton also borrowed from the spirit of the Renaissance.

In 1533, a fourteen-year-old Caterina de' Medici (1519-1589), born in Florence to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino and Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne, married Henry II of France, second son of King Francis I and Queen Claude. Though she became famous and infamous for her role in France's religious wars, she made a direct contribution in bringing arts, sciences, and music (including the origins of ballet) to the French court from her native Florence.

Portrait of Emperor Maximilian I, by Albrecht Dürer, 1519

In the second half of the 15th century, the Renaissance spirit spread to Germany and the Low Countries, where the development of the printing press (ca. 1450) and Renaissance artists such as Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) predated the influence from Italy. In the early Protestant areas of the country humanism became closely linked to the turmoil of the Reformation, and the art and writing of the German Renaissance frequently reflected this dispute. However, the Gothic style and medieval scholastic philosophy remained exclusively until the turn of the 16th century. Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg (ruling 1493-1519) was the first truly Renaissance monarch of the Holy Roman Empire.

Hungarian trecento and quattrocento

After Italy, Hungary was the first European country where the Renaissance appeared. The Renaissance style came directly from Italy during the Quattrocento to Hungary first in the Central European region, thanks to the development of early Hungarian-Italian relationships - not only in dynastic connections, but also in cultural, humanistic and commercial relations - growing in strength from the 14th century. The relationship between Hungarian and Italian Gothic styles was a second reason - exaggerated breakthrough of walls is avoided, preferring clean and light structures. Large-scale building schemes provided ample and long term work for the artists, for example, the building of the Friss (New) Castle in Buda, the castles of Visegrád, Tata, and Várpalota. In Sigismund's court there were patrons such as Pipo Spano, a descendant of the Scolari family of Florence, who invited Manetto Ammanatini and Masolino da Pannicale to Hungary.

The new Italian trend combined with existing national traditions to create a particular local Renaissance art. Acceptance of Renaissance art was furthered by the continuous arrival of humanist thought in the country. Many young Hungarians studying at Italian universities came closer to the Florentine humanist center, so a direct connection with Florence evolved. The growing number of Italian traders moving to Hungary, specially to Buda, helped this process. New thoughts were carried by the humanist prelates, among them Vitéz János, archbishop of Esztergom, one of the founders of Hungarian humanism. During the long reign of emperor Sigismund of Luxemburg the Royal Castle of Buda became probably the largest Gothic palace of the late Middle Ages. King Matthias Corvinus (r. 1458-1490) rebuilt the palace in early Renaissance style and further expanded it.

After the marriage in 1476 of King Matthias to Beatrice of Naples, Buda became one of the most important artistic centers of the Renaissance north of the Alps. The most important humanists living in Matthias' court were Antonio Bonfini and the famous Hungarian poet Janus Pannonius. András Hess set up a printing press in Buda in 1472. Matthias Corvinus's library, the Bibliotheca Corviniana, was Europe's greatest collections of secular books: historical chronicles, philosophic and scientific works in the 15th century. His library was second only in size to the Vatican Library. (However, the Vatican Library mainly contained Bibles and religious materials.) In 1489, Bartolomeo della Fonte of Florence wrote that Lorenzo de' Medici founded his own Greek-Latin library encouraged by the example of the Hungarian king. Corvinus's library is part of UNESCO World Heritage.

Matthias started at least two major building projects. The works in Buda and Visegrád began in about 1479. Two new wings and a hanging garden were built at the royal castle of Buda, and the palace at Visegrád was rebuilt in Renaissance style. Matthias appointed the Italian Chimenti Camicia and the Dalmatian Giovanni Dalmata to direct these projects. Matthias commissioned the leading Italian artists of his age to embellish his palaces: for instance, the sculptor Benedetto da Majano and the painters Filippino Lippi and Andrea Mantegna worked for him. A copy of Mantegna's portrait of Matthias survived. Matthias also hired the Italian military engineer Aristotele Fioravanti to direct the rebuilding of the forts along the southern frontier. He had new monasteries built in Late Gothic style for the Franciscans in Kolozsvár, Szeged and Hunyad, and for the Paulines in Fejéregyháza. In the spring of 1485, Leonardo da Vinci travelled to Hungary on behalf of Sforza to meet king Matthias Corvinus, and was commissioned by him to paint a Madonna.

Matthias enjoyed the company of Humanists and had lively discussions on various topics with them. The fame of his magnanimity encouraged many scholars-mostly Italian-to settle in Buda. Antonio Bonfini, Pietro Ranzano, Bartolomeo Fonzio, and Francesco Bandini spent many years in Matthias's court. This circle of educated men introduced the ideas of Neoplatonism to Hungary. Like all intellectuals of his age, Matthias was convinced that the movements and combinations of the stars and planets exercised influence on individuals' life and on the history of nations. Galeotto Marzio described him as "king and astrologer", and Antonio Bonfini said Matthias "never did anything without consulting the stars". Upon his request, the famous astronomers of the age, Johannes Regiomontanus and Marcin Bylica, set up an observatory in Buda and installed it with astrolabes and celestial globes. Regiomontanus dedicated his book on navigation that was used by Christopher Columbus to Matthias.

Other important figures of Hungarian Renaissance include Bálint Balassi (poet), Sebestyén Tinódi Lantos (poet), Bálint Bakfark (composer and lutenist), and Master MS (fresco painter).

Renaissance in the Low Countries

Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1523, as depicted by Hans Holbein the Younger

Culture in the Netherlands at the end of the 15th century was influenced by the Italian Renaissance through trade via Bruges, which made Flanders wealthy. Its nobles commissioned artists who became known across Europe. In science, the anatomist Andreas Vesalius led the way; in cartography, Gerardus Mercator's map assisted explorers and navigators. In art, Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting ranged from the strange work of Hieronymus Bosch to the everyday life depictions of Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

Erasmus was arguably the Netherlands' best known humanist and Catholic intellectual during the Renaissance.

Northern Europe

The Renaissance in Northern Europe has been termed the "Northern Renaissance". While Renaissance ideas were moving north from Italy, there was a simultaneous southward spread of some areas of innovation, particularly in music. The music of the 15th-century Burgundian School defined the beginning of the Renaissance in music, and the polyphony of the Netherlanders, as it moved with the musicians themselves into Italy, formed the core of the first true international style in music since the standardization of Gregorian Chant in the 9th century. The culmination of the Netherlandish school was in the music of the Italian composer Palestrina. At the end of the 16th century Italy again became a center of musical innovation, with the development of the polychoral style of the Venetian School, which spread northward into Germany around 1600. In Denmark, the Renaissance sparked the translation of the works of Saxo Grammaticus into Danish as well as Frederick II and Christian IV ordering the redecoration or construction of several important works of architecture, i.e. Kronborg, Rosenborg and Børsen. Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe greatly contributed to turn astronomy into the first modern science and also helped launch the Scientific Revolution.

The paintings of the Italian Renaissance differed from those of the Northern Renaissance. Italian Renaissance artists were among the first to paint secular scenes, breaking away from the purely religious art of medieval painters. Northern Renaissance artists initially remained focused on religious subjects, such as the contemporary religious upheaval portrayed by Albrecht Dürer. Later, the works of Pieter Bruegel influenced artists to paint scenes of daily life rather than religious or classical themes. It was also during the Northern Renaissance that Flemish brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck perfected the oil painting technique, which enabled artists to produce strong colors on a hard surface that could survive for centuries. A feature of the Northern Renaissance was its use of the vernacular in place of Latin or Greek, which allowed greater freedom of expression. This movement had started in Italy with the decisive influence of Dante Alighieri on the development of vernacular languages; in fact the focus on writing in Italian has neglected a major source of Florentine ideas expressed in Latin. The spread of the printing press technology boosted the Renaissance in Northern Europe as elsewhere, with Venice becoming a world center of printing.

An early Italian humanist who came to Poland in the mid-15th century was Filippo Buonaccorsi. Many Italian artists came to Poland with Bona Sforza of Milan, when she married King Sigismund I in 1518. This was supported by temporarily strengthened monarchies in both areas, as well as by newly established universities. The Polish Renaissance lasted from the late 15th to the late 16th century and was the Golden Age of Polish culture. Ruled by the Jagiellonian dynasty, the Kingdom of Poland (from 1569 known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) actively participated in the broad European Renaissance. The multi-national Polish state experienced a substantial period of cultural growth thanks in part to a century without major wars - aside from conflicts in the sparsely populated eastern and southern borderlands. The Reformation spread peacefully throughout the country (giving rise to the Polish Brethren), while living conditions improved, cities grew, and exports of agricultural products enriched the population, especially the nobility () who gained dominance in the new political system of Golden Liberty. The Polish Renaissance architecture has three periods of development.

The greatest monument of this style in the territory of the former Duchy of Pomerania is the Ducal Castle in Szczecin.

Although Italian Renaissance had a modest impact in Portuguese arts, Portugal was influential in broadening the European worldview, stimulating humanist inquiry. Renaissance arrived through the influence of wealthy Italian and Flemish merchants who invested in the profitable commerce overseas. As the pioneer headquarters of European exploration, Lisbon flourished in the late 15th century, attracting experts who made several breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy and naval technology, including Pedro Nunes, João de Castro, Abraham Zacuto, and Martin Behaim. Cartographers Pedro Reinel, Lopo Homem, Estêvão Gomes, and Diogo Ribeiro made crucial advances in mapping the world. Apothecary Tomé Pires and physicians Garcia de Orta and Cristóvão da Costa collected and published works on plants and medicines, soon translated by Flemish pioneer botanist Carolus Clusius.

São Pedro Papa, 1530-1535, by Grão Vasco Fernandes. A pinnacle piece from when the Portuguese Renaissance had considerable external influence.

In architecture, the huge profits of the spice trade financed a sumptuous composite style in the first decades of the 16th century, the Manueline, incorporating maritime elements. The primary painters were Nuno Gonçalves, Gregório Lopes, and Vasco Fernandes. In music, Pedro de Escobar and Duarte Lobo produced four songbooks, including the Cancioneiro de Elvas. In literature, Sá de Miranda introduced Italian forms of verse. Bernardim Ribeiro developed pastoral romance, plays by Gil Vicente fused it with popular culture, reporting the changing times, and Luís de Camões inscribed the Portuguese feats overseas in the epic poem Os Lusíadas. Travel literature especially flourished: João de Barros, Castanheda, António Galvão, Gaspar Correia, Duarte Barbosa, and Fernão Mendes Pinto, among others, described new lands and were translated and spread with the new printing press. After joining the Portuguese exploration of Brazil in 1500, Amerigo Vespucci coined the term New World, in his letters to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici.

The intense international exchange produced several cosmopolitan humanist scholars, including Francisco de Holanda, André de Resende, and Damião de Góis, a friend of Erasmus who wrote with rare independence on the reign of King Manuel I. Diogo and André de Gouveia made relevant teaching reforms via France. Foreign news and products in the Portuguese factory in Antwerp attracted the interest of Thomas More and Albrecht Dürer to the wider world. There, profits and know-how helped nurture the Dutch Renaissance and Golden Age, especially after the arrival of the wealthy cultured Jewish community expelled from Portugal.

The Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo del Escorial, by Juan de Herrera and Juan Bautista de Toledo

The Renaissance arrived in the Iberian peninsula through the Mediterranean possessions of the Aragonese Crown and the city of Valencia. Many early Spanish Renaissance writers come from the Kingdom of Aragon, including Ausiàs March and Joanot Martorell. In the Kingdom of Castile, the early Renaissance was heavily influenced by the Italian humanism, starting with writers and poets such as the Marquis of Santillana, who introduced the new Italian poetry to Spain in the early 15th century. Other writers, such as Jorge Manrique, Fernando de Rojas, Juan del Encina, Juan Boscán Almogáver, and Garcilaso de la Vega, kept a close resemblance to the Italian canon. Miguel de Cervantes's masterpiece Don Quixote is credited as the first Western novel. Renaissance humanism flourished in the early 16th century, with influential writers such as philosopher Juan Luis Vives, grammarian Antonio de Nebrija and natural historian Pedro de Mexía.

Later Spanish Renaissance tended toward religious themes and mysticism, with poets such as Luis de León, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross, and treated issues related to the exploration of the New World, with chroniclers and writers such as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Bartolomé de las Casas, giving rise to a body of work, now known as Spanish Renaissance literature. The late Renaissance in Spain produced artists such as El Greco and composers such as Tomás Luis de Victoria and Antonio de Cabezón.

Further countries

Historiography

Conception

A cover of the Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari

The Italian artist and critic Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) first used the term rinascita in his book The Lives of the Artists (published 1550). In the book Vasari attempted to define what he described as a break with the barbarities of Gothic art: the arts (he held) had fallen into decay with the collapse of the Roman Empire and only the Tuscan artists, beginning with Cimabue (1240-1301) and Giotto (1267-1337) began to reverse this decline in the arts. Vasari saw ancient art as central to the rebirth of Italian art.

However, only in the 19th century did the French word renaissance achieve popularity in describing the self-conscious cultural movement based on revival of Roman models that began in the late 13th century. French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874) defined "The Renaissance" in his 1855 work Histoire de France as an entire historical period, whereas previously it had been used in a more limited sense. For Michelet, the Renaissance was more a development in science than in art and culture. He asserted that it spanned the period from Columbus to Copernicus to Galileo; that is, from the end of the 15th century to the middle of the 17th century. Moreover, Michelet distinguished between what he called, "the bizarre and monstrous" quality of the Middle Ages and the democratic values that he, as a vocal Republican, chose to see in its character. A French nationalist, Michelet also sought to claim the Renaissance as a French movement.

The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) in his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), by contrast, defined the Renaissance as the period between Giotto and Michelangelo in Italy, that is, the 14th to mid-16th centuries. He saw in the Renaissance the emergence of the modern spirit of individuality, which the Middle Ages had stifled. His book was widely read and became influential in the development of the modern interpretation of the Italian Renaissance. However, Buckhardt has been accused of setting forth a linear Whiggish view of history in seeing the Renaissance as the origin of the modern world.

More recently, some historians have been much less keen to define the Renaissance as a historical age, or even as a coherent cultural movement. The historian Randolph Starn, of the University of California Berkeley, stated in 1998:

Rather than a period with definitive beginnings and endings and consistent content in between, the Renaissance can be (and occasionally has been) seen as a movement of practices and ideas to which specific groups and identifiable persons variously responded in different times and places. It would be in this sense a network of diverse, sometimes converging, sometimes conflicting cultures, not a single, time-bound culture.

Debates about progress

There is debate about the extent to which the Renaissance improved on the culture of the Middle Ages. Both Michelet and Burckhardt were keen to describe the progress made in the Renaissance toward the modern age. Burckhardt likened the change to a veil being removed from man's eyes, allowing him to see clearly.

In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness - that which was turned within as that which was turned without - lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues.

-  Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy

Painting of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, an event in the French Wars of Religion, by François Dubois

On the other hand, many historians now point out that most of the negative social factors popularly associated with the medieval period - poverty, warfare, religious and political persecution, for example - seem to have worsened in this era, which saw the rise of Machiavellian politics, the Wars of Religion, the corrupt Borgia Popes, and the intensified witch-hunts of the 16th century. Many people who lived during the Renaissance did not view it as the " golden age" imagined by certain 19th-century authors, but were concerned by these social maladies. Significantly, though, the artists, writers, and patrons involved in the cultural movements in question believed they were living in a new era that was a clean break from the Middle Ages. Some Marxist historians prefer to describe the Renaissance in material terms, holding the view that the changes in art, literature, and philosophy were part of a general economic trend from feudalism toward capitalism, resulting in a bourgeois class with leisure time to devote to the arts.

Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) acknowledged the existence of the Renaissance but questioned whether it was a positive change. In his book The Autumn of the Middle Ages, he argued that the Renaissance was a period of decline from the High Middle Ages, destroying much that was important. The Medieval Latin language, for instance, had evolved greatly from the classical period and was still a living language used in the church and elsewhere. The Renaissance obsession with classical purity halted its further evolution and saw Latin revert to its classical form. This view is however somewhat contested by recent studies. Robert S. Lopez has contended that it was a period of deep economic recession. Meanwhile, George Sarton and Lynn Thorndike have both argued that scientific progress was perhaps less original than has traditionally been supposed. Finally, Joan Kelly argued that the Renaissance led to greater gender dichotomy, lessening the agency women had had during the Middle Ages.

Some historians have begun to consider the word Renaissance to be unnecessarily loaded, implying an unambiguously positive rebirth from the supposedly more primitive " Dark Ages", the Middle Ages. Most political and economic historians now prefer to use the term " early modern" for this period (and a considerable period afterwards), a designation intended to highlight the period as a transitional one between the Middle Ages and the modern era. Others such as Roger Osborne have come to consider the Italian Renaissance as a repository of the myths and ideals of western history in general, and instead of rebirth of ancient ideas as a period of great innovation.

The art historian Erwin Panofsky observed of this resistance to the concept of "Renaissance":

It is perhaps no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been most vigorously questioned by those who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects of civilization - historians of economic and social developments, political and religious situations, and, most particularly, natural science - but only exceptionally by students of literature and hardly ever by historians of Art.

Other Renaissances

The term Renaissance has also been used to define periods outside of the 15th and 16th centuries. Charles H. Haskins (1870-1937), for example, made a case for a Renaissance of the 12th century. Other historians have argued for a Carolingian Renaissance in the 8th and 9th centuries, Ottonian Renaissance in the 10th century and for the Timurid Renaissance of the 14th century. The Islamic Golden Age has been also sometimes termed with the Islamic Renaissance. The Macedonian Renaissance is a term used for a period in the Roman Empire in the 9th-11th centuries CE.

Other periods of cultural rebirth have also been termed "renaissances", such as the Bengal Renaissance, Tamil Renaissance, Nepal Bhasa renaissance, al-Nahda or the Harlem Renaissance. The term can also be used in cinema. In animation, the Disney Renaissance is a period that spanned the years from 1989 to 1999 which saw the studio return to the level of quality not witnessed since their Golden Age of Animation. The San Francisco Renaissance was a vibrant period of exploratory poetry and fiction writing in that city in the mid-20th century.

References

Explanatory notes

1. For information on this earlier, very different approach to a different set of ancient texts (scientific texts rather than cultural texts) see ^ Latin translations of the 12th century, and Islamic contributions to Medieval Europe.

2. ^ Joseph Ben-David wrote:

Rapid accumulation of knowledge, which has characterized the development of science since the 17th century, had never occurred before that time. The new kind of scientific activity emerged only in a few countries of Western Europe, and it was restricted to that small area for about two hundred years. (Since the 19th century, scientific knowledge has been assimilated by the rest of the world).

3. ^ It is sometimes thought that the Church, as an institution, formally sold indulgences at the time. This, however, was not the practice. Donations were often received, but only mandated by individuals that were condemned.

General sources

Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), a famous classic; excerpt and text search 2007 edition; also complete text online.

Cartledge, Bryan (2011). The Will to Survive: A History of Hungary. C. Hurst & Co. ISBN 978-1849041126.

Hendrix, Scott E. (2013). "Astrological forecasting and the Turkish menace in the Renaissance Balkans" (PDF). Anthropology. Universitatis Miskolciensis. 13 (2): 57-72. ISSN 1452-7243.

Klaniczay, Tibor (1992). "The age of Matthias Corvinus". In Porter, Roy; Teich, Mikuláš (eds.). The Renaissance in National Context. Cambridge University Press. pp. 164-179. ISBN 0521369703.

Reynolds, L. D.; Wilson, Nigel (1974). Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0199686339. OL 26919731M.

Further reading

Cronin, Vincent (1969), The Flowering of the Renaissance, ISBN 0712698841

Cronin, Vincent (1992), The Renaissance, ISBN 0002154110

Campbell, Gordon. The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance. (2003). 862 pp. online at OUP

Fletcher, Stella. The Longman Companion to Renaissance Europe, 1390-1530. (2000). 347 pp.

Grendler, Paul F., ed. The Renaissance: An Encyclopedia for Students. (2003). 970 pp.

Hale, John. The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance. (1994). 648 pp.; a magistral survey, heavily illustrated; excerpt and text search

Hall, Bert S. Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics (2001); excerpt and text search

Hattaway, Michael, ed. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture. (2000). 747 pp.

King, Margaret L. Women of the Renaissance (1991) excerpt and text search

Kristeller, Paul Oskar, and Michael Mooney. Renaissance Thought and its Sources (1979); excerpt and text search

Nauert, Charles G. Historical Dictionary of the Renaissance. (2004). 541 pp.

Patrick, James A., ed. Renaissance and Reformation (5 vol 2007), 1584 pages; comprehensive encyclopedia

Plumb, J.H. The Italian Renaissance (2001); excerpt and text search

Paoletti, John T. and Gary M. Radke. Art in Renaissance Italy (4th ed. 2011)

Potter, G.R. ed. The New Cambridge Modern History: Volume 1: The Renaissance, 1493-1520 (1957) online; major essays by multiple scholars. Summarizes the viewpoint of 1950s.

Robin, Diana; Larsen, Anne R.; and Levin, Carole, eds. Encyclopedia of Women in the Renaissance: Italy, France, and England (2007) 459 pp.

Rowse, A.L. The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Life of the Society (2000); excerpt and text search

Ruggiero, Guido. The Renaissance in Italy: A Social and Cultural History of the Rinascimento (Cambridge University Press, 2015). 648 pp. online review

Rundle, David, ed. The Hutchinson Encyclopedia of the Renaissance. (1999). 434 pp.; numerous brief articles online edition

Turner, Richard N. Renaissance Florence (2005); excerpt and text search

Ward, A. The Cambridge Modern History. Vol 1: The Renaissance (1902); older essays by scholars; emphasis on politics

Historiography

Bouwsma, William J. "The Renaissance and the drama of Western history." American Historical Review (1979): 1-15. in JSTOR

Caferro, William. Contesting the Renaissance (2010); excerpt and text search

Ferguson, Wallace K. "The Interpretation of the Renaissance: Suggestions for a Synthesis." Journal of the History of Ideas (1951): 483-495. online in JSTOR

Ferguson, Wallace K. "Recent trends in the economic historiography of the Renaissance." Studies in the Renaissance (1960): 7-26.

Ferguson, Wallace Klippert. The Renaissance in historical thought (AMS Press, 1981)

Grendler, Paul F. "The Future of Sixteenth Century Studies: Renaissance and Reformation Scholarship in the Next Forty Years", Sixteenth Century Journal Spring 2009, Vol. 40 Issue 1, pp. 182+

Murray, Stuart A.P. The Library: An Illustrated History. American Library Association, Chicago, 2012.

Ruggiero, Guido, ed. A Companion to the Worlds of the Renaissance. (2002). 561 pp.

Starn, Randolph. "A Postmodern Renaissance?" Renaissance Quarterly 2007 60(1): 1-24 in Project MUSE

Summit, Jennifer. "Renaissance Humanism and the Future of the Humanities". Literature Compass (2012) 9#10 pp: 665-678.

Trivellato, Francesca. "Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean in Recent Historical Work", Journal of Modern History (March 2010), 82#1 pp: 127-155.

Woolfson, Jonathan, ed. Palgrave advances in Renaissance historiography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)

Primary sources

Bartlett, Kenneth, ed. The Civilization of the Italian Renaissance: A Sourcebook (2nd ed., 2011)

Ross, James Bruce, and Mary M. McLaughlin, eds. The Portable Renaissance Reader (1977); excerpt and text search

External links

Interactive resources

Lectures and galleries

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The Renaissance ( rin-AY-sənss , REN-ə-sahnss ) is a period in history and a cultural movement marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity, covering the 15th and 16th centuries and characterized by an effort to revive and surpass the ideas and achievements of classical antiquity; it occurred after the crisis of the Late Middle Ages and was associated with great social change in most fields and disciplines, including art, architecture, politics, literature, exploration and science.

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They had about four different types of painting styles. people liked the ones that were more realistic. -Karen Ramirez

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Renaissance art - the Cranachs | DW Documentary

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Art  people look at art from the Roman . Daniel Leon

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The renaissance attained its glourious expression in its painting sculptures and its archtitecture.-marisse

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famous paintings humanism italian wallpaper italy early renaissance paintings middle ages high renaissance period architecture portrait

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Leonardo Da Vinci was a inventor and artist. He created the "Mona Lisa" and made many ideas for incredible inventions. What's awesome is how he managed to come up with the ideas of helicopters and submarines.
Ada Santos

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Era of change within the 15th - 16th century
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World#/media/File:Map_of_America_by_Sebastian_Munster.JPG

Melano

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Was a sculpture, engineer, painter, architect, and poet

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Was a sculpture, engineer, painter, architect, and poet

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The Renaissance started in Italy - Anthony Anaya

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Florence and the Renaissance: Crash Course European History #2

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an era where many things were changed like political, social,economic and cultural. 

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an era where many things were changed like political, social,economic and cultural. 

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The Ranaissance is was a period of time where  European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages. Daniel leon

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From Darkness to Light: The Renaissance Begins

During the Middle Ages, a period that took place between the fall of ancient Rome in 476 A.D. and the beginning of the 14th century, Europeans made few advances in science and art.

Also known as the "Dark Ages," the era is often branded as a time of war, ignorance, famine and pandemics such as the Black Death.

Some historians, however, believe that such grim depictions of the Middle Ages were greatly exaggerated, though many agree that there was relatively little regard for ancient Greek and Roman philosophies and learning at the time.

Humanism

During the 14th century, a cultural movement called humanism began to gain momentum in Italy. Among its many principles, humanism promoted the idea that man was the center of his own universe, and people should embrace human achievements in education, classical arts, literature and science.

In 1450, the invention of the Gutenberg printing press allowed for improved communication throughout Europe and for ideas to spread more quickly.

As a result of this advance in communication, little-known texts from early humanist authors such as those by Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, which promoted the renewal of traditional Greek and Roman culture and values, were printed and distributed to the masses.

Additionally, many scholars believe advances in international finance and trade impacted culture in Europe and set the stage for the Renaissance.

Medici Family

The Renaissance started in Florence, Italy, a place with a rich cultural history where wealthy citizens could afford to support budding artists.

Members of the powerful Medici family, which ruled Florence for more than 60 years, were famous backers of the movement.

Great Italian writers, artists, politicians and others declared that they were participating in an intellectual and artistic revolution that would be much different from what they experienced during the Dark Ages.

The movement first expanded to other Italian city-states, such as Venice, Milan, Bologna, Ferrara and Rome. Then, during the 15th century, Renaissance ideas spread from Italy to France and then throughout western and northern Europe.

Although other European countries experienced their Renaissance later than Italy, the impacts were still revolutionary.

Renaissance Geniuses

Some of the most famous and groundbreaking Renaissance intellectuals, artists, scientists and writers include the likes of:

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519): Italian painter, architect, inventor and "Renaissance man" responsible for painting "The Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper.

Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536): Scholar from Holland who defined the humanist movement in Northern Europe. Translator of the New Testament into Greek.

Rene Descartes (1596-1650): French philosopher and mathematician regarded as the father of modern philosophy. Famous for stating, "I think; therefore I am."

Galileo (1564-1642): Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer whose pioneering work with telescopes enabled him to describes the moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn. Placed under house arrest for his views of a heliocentric universe.

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543): Mathematician and astronomer who made first modern scientific argument for the concept of a heliocentric solar system.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679): English philosopher and author of "Leviathan."

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400): English poet and author of "The Canterbury Tales."

Giotto (1266-1337): Italian painter and architect whose more realistic depictions of human emotions influenced generations of artists. Best known for his frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.

Dante (1265-1321): Italian philosopher, poet, writer and political thinker who authored "The Divine Comedy."

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527): Italian diplomat and philosopher famous for writing "The Prince" and "The Discourses on Livy."

Titian (1488-1576): Italian painter celebrated for his portraits of Pope Paul III and Charles I and his later religious and mythical paintings like "Venus and Adonis" and "Metamorphoses."

William Tyndale (1494-1536): English biblical translator, humanist and scholar burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English.

William Byrd (1539/40-1623): English composer known for his development of the English madrigal and his religious organ music.

John Milton (1608-1674): English poet and historian who wrote the epic poem "Paradise Lost."

William Shakespeare (1564-1616): England's "national poet" and the most famous playwright of all time, celebrated for his sonnets and plays like "Romeo and Juliet."

Donatello (1386-1466): Italian sculptor celebrated for lifelike sculptures like "David," commissioned by the Medici family.

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510): Italian painter of "Birth of Venus."

Raphael (1483-1520): Italian painter who learned from da Vinci and Michelangelo. Best known for his paintings of the Madonna and "The School of Athens."

Michelangelo (1475-1564): Italian sculptor, painter and architect who carved "David" and painted The Sistine Chapel in Rome.

Renaissance Impact on Art, Architecture and Science

Art, architecture and science were closely linked during the Renaissance. In fact, it was a unique time when these fields of study fused together seamlessly.

For instance, artists like da Vinci incorporated scientific principles, such as anatomy into their work, so they could recreate the human body with extraordinary precision.

Architects such as Filippo Brunelleschi studied mathematics to accurately engineer and design immense buildings with expansive domes.

Scientific discoveries led to major shifts in thinking: Galileo and Descartes presented a new view of astronomy and mathematics, while Copernicus proposed that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system.

Renaissance art was characterized by realism and naturalism. Artists strived to depict people and objects in a true-to-life way.

They used techniques, such as perspective, shadows and light to add depth to their work. Emotion was another quality that artists tried to infuse into their pieces.

Some of the most famous artistic works that were produced during the Renaissance include:

The Mona Lisa (Da Vinci)

The Last Supper (Da Vinci)

Statue of David (Michelangelo)

The Birth of Venus (Botticelli)

The Creation of Adam (Michelangelo)

Renaissance Exploration

While many artists and thinkers used their talents to express new ideas, some Europeans took to the seas to learn more about the world around them. In a period known as the Age of Discovery, several important explorations were made.

Voyagers launched expeditions to travel the entire globe. They discovered new shipping routes to the Americas, India and the Far East and explorers trekked across areas that weren't fully mapped.

Famous journeys were taken by Ferdinand Magellan, Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci (after whom America is named), Marco Polo, Ponce de Leon, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Hernando De Soto and other explorers.

Renaissance Religion

Humanism encouraged Europeans to question the role of the Roman Catholic church during the Renaissance.

As more people learned how to read, write and interpret ideas, they began to closely examine and critique religion as they knew it. Also, the printing press allowed for texts, including the Bible, to be easily reproduced and widely read by the people, themselves, for the first time.

In the 16th century, Martin Luther, a German monk, led the Protestant Reformation - a revolutionary movement that caused a split in the Catholic church. Luther questioned many of the practices of the church and whether they aligned with the teachings of the Bible.

As a result, a new form of Christianity, known as Protestantism, was created.

End of the Renaissance

Scholars believe the demise of the Renaissance was the result of several compounding factors.

By the end of the 15th century, numerous wars had plagued the Italian peninsula. Spanish, French and German invaders battling for Italian territories caused disruption and instability in the region.

Also, changing trade routes led to a period of economic decline and limited the amount of money that wealthy contributors could spend on the arts.

Later, in a movement known as the Counter-Reformation, the Catholic church censored artists and writers in response to the Protestant Reformation. Many Renaissance thinkers feared being too bold, which stifled creativity.

Furthermore, in 1545, the Council of Trent established the Roman Inquisition, which made humanism and any views that challenged the Catholic church an act of heresy punishable by death.

By the early 17th century, the Renaissance movement had died out, giving way to the Age of Enlightenment.

Debate Over the Renaissance

While many scholars view the Renaissance as a unique and exciting time in European history, others argue that the period wasn't much different from the Middle Ages and that both eras overlapped more than traditional accounts suggest.

Also, some modern historians believe that the Middle Ages had a cultural identity that's been downplayed throughout history and overshadowed by the Renaissance era.

While the exact timing and overall impact of the Renaissance is sometimes debated, there's little dispute that the events of the period ultimately led to advances that changed the way people understood and interpreted the world around them.

Sources

The Renaissance, History World International.
The Renaissance - Why it Changed the World, The Telegraph.
Facts About the Renaissance, Biography Online.
Facts About the Renaissance Period, Interestingfacts.org.
What is Humanism? International Humanist and Ethical Union.
Why Did the Italian Renaissance End? Dailyhistory.org.
The Myth of the Renaissance in Europe, BBC.

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Renaissance Period: Timeline, Art & Facts

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The Renaissance was a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic "rebirth" following the Middle Ages.

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The Renaissance began in Italy because it was the middle of Rome -Dinora L

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was an era
where many things were
changed like political,
social,economic and cultural.

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The renaissance was a time of creativity and change in many political, social, economic and cultural.-marisse

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what is renaissance Search instead for what is reiassnace

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In the Medieval Times, art was much more stylized. Many people thought that realistic art was cooler  and it was popular in ancient Greece and Rome. Many art techniques were used, like making objects smaller in the back made paintings look 3D.
Ada Santos

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the renaissance was the period when they started to explorer new technology and ideas.it was the rebirth following the middle age.-Karen Ramirez.

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Florence and the Renaissance: Crash Course European History #2

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There were a lot of resources and there weren't any more plagues so it was a good time to start advancing society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance

Melano

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was time in the era

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The Renaissance began in Italy because they felt it was time to "rebirth" and Italy was the perfect place to change their ways of living.

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The renasissnace begain in italy because it is in the middle ofthe roman empire.-marisse

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The Renaissance started in Italy because Italy was the center of Rome. - Karen Ramirez

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The Renaissance was a period of time in Italy when people started to get rid of Medieval ideology and started to explore new technology and ideas.
Ada Santos

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it started in itily it is the center of rome they wanted explre greek

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The renaissance

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The Renaissance started in Italy because Italy was the center of Rome. The idea of exploring Greek and Roman literature was spawning, so Italy was an excellent area.
Ada Santos

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The Ranaissance  start in Italy because Italy  was in the center of the Roman empire Daniel Leon

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The Renaissance may be vivid in the mind's eye - in images of human figures sculpted in the round, or in scenes painted with a profound and moving realism. But as a concept it is a slippery customer.

The word is French for 'rebirth'. Historians first use it (from about 1840) for the period from the 14th to the 16th century, implying a rediscovery of rational civilization (exemplified by Greece and Rome) after the medieval centuries - seen as superstitious and artistically primitive. The term 'Middle Ages', also coined by historians, makes the same point in a different way - defining the medieval period merely as the gap between classical and modern civilization.

The first problem with this scenario is that the Middle Ages have a vivid cultural identity of their own, different from the classical pattern but not necessarily inferior. And the later medieval centuries, in particular the 12th and 13th, are unmistakably civilized.

The second difficulty is that it is impossible to establish clear dividing lines between medieval and Renaissance. In art (particularly sculpture) stylistic hints of the coming Renaissance can be seen well before 1300. But there is one field in which a new start is consciously made in the 14th century. This is the revival of the study of classical literature.

On the Capitol in Rome, in 1341, a ceremony deliberately echoes the ancient Roman empire. The king of Naples, ruling in Rome on behalf of the pope in Avignon, places a laurel wreath on the brow of Petrarch - honouring him just as Augustus might have honoured Virgil.

The event deliberately symbolizes a renewed interest in classical culture, a movement in which Petrarch is a leading figure. But the new poet laureate adds a contemporary touch. He immediately goes to the tomb of St Peter and places on it his wreath.

This blending of the old and the new Rome, using the classical tradition in the service of Christianity, becomes a characteristic of Renaissance painting and sculpture. Christian saints are sculpted with the freshness of classical boys (Donatello's Saint George, for example), and painters place the gospel scenes in ancient Roman settings.

The roots of these artistic developments are too complex to be explained by a simple interest in classical culture. Only in the world of learning is the link between the Renaissance and the ancient world unmistakably clear. Only among Petrarch and his followers in the 14th and 15th century is the rebirth of the past ( rinascimento in Italian) a conscious aim.

In Florence, in April 1350, Petrarch makes his first influential convert to the cause of classical studies. He is visited by an admirer, Boccaccio, nine years younger than himself, who has written a biography of Petrarch but has not previously met him.

The encounter changes Boccaccio's life. He is in the middle of writing the work for which he is now famous, the Decameron. After completing it, probably in the following year, he abandons Italian literature - writing henceforth only in Latin and devoting himself to tracking down original manuscripts of classical texts.

Boccaccio is just one of the many followers of Petrarch who visit ancient monastery libraries in search of forgotten Latin manuscripts. They travel to Constantinople to bring back trunkloads of Greek parchments. They clamber among ancient ruins to note the inscriptions.

They copy out their findings and present their manuscripts to friends (soon the invention of printing will greatly speed up the spread of these texts). They form academies (echoing Plato's academy) in which they read learned papers on classical themes. They attempt performances of music and drama in what they believe to be the classical style. The members of one academy in Rome are even arrested for indulging in pagan classical rites.

Scholars of this kind become known as humanists, implying an admiration for the finest achievements of the human race. Human excellence and virtue is now seen as valuable in itself, in this present world of ours, rather than as a necessary qualification for entry to a world beyond.

An emphasis on the next world has characterized medieval teaching, broadly described as scholasticism. Humanism, in contrast to scholasticism, represents the cast of mind of the Renaissance. Beginning as a movement in Italy in the 14th century, it finds some of its greatest adherents in northern Europe as late as the 16th century - in influential figures such as Erasmus and Thomas More.

Italian scholars of the 14th and 15th century, followers of Petrarch in their reverence for classical culture, search through libraries for ancient texts. Copying out their discoveries, they aspire also to an authentic script. They find their models in beautifully written manuscripts which they take to be Roman but which are in fact Carolingian.

The error is a fortunate one. The script devised for Charlemagne's monastic workshops in the 8th century is a model of clarity and elegance. It is adapted for practical use, in slightly different ways, by two Florentine friends - Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolò Niccoli.

Bracciolini, employed as secretary at the papal court in Rome from 1403, uses the ancient script for important documents. To the rounded lower-case letters of the the Carolingian script he adds straight-edged capital letters which he copies from Roman monuments.

By contrast his friend Niccoli adapts the Carolingian script to the faster requirements of everyday writing. To this end he finds it more convenient to slope the letters a little (the result of holding the pen at a more comfortable angle), and to allow some of them to join up. Joining up is not in itself new. In several forms of medieval hand-writing the letters flow together to become what is known as a 'cursive' hand.

Printers in Venice later in the century, attempting to reflect the classical spirit of humanism, turn to the scripts of Bracciolini and Niccoli. The rounded but upright style of Bracciolini is first used by the French printer Nicolas Jenson shortly after his arrival in the city in 1470. This type face is given the name roman, reflecting its ancient origins.

In 1501 another great Venetian printer, Aldus Manutius, needs a contrasting and smaller type for a 'pocket edition' of Virgil. He turns to the script of Niccoli, in everyday use by fashionable Italians, and calls it accordingly italic. Roman and italic eventually become a standard part of every printer's repertoire.

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The Renaissance may be vivid in the mind's eye - in images of human figures sculpted in the round, or in scenes painted with a profound and moving realism. But as a concept it is a slippery customer. The word is French for 'rebirth'.

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From politics and trade to society and culture, the Renaissance brought great change.  Life moved from the country to the city and people began to learn more about their world.

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What does "Renaissance" mean?

When did the Renaissance happen?

What is Renaissance art?

What does "Renaissance man" mean?

Renaissance, (French: "Rebirth") period in European civilization immediately following the Middle Ages and conventionally held to have been characterized by a surge of interest in Classical scholarship and values. The Renaissance also witnessed the discovery and exploration of new continents, the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the decline of the feudal system and the growth of commerce, and the invention or application of such potentially powerful innovations as paper, printing, the mariner's compass, and gunpowder. To the scholars and thinkers of the day, however, it was primarily a time of the revival of Classical learning and wisdom after a long period of cultural decline and stagnation.

A brief treatment of the Renaissance follows. For full treatment, see history of Europe: The Renaissance.

Origins and rise of humanism

The term Middle Ages was coined by scholars in the 15th century to designate the interval between the downfall of the Classical world of Greece and Rome and its rediscovery at the beginning of their own century, a revival in which they felt they were participating. Indeed, the notion of a long period of cultural darkness had been expressed by Petrarch even earlier. Events at the end of the Middle Ages, particularly beginning in the 12th century, set in motion a series of social, political, and intellectual transformations that culminated in the Renaissance. These included the increasing failure of the Roman Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire to provide a stable and unifying framework for the organization of spiritual and material life, the rise in importance of city-states and national monarchies, the development of national languages, and the breakup of the old feudal structures.

While the spirit of the Renaissance ultimately took many forms, it was expressed earliest by the intellectual movement called humanism. Humanism was initiated by secular men of letters rather than by the scholar-clerics who had dominated medieval intellectual life and had developed the Scholastic philosophy. Humanism began and achieved fruition first in Italy. Its predecessors were men like Dante and Petrarch, and its chief protagonists included Giannozzo Manetti, Leonardo Bruni, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo Valla, and Coluccio Salutati. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 provided humanism with a major boost, for many eastern scholars fled to Italy, bringing with them important books and manuscripts and a tradition of Greek scholarship.

Humanism had several significant features. First, it took human nature in all of its various manifestations and achievements as its subject. Second, it stressed the unity and compatibility of the truth found in all philosophical and theological schools and systems, a doctrine known as syncretism. Third, it emphasized the dignity of man. In place of the medieval ideal of a life of penance as the highest and noblest form of human activity, the humanists looked to the struggle of creation and the attempt to exert mastery over nature. Finally, humanism looked forward to a rebirth of a lost human spirit and wisdom. In the course of striving to recover it, however, the humanists assisted in the consolidation of a new spiritual and intellectual outlook and in the development of a new body of knowledge. The effect of humanism was to help men break free from the mental strictures imposed by religious orthodoxy, to inspire free inquiry and criticism, and to inspire a new confidence in the possibilities of human thought and creations.

From Italy the new humanist spirit and the Renaissance it engendered spread north to all parts of Europe, aided by the invention of printing, which allowed literacy and the availability of Classical texts to grow explosively. Foremost among northern humanists was Desiderius Erasmus, whose Praise of Folly (1509) epitomized the moral essence of humanism in its insistence on heartfelt goodness as opposed to formalistic piety. The intellectual stimulation provided by humanists helped spark the Reformation, from which, however, many humanists, including Erasmus, recoiled. By the end of the 16th century the battle of Reformation and Counter-Reformation had commanded much of Europe's energy and attention, while the intellectual life was poised on the brink of the Enlightenment.

Artistic developments and the emergence of Florence

It was in art that the spirit of the Renaissance achieved its sharpest formulation. Art came to be seen as a branch of knowledge, valuable in its own right and capable of providing man with images of God and his creations as well as with insights into man's position in the universe. In the hands of men such as Leonardo da Vinci it was even a science, a means for exploring nature and a record of discoveries. Art was to be based on the observation of the visible world and practiced according to mathematical principles of balance, harmony, and perspective, which were developed at this time. In the works of painters such as Masaccio, the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Perugino, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, and Titian; sculptors such as Giovanni Pisano, Donatello, Andrea del Verrocchio, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Michelangelo; and architects such as Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Andrea Palladio, Michelozzo, and Filarete, the dignity of man found expression in the arts.

In Italy the Renaissance proper was preceded by an important "proto-renaissance" in the late 13th and early 14th centuries, which drew inspiration from Franciscan radicalism. St. Francis of Assisi had rejected the formal Scholasticism of the prevailing Christian theology and gone out among the poor praising the beauties and spiritual value of nature. His example inspired Italian artists and poets to take pleasure in the world around them. The work of the most famous artist of the proto-renaissance period, Giotto (1266/67 or 1276-1337), reveals a new pictorial style that depends on clear, simple structure and great psychological penetration rather than on the flat, linear decorativeness and hierarchical compositions of his predecessors and contemporaries, such as the Florentine painter Cimabue and the Siennese painters Duccio and Simone Martini. The great poet Dante lived at about the same time as Giotto, and his poetry shows a similar concern with inward experience and the subtle shades and variations of human nature. Although his Divine Comedy belongs to the Middle Ages in its plan and ideas, its subjective spirit and power of expression look forward to the Renaissance. Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio also belong to this proto-renaissance period, both through their extensive studies of Latin literature and through their writings in the vernacular. Unfortunately, the terrible plague of 1348 and subsequent civil wars submerged both the revival of humanistic studies and the growing interest in individualism and naturalism revealed in the works of Giotto and Dante. The spirit of the Renaissance did not surface again until the 15th century.

In 1401 a competition was held at Florence to award the commission for bronze doors to be placed on the baptistery of San Giovanni. Defeated by the goldsmith and painter Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello left for Rome, where they immersed themselves in the study of ancient architecture and sculpture. When they returned to Florence and began to put their knowledge into practice, the rationalized art of the ancient world was reborn. The founder of Renaissance painting was Masaccio (1401-28). The intellectuality of his conceptions, the monumentality of his compositions, and the high degree of naturalism in his works mark Masaccio as a pivotal figure in Renaissance painting. The succeeding generation of artists- Piero della Francesca, the Pollaiuolo brothers, and Andrea del Verrocchio-pressed forward with researches into linear and aerial perspective and anatomy, developing a style of scientific naturalism.

The situation in Florence was uniquely favourable to the arts. The civic pride of Florentines found expression in statues of the patron saints commissioned from Ghiberti and Donatello for niches in the grain-market guildhall known as Or San Michele, and in the largest dome built since antiquity, placed by Brunelleschi on the Florence cathedral. The cost of construction and decoration of palaces, churches, and monasteries was underwritten by wealthy merchant families, chief among whom were the Medici family.

The Medici traded in all of the major cities in Europe, and one of the most famous masterpieces of Northern Renaissance art, The Portinari Altarpiece, by Hugo van der Goes ( c. 1476; Uffizi, Florence), was commissioned by their agent, Tommaso Portinari. Instead of being painted with the customary tempera of the period, the work is painted with translucent oil glazes that produce brilliant jewel-like colour and a glossy surface. Early Northern Renaissance painters were more concerned with the detailed reproduction of objects and their symbolic meaning than with the study of scientific perspective and anatomy even after these achievements became widely known. On the other hand, central Italian painters began to adopt the oil medium soon after The Portinari Altarpiece was brought to Florence in 1476.

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Renaissance | Definition, Meaning, History, Artists, Art, & Facts

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The Renaissance was a period in European civilization that immediately followed the Middle Ages and reached its height in the 15th century. It is conventionally held to have been characterized by a surge of interest in Classical scholarship and values. The Renaissance also witnessed the discovery and exploration of new continents and numerous important inventions.

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it was a good place to start a new beggining and it was mostly good for trade because of the water