Renaissance << REHN uh sons >> was a great cultural movement that began in Italy during the early 1300’s. It spread to England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and other countries in the late 1400’s and ended about 1600. The French word Renaissance comes from the Latin word renascor and refers to the act of rebirth.
During the Renaissance, many European scholars and artists, especially in Italy, studied the learning and art of ancient Greece and Rome. They wanted to recapture the spirit of the Greek and Roman cultures in their own artistic, literary, and philosophic works. The cultures of ancient Greece and Rome are often called classical antiquity. The Renaissance thus represented a rebirth of these cultures and is therefore also known as the revival of antiquity or the revival of learning.
The Renaissance overlapped the end of a period in European history called the Middle Ages, which began in the 400’s. The leaders of the Renaissance rejected many of the attitudes and ideas of the Middle Ages. For example, religious authorities in the Middle Ages taught that cities were dangerous, wicked places that distracted people from the important task of saving their souls. Renaissance thinkers commonly saw cities as places where people could exercise such civic virtues as justice, devotion to the common good, courage, and self-sacrifice. Such Renaissance religious leaders as Girolamo Savonarola believed corrupt cities could be redeemed if their citizens fervently practiced Christianity.
During the Middle Ages, the most important branch of learning was theology (the study of God). However, many Renaissance thinkers paid greater attention to the study of humanity. They examined the great accomplishments of different cultures, particularly those of ancient Greece and Rome. These thinkers organized a new group of intellectual disciplines, called the humanities, that emphasized language, oratory (public speaking), history, poetry, and moral philosophy. These disciplines aimed to enrich earthly life rather than an afterlife.
Medieval artists painted human figures that looked stiff and unrealistic and which often served symbolic purposes or aimed to instruct. But Renaissance artists stressed the beauty of the human body. They tried to capture the dignity and majesty of human beings in lifelike paintings and sculptures. They believed that people could relate more easily to realistic art, and thus the artwork could more strongly influence its viewers.
Renaissance culture spread gradually. At the height of the Renaissance, during the late 1400’s and early 1500’s, relatively few Europeans accepted Renaissance ideas. But the influence of the Renaissance on future generations was to prove immense in many fields—from art and literature to education, political science, and history. For centuries, scholars agreed that the modern era of human history began with the Renaissance. Today, many scholars consider the Renaissance part of the early modern period.
The Italian Renaissance
Political background.
Italy was not a unified country until the 1860’s. At the beginning of the Renaissance, it consisted of about 250 separate states, most of which were ruled by a city. Most cities had only 5,000 to 10,000 people. But others were among the largest cities in Europe. For example, Florence, Milan, and Venice had at least 100,000 people each in the early 1300’s. 
At the dawn of the Renaissance, much of Italy was supposedly controlled by the Holy Roman Empire. However, the emperors lived in Germany and had little power over their Italian lands. The popes ruled central Italy, including the city of Rome, but were unable to extend political control to the rest of Italy. No central authority was thus established in Italy to unify all the states.
During the mid-1300’s and early 1400’s, a number of major Italian cities came under the control of one family. For example, the Visconti family governed Milan from the early 1300’s until 1447, when the last male member died. Soon after, the Sforza family took control of Milan and governed the city until the late 1400’s. The Este family in Ferrara, the Gonzaga family in Mantua, and the Montefeltro family in Urbino were other ruling families. 
The form of government established by the ruling families of the Italian cities was called the signoria (principality), and the ruling prince was known as the signore. All power was concentrated in the signore and his friends and relatives. An elaborate court slowly grew up around each signorial government. At the court, the area’s leading artists, intellectuals, and politicians gathered under the sponsorship of the signore.
Other Italian cities had a form of government known as republicanism. In republican cities, a ruling class controlled the government. Members of the ruling class considered themselves superior to the other residents of the city. The most important examples of republican government were in Florence and Venice.
In the republican government of Florence, about 800 of the city’s wealthiest families made up the ruling class. The members of these Florentine families intermarried and lived in large, beautiful palaces built by Renaissance architects. They paid for the construction of great religious and civic buildings and impressive monuments throughout Florence. They also supported artists and intellectuals. In addition, the ruling class encouraged the study of ancient Greek and Roman authors in the desire to have their society resemble the cultures of classical antiquity. 
By the 1430’s, the Medici family dominated the ruling class of Florence. The family controlled the largest bank in Europe and was headed by a series of talented and ambitious men. Under Medici domination, the Florentine republic in some ways resembled a signorial government.
About 180 families controlled the republican government of Venice. All government leaders came from these families. A law passed in 1297 restricted membership in the Great Council, the principal governing body, to descendants of families that had already sat in the council. Like Florence, Venice became a leading center of Renaissance art under the support of the ruling class.
Humanism
was the most significant intellectual movement of the Renaissance. It blended concern for the history and actions of human beings with religious concerns. The humanists were scholars and artists who studied subjects that they believed would help them better understand the problems of humanity. These subjects included history, literature, and philosophy. The humanists shared the view that the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome had achieved greatness in the arts and sciences, government, and military affairs and thus could serve as models. They believed that modern people should understand and appreciate classical antiquity to learn how to conduct their lives.
To understand the customs, laws, and ideas of ancient Greece and Rome, the humanists had first to master the languages of classical antiquity. The Greeks had used a language foreign to Italians, and the Romans had used a form of Latin far different from that used in the 1300’s and 1400’s. To learn ancient Greek and Latin, the humanists studied philology (the science of the meaning and history of words). Philology became one of the two principal concerns of the humanists. The other was history, which the humanists saw as the study of great actions taken by courageous, noble, or wise men of classical antiquity.
The interest of the humanists in ancient Greece and Rome led them to search for manuscripts, statues, coins, and other surviving examples of classical civilization. For example, they combed monastery libraries throughout Europe, locating on dusty shelves long-neglected manuscripts by classical authors. The humanists carefully studied these manuscripts, prepared critical editions of them, and often translated them.
Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio
were the first Renaissance humanists. In the mid-1300’s, the two friends recovered many important but long ignored ancient manuscripts. Petrarch discovered the most influential of these works. It was Letters to Atticus, a collection of letters on Roman political life by the statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero. As Petrarch and Boccaccio studied the classical writings, they grew to dislike the clumsy, limited form of Latin widely used by their contemporaries. They urged people to adopt the precise and powerful writing style of classical literature.
Petrarch became known for his poetry, and Boccaccio for his collection of stories called the Decameron (about 1349-1353). In their works, they tried to describe human feelings and situations that people could easily understand. Petrarch and Boccaccio insisted that the duty of intellectuals was to concentrate on human problems, which they believed were more important than an understanding of the mysteries of nature or of God’s will. Many of Boccaccio’s works contain the idea that it is socially harmful to impose upon people severe moral standards that contradict normal human behavior.
The revival of Platonism.
Petrarch urged people to study the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. He believed that reading Plato would strengthen Christian faith. During the 1400’s, the study of Plato’s works became popular with many humanists. In 1484, the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino completed the first Latin translation of Plato’s writing. Platonic philosophy and Christianity share such ideas as the immortality of the individual human soul and the creation of the world by an all-powerful God. Renaissance thinkers saw in Plato’s works a harmony between wisdom and Christian devotion.
Niccolò Machiavelli.
Medieval political thinkers viewed politics idealistically, within a religious framework. But during the Renaissance, the statesman Niccolò Machiavelli developed a new, more practical philosophy of politics. His writings, contained in The Prince (written in 1513 and published in 1532) and other books, explain politics based on human nature and Roman history rather than on moral or religious ideals. Machiavelli determined that sometimes a leader must resort to such strong measures as cruelty, deception, or force to protect the power of the state against its rival states. Machiavelli’s separation of morality from political success has led many historians to consider him the first political scientist. 
The ideal courtier.
Some Italian humanists spent most of their time in signorial courts. During the late 1400’s, these humanists began to develop ideas about the proper conduct of courtiers—the noblemen and noblewomen who lived in a royal court. In 1528, The Book of the Courtier, by the author and diplomat Baldassare Castiglione, was published. He based the work on his experiences at the court of Urbino. It was translated into several European languages and influenced the conduct of courtiers throughout Europe. The Courtier also strongly influenced educational theory in England during the Renaissance.
Castiglione wrote that the ideal male courtier is refined in writing and speaking and skilled in the arts, sports, and the use of weapons. He willingly devotes himself to his signore, always seeking to please him. The courtier is polite and attentive to women. Whatever he does is achieved with an easy, natural style, which reflects his command of every situation. An ideal court woman knows literature and art and how to entertain the court. She exhibits the highest moral character and acts in a feminine manner. The highest form of love that a courtier can express is platonic love—that is, nonromantic love. The highest form of courtiership is one in which the courtier helps the prince to rule virtuously.
The fine arts.
During the Middle Ages, painters and sculptors tried to give their works a spiritual quality. They wanted viewers to concentrate on the deep religious meaning of their paintings and sculptures. They were not concerned with making their subjects appear natural or lifelike. But Renaissance painters and sculptors, like Renaissance writers, wanted to portray people and nature realistically. Medieval architects designed huge cathedrals to emphasize the grandeur of God and to humble the human spirit. Renaissance architects designed buildings whose proportions were based on those of the human body and whose ornamentation imitated ancient designs. 
Arts of the 1300’s and early 1400’s.
During the early 1300’s, the Florentine painter Giotto became the first artist to portray nature realistically. He produced magnificent frescoes (paintings on damp plaster) for churches in Assisi, Florence, Padua, and Rome. Giotto attempted to create lifelike figures showing real emotions. He portrayed many of his figures in realistic settings.
A remarkable group of Florentine architects, painters, and sculptors worked during the early 1400’s. They included the painter Masaccio, the sculptor Donatello, and the architect Filippo Brunelleschi. 
Masaccio’s finest work was a series of frescoes he painted about 1427 in the Brancacci Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. The frescoes realistically show Biblical scenes of emotional intensity. In these paintings, Masaccio utilized Brunelleschi’s system for achieving linear perspective.
In his sculptures, Donatello tried to portray the dignity of the human body in realistic and often dramatic detail. His masterpieces include three statues of the Biblical hero David. In a version finished in the 1430’s, Donatello portrayed David as a graceful, nude youth, moments after he slew the giant Goliath. The work, which is about 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall, was the first large free-standing nude created in Western art since classical antiquity. 
Brunelleschi was the first Renaissance architect to revive the ancient Roman style of architecture. He used arches, columns, and other elements of classical architecture in his designs. One of his best-known buildings is the beautifully and harmoniously proportioned Pazzi Chapel in Florence. The chapel, begun in 1442 and completed about 1465, was one of the first buildings designed in the new Renaissance style. Brunelleschi also was the first Renaissance artist to master linear perspective, a mathematical system with which painters could show space and depth on a flat surface.
Arts of the late 1400’s and early 1500’s
were dominated by three men. They were Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci.
Raphael‘s paintings are softer in outline and more poetic than those of Michelangelo. Raphael was skilled in creating perspective and in the delicate use of color. He painted a number of beautiful pictures of the Madonna (Virgin Mary) and many outstanding portraits. One of his greatest works is the fresco School of Athens (1511). The painting was influenced by classical Greek and Roman models. It portrays the great philosophers and scientists of ancient Greece in a setting of classical arches. Raphael was thus making a connection between the culture of classical antiquity and the Italian culture of his time. 
Leonardo da Vinci painted two of the most famous works of Renaissance art, the wallpainting The Last Supper (about 1497) and the portrait Mona Lisa (begun in 1503). Leonardo had one of the most searching minds in all history. He wanted to know how everything that he saw in nature worked. In over 4,000 pages of notebooks, he drew detailed diagrams and wrote his observations. Leonardo made careful drawings of human skeletons and muscles, trying to learn how the body worked. Due to his inquiring mind, Leonardo has become a symbol of the Renaissance spirit of learning and intellectual curiosity. 
The Renaissance outside Italy
In the late 1400’s, the Renaissance spread from Italy to such countries as France, Germany, England, and Spain. Such visitors to Italy as bankers, diplomats, merchants, and young scholars carried Renaissance culture home with them. The scholars acquired from the Italians the basic tools of humanistic study—history and philology.
A series of invasions of Italy played a major role in the spread of the Renaissance to other parts of Europe. From 1494 to the early 1500’s, French, German, and Spanish armies invaded Italy. The invaders were dazzled by the beauty of Italian art and architecture and returned home deeply influenced by Italian culture.
In Italy, evidence of classical antiquity, especially Roman antiquity, could be seen almost everywhere. Ruins of Roman monuments and buildings stood in every Italian city. This link between the present and the classical past was much weaker elsewhere in Europe. In ancient times, Roman culture had been forced upon northern and western Europeans by conquering Roman armies. But that culture quickly disappeared after the Roman Empire in the West fell in the A.D. 400’s.
The relative scarcity of classical art affected the development of European art outside Italy during the 1400’s. Painters had few examples of classical antiquity to imitate, and so they tended to be more influenced by the northern Gothic style of the late Middle Ages. The first great achievements in Renaissance painting outside Italy appeared in the works of artists living in Flanders. Most of the Flanders region lies in what are now Belgium and France. Flemish painting was known for its precise details. The human figures were realistic but lacked the sculptural quality characteristic of Italian painting. 
Political background.
During the Renaissance, the political structure of northern and western Europe differed greatly from that of Italy. By the late 1400’s, England, France, and Spain were being united into nations under monarchies. These monarchies provided political and cultural leadership for their countries. Germany, like Italy, was divided into many largely independent states. But Germany was the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, which unified the various German states to some extent.
The great royal courts supported the Renaissance in northern and western Europe much as the princes did in Italy. The French king Francis I, who ruled from 1515 to 1547, tried to surround himself with the finest representatives of the Italian Renaissance. The king brought Leonardo da Vinci and many other Italian artists and scholars to France. In England, the House of Tudor became the most important patron of the Renaissance. The Tudors ruled from 1485 to 1603. Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, invited numerous Italian humanists to England. These men encouraged English scholars to study the literature and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome.
Christian humanism.
After about 1500, humanists in northern Europe increasingly emphasized the study and revival of ancient Christianity. Humanist scholars identified and edited ancient Christian texts to remove any distortions that had been introduced into the writings over time. These texts included the Bible and the works of such Catholic thinkers and churchmen as Saint Augustine and Saint Jerome, as well as the leaders of the ancient Greek church. This attempt to purify the sources of Christian tradition implied a criticism of existing Church practices and an attempt to reform them. In addition, many Christian humanists believed they could reform religion through education.
Desiderius Erasmus and Sir Thomas More
were the leading Christian humanists. They were close friends who courageously refused to abandon their ideals.
Erasmus was born in the Netherlands. He was educated in Paris and traveled throughout Germany, England, and Italy. He was an excellent scholar, with a thorough knowledge of Latin and Greek. 
Erasmus refused to take sides in any political or religious controversy. In particular, he would not support either side during the Reformation, the religious movement of the 1500’s that gave birth to Protestantism. Both Roman Catholics and Protestants sought Erasmus’ support. He stubbornly kept his independence and was called a coward by both sides. However, Erasmus did attack abuses he saw in the church in a famous witty work called The Praise of Folly (1511). In this book, he criticized the moral quality of church leaders. Erasmus accused them of overemphasizing procedures and ceremonies while neglecting Christianity’s spiritual values.
Sir Thomas More (also known as Saint Thomas More) was born in England and devoted his life to serving his country. He gained the confidence of King Henry VIII and carried out a number of important missions for him. In 1529, the king appointed More lord chancellor, England’s highest judicial official.
Throughout his career, More dedicated himself to the principles that had inspired Erasmus. Like Erasmus, he believed it was important to eliminate the abuses, inequalities, and evils that were accepted as normal in his day. More’s best-known work is Utopia (1516). In this book, More described an imaginary society in which the divisions between the rich and the poor and the powerful and the weak were replaced by a common concern for the health and happiness of everyone. The abolition of private property would help to create equality between people in More’s ideal society.
More’s strong principles finally cost him his life. He objected to Henry VIII’s decision to annul (cancel) his marriage to Catherine of Aragon and remarry. More then refused to acknowledge the king’s authority over that of the pope. In 1535, he was beheaded for treason.
The heritage of the Renaissance
The Renaissance left an intellectual and artistic heritage that still remains important. Since the Renaissance, scholars have used Renaissance methods of humanistic inquiry, even when they did not share the ideas and spirit of the Renaissance humanists. In literature, writers have tried for centuries to imitate and improve upon the works of such Renaissance authors as Petrarch and Boccaccio.
The influence of Renaissance painters, sculptors, and architects has been particularly strong. The artists of Florence and Rome set enduring standards for painting in the Western world. For hundreds of years, painters have traveled to Florence to admire the frescoes of Giotto and Masaccio. They have visited Rome to study the paintings of Raphael and Michelangelo. The works of Donatello and Michelangelo have inspired sculptors for generations. The beautifully scaled buildings of Brunelleschi and other Renaissance architects still serve as models for architects.
Since the Renaissance, people have also been inspired by the intellectual daring of such men as Petrarch and Erasmus. Leaders of the Renaissance seemed to be breaking out of intellectual boundaries and entering unknown territories.
It is no accident that some of the greatest explorers of the late 1400’s and early 1500’s were Italians exposed to the traditions of the Renaissance. Christopher Columbus was a sailor from Genoa and an expert navigator. Before setting out on the voyage in which he hoped to find a western sea route to Asia, Columbus consulted the same scientist who taught mathematics to the architect Filippo Brunelleschi. Columbus—like such other Italian explorers as John Cabot, Giovanni da Verrazzano, and Amerigo Vespucci—was willing to take enormous risks to achieve results that people had never dreamed of. In a sense, Columbus’s arrival in America in 1492 was one of the greatest achievements of the Renaissance.
