A Rebirth Dug Out of Old Libraries
The Renaissance did not start with a new idea. It started with old ones being found again. Humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini combed through the monastic libraries of Europe hunting for Latin literary, historical and oratorical texts of antiquity that had sat unread for centuries.
Then came a windfall from disaster. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 sent a wave of emigre Greek scholars west, carrying precious manuscripts in ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity in western Europe.
That focus on literary and historical texts is precisely what separated Renaissance scholars from their medieval predecessors. Their intellectual basis was a version of humanism drawn from Roman *humanitas* and rediscovered Greek philosophy, including Protagoras and his claim that "man is the measure of all things".
Why It Happened in Florence
The movement was first centred in the Republic of Florence, one of many Italian states, before spreading through Italy and then across Europe. Historians have offered several explanations for why that particular city.
The usual candidates are Florence's unusual social and civic make-up at the time, its political structure, and the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici, who paid for art and scholarship on a scale few could match. The influx of Greek scholars after 1453 added fuel.
Other centres followed: Venice, Genoa, Milan, Rome under the Renaissance Papacy, and Naples. The Italian Renaissance is conventionally said to have concluded in 1527, when Holy Roman Emperor Charles V assaulted Rome during the war of the League of Cognac. Even so, painters including Tintoretto, Sofonisba Anguissola and Paolo Veronese carried the work on through the mid-to-late 16th century.
The Trick That Made Paint Look Real
As a cultural movement, the Renaissance produced an innovative flowering of literary Latin and an explosion of vernacular literatures, starting with the 14th-century revival of learning from classical sources that contemporaries credited to Petrarch.
In painting, the breakthrough was linear perspective, along with other techniques for rendering a more natural reality. A flat surface could suddenly hold convincing depth. Renaissance scholars applied the humanist method to study and searched for realism and genuine human emotion in art.
The change was not uniform or sudden. The first traces appear in Italy as early as the late 13th century, particularly in the writings of Dante and the paintings of Giotto. The invention of metal movable type later in the 15th century then sped the spread of ideas dramatically.
When Renaissance Man Was a Job Description
The period threw up polymaths such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, men who worked across art, engineering and science at once. They inspired the very term "Renaissance man", still used for anyone who refuses to stay in one lane.
The ripple effects reached well beyond the studio. In politics, the Renaissance shaped the customs and conventions of diplomacy. The era saw revolutions in printing and navigation, and the introduction of modern banking and the field of accounting.
Not everyone accepts the flattering version. There is a long and complex historiography here, with much debate reacting against 19th-century glorification of the period and its cultural heroes. Some observers question whether it was an advance at all, reading it instead as pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity. Social and economic historians tend to stress continuity with the Middle Ages, two eras linked, as one scholar put it, "by a thousand ties".
