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Renaissance

Period in European cultural history that began in Italy around 1400 and lasted there until the end of the 1500s. Elsewhere in Europe it began later, and lasted until the 1600s. One characteristic of the Renaissance was the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Roman literature, led by the writers Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarch who translated and studied the works of the classical civilizations. A central theme of the Renaissance was humanism, a belief in actively searching for knowledge rather than accepting what already exists, and a faith in the republican ideal. The greatest expression of the Renaissance was in the arts and learning. The term ‘Renaissance’ (French for ‘rebirth’) to describe this period of cultural history was invented by historians in the 1800s.

Art and architecture

Leon Alberti, in his writings on painting, created both a method of painting - using perspective to create an illusion of a third dimension - and the idea of using classically inspired, non-religious subjects. In Renaissance architecture, by his writing and his buildings, Alberti created a system of simple proportion that was followed for hundreds of years. Masaccio and Filippo Brunelleschi, working in the same period as Alberti, perfected the application of these ideas in painting and architecture respectively.

In the arts, historians regard the years 1490-1520 (the ‘High Renaissance’) as a peak, with the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael Sanzio, and Michelangelo Buonarotti in painting, and Michelangelo and Donato Bramante in architecture being of great importance. The high point of Venetian painting came some years later, with the work of Titian, Paolo Veronese, and Tintoretto. Leonardo has been described as a ‘universal man’ for his enormously wide-ranging studies, including painting, architecture, science, and engineering.

The enormous achievements of creative artists during the Renaissance were made possible by the patronage (money, sponsorship, and support) of wealthy ruling families such as the Sforza in Milan and the Medici in Florence; by the ruling doge of Venice; and by popes, notably Julius II and Leo X.

Italian literature

Both Boccaccio and Petrarch wrote major works in Italian rather than Latin, a trend that was continued by the creation of epic poems in Italian by Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso. Progress from the religious to the secular was seen in the creation of the first public libraries, and in the many translations from the classics published in Venice in the 16th century. In philosophy, the rediscovery of Greek thought took the form of neoplatonism in the work of such people as Marsilio Ficino. Niccolò Machiavelli in The Prince (1513) founded the modern study of politics.

Spread of the Renaissance

Outside Italy, Renaissance art and ideas became widespread throughout Europe. The Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus embodied humanist scholarship for northern Europe; Dutch painters included Albrecht Dürer and Hans Holbein. In France, Renaissance writers included François Rabelais, Joaquim Du Bellay, and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne; in Spain, Miguel de Cervantes; in Portugal, Luís Vaz de Camoëns; and in England William Shakespeare.

In the visual arts, the end of the High Renaissance is marked by a movement in the late 1400s known as Mannerism, a tendency to deliberate elongation of the body, and a wilful distortion of perspective. The true end of the Renaissance ideal came with the enlightenment movement in the late 1600s.

The idea of the Renaissance The art historian Giorgio Vasari applied the term rinascita/rebirth to the rise of art from Giotto di Bondone onwards. Critics in the 1800s adopted this concept for the development of Italian culture from the 1300s to the early 1500s; this is why what was an Italian phenomenon is known by a French term.

Petrarch Petrarch, though Florentine by parentage, was brought up in Provence, France, because his father was exiled there. Petrarch wanted to restore the place of Roman ideals and government to the Italian states of the 14th century. He worked on the restoration and publication of Roman texts that he found in the libraries of monasteries all over France. The first Roman text that he republished was the works of the Roman historian Livy, which he found almost complete at Avignon, although it had become corrupted over a long period. In the latter part of the 14th century Petrarch's efforts to spread the culture of Roman government influenced many Renaissance writers to argue for the use of humanism by governments. Humanist teachers influenced by Petrarch's work included Guarino da Verona (1374-1460) and Vittorino da Feltre (1378-1446).

Petrarch restored a sense of classical Latin scholarship, and initiated the recovery and revision of ancient texts that followed in the early 1400s. This task was virtually completed in the first quarter of the 1400s, especially for Latin literature. Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) was one of the most successful discoverers of classical manuscripts buried in monastic libraries.

Petrarch's ideas filtered through to Florence in the late 1300s, through Boccaccio and the historian Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406). These ideas inspired what has been called ‘civic humanism’, the belief in the value of the active, rather than the contemplative, life. From Petrarch sprang the activity of the humanist teachers, chief among them Guarino da Verona and Vittorino da Feltre. Many treatises of the early 1400s have the dignity of humanity as their theme. The prime example is a work by Giannozzo Manetti (1396-1459), On the Dignity and Excellence of Man (1451-52).

Alberti and the visual arts Leon Battista Alberti turned his mind to the practice and the theory of art. No ancient studies on the painting of Greek and Roman artists had survived, so Alberti was the first to write books on the subject. His De pictura/On Painting (1435) records the Florentine ideas of space in painting, making the subject of painting the real world, with the illusion of a third dimension created by perspective. The flat religious art of the Gothic and Byzantine world, with gold backgrounds and primary unblended colours, was thus swept away. He argued for a revolution in the subject matter of the arts, and the secular painting of the Renaissance was born.

Alberti was also influential in architecture. He was a practical architect (he designed the Rucellai palace in Florence and the Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini), as well as developing new architectural theory. Alberti proposed a rational architecture, and coupled this with the revival of the classical style. He recorded what was already happening in Florentine painting with Masaccio, and in the same way noted the developments in architecture made by Filippo Brunelleschi. Alberti's theory of painting was influential at least as far as the Impressionists, and in architecture Alberti's theory underlies the Renaissance itself, the age of baroque, and on through rococo to neoclassicism.

The 1400s in other Italian cities Florence is the representative of the age, and spirit, of the communes; but the communes tended naturally to give way to ruling families. In Florence itself the Medici from 1434 became virtual princes, and under Lorenzo Medici new aspects of culture flourished in a courtly environment. This state of things was repeated in other princely courts in Italy, notably with the Gonzaga in Mantua, the Este in Ferrara, the Sforza in Milan, Federigo da Montefeltro in Urbino, and Alfonso of Aragón in Naples. The search for classical manuscripts was extended as far as Byzantium, and with the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 scholars from the East added to the Greek influence in Renaissance learning. Prominent among these scholars was Cardinal John Bessarion (c. 1403-1472), whose legacy of books founded the great library of St Mark's in Venice. Earlier in Florence the first public library of Europe had been established by the Medici in San Marco. This was all part of a process by which learning, once exclusively monastic, passed into the public domain.

Printing The removal of learning from religious control was advanced by the invention in Germany in the mid-1400s of printing with movable type. The cost of books was greatly reduced as was the time it took to produce new editions. The number of copies could be increased, as could the quality of the printing. Each copy would be identical, enabling readers across Europe to have access to the same information and images. Printing was imported into Italy around 1460. There it was rapidly adopted, especially in Venice, which became for at least a century the centre of the European book trade. Just before the time of printing, Pope Nicholas V had encouraged the translation into Latin of the Greek authors who were then being discovered. At the turn of the century Aldus Manutius, a Roman printer established in Venice, supplied Europe with the first printed editions of Greek literature and, with his adoption of italic type in 1501, a whole series of pocket-sized plain texts of both classical and contemporary literature. The foundations for the modern world - for the whole of Europe - lay in this new availability of learning to all.

The High Renaissance in art The period of the 1400s was an artistic high point, with the work of Masaccio, Donatello, and Sandro Botticelli in Florence, and elsewhere with, for example, Piero della Francesca and Andrea Mantegna. In the early 1500s, during the pontificates of Julius II and Leo X, the focus shifted to Rome, with the climax of the High Renaissance in the work of Michelangelo and Raphael. Leonardo da Vinci never went to Rome, but was associated with Lodovico Sforza in Milan; he died in France in 1519, where he had gone at the invitation of King Francis I. His painted work is all the more precious because it is rare and, because he was continually experimenting with materials, fragile. For the art historian Vasari these three artists were the culmination of an artistic ascent that had begun in the 1300s. Leonardo, from the scope of his interests, has always been taken as the pattern of the universal human of the Renaissance.

The Renaissance in Venice Venice had remained aloof from the general pattern, looking outwards to its trade with the Levant, and backwards to links with the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. But Venice made a step forward with the generation of Aldus Manutius to dominate the book trade; and with Jacopo Bellini and Giorgione, Venice took its place as an equal in Renaissance painting.

In spite of the political crisis of 1508, in which it was heavily defeated by the League of Cambrai, Venice survived the fall of Italian liberties, and the advent of absolute rule with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (from 1530), remaining rich and free throughout the 1500s. It continued its period of artistic splendour with Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto and with the most influential of all Renaissance architects, Andrea Palladio.

Renaissance scholarship The Roman-born teacher Lorenzo Valla was the sharpest critical mind of the 1400s and the author of the Elegantiae (1435-44). As an expert in linguistics he foreshadowed Angelo Politian, a great scholar of Greek and Latin, and the two are almost alone in still commanding respect among modern classical scholars.

Education The aim of Renaissance education was to produce the ‘complete human being’ or ‘universal man’, practised in the humanities, mathematics and science (including their application in war), the arts and crafts, and athletics and sport. It was also intended to increase the fields of study and geographical knowledge, and to encourage the growth of scepticism and free thought, and the study and imitation of Greek and Latin literature and art. The study of the classics was not held to be incompatible in any way with Christian principles. There was little formal education for girls.

Political thought and history It was in political thought and the writing of history that Italy gave the clearest lead to Europe. Leonardo Bruni, chancellor of Florence, wrote a great History of the Florentine People in Latin that preceded by a century the work of Machiavelli and the Florentine historian, lawyer, and diplomat Francesco Guicciardini. Machiavelli's The Prince (1513) was widely misunderstood, but was the foundation stone of political discussion, while his Florentine Histories, and to a greater extent Guicciardini's History of Italy (1537-40), form the basis of modern historical writing.

Renaissance and vernacular literature There is a strong current of vernacular literature (works written in ordinary language or dialect) running through the 15th century, which was acknowledged and encouraged by humanists such as Leonardo Bruni and Alberti. Vernacular poetry was written by such figures as Lorenzo the Magnificent and Politian, and the genres that survive are enriched by contact with classical poetry. This is especially so with Ludovico Ariosto, whose Orlando furioso (1532) is the most popular poem of its time. At the beginning of the 1500s came Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), who placed the vernacular on a level with Latin itself. His Prose della volgar lingua (1525) made Tuscan the undisputed language of literature for the whole of Italy. It prepared the way for others elsewhere, such as the French poet Joachim Du Bellay, with his Deffense et illustration de la langue françoise (1549), or the English poet Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie (1580-81).

Science and medicine in the Renaissance Great progress was made in scientific knowledge during the Renaissance period. Thinkers such as Galileo (mathematics and astronomy), Nicolaus Copernicus (astronomy), Tycho Brahe (astronomy), Johannes Kepler (mathematics and astronomy) and Isaac Newton (astronomy, physics, and mathematics) made enormous advances in the human understanding of the world. The basic building blocks of science were rebuilt by these pioneers, and the dominance of biblical learning was challenged.

When Galileo argued that the Earth orbited around the Sun and not the Sun around the Earth, he challenged accepted Christian teaching that the Earth and its human inhabitants were the centre of God's universe. Galileo quoted evidence to prove the work of Copernicus on the same matter. However he was forced to withdraw his ideas on threat of death from the Roman Catholic Church in 1633. During the Renaissance, the power of science to challenge accepted teaching was viewed as a threat by many Christians, but once the new ideas had been developed and proved, it was impossible to make them vanish.

In Renaissance medicine there were important advances in the understanding of anatomy and medical practice. Doctors and scientists such as Ambroise Paré, Paracelsus, and Andreas Vesalius successfully challenged old medical theories and developed new ones to take their place.

The Renaissance outside Italy The impact of humanism and the Italian Renaissance on the rest of Europe was varied. Erasmus, more than any other single figure, represented humanist learning in northern Europe. He found and published in 1505 the Adnotationes in Novum Testamentum of Lorenzo Valla, thus beginning the science of biblical criticism.

Scholars of Erasmus' generation acknowledged the ideal of the three learned languages, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, the last particularly by the influence of the Italian philosopher Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who was greatly influenced by Ficino. This ideal was to inspire Rabelais in France in the early 16th century; while later Montaigne, with his purely Latin upbringing, his wide range over all the Latin writers, and with his interest in the individual, is unthinkable without the background of the Renaissance.

When King Charles VIII of France invaded Italy in 1494, the impact of the Italian scene on the French was very strong, and helped the spread of Italian art and artists to France. Besides Leonardo, other Italian artists such as Francesco Primaticcio and Niccolò dell'Abate worked for Francis I at Fontainebleau, influencing decisively the Fontainebleau School. Also employed by Francis I was the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. The effects on French art reached a climax with Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin in the 1600s. The principles of Italian architecture were always compromised there by the strong traditions of French building.

In the 1400s, English students and professors studied at Italian universities, or were pupils of such teachers as Guarino Guarini and Vittorino da Feltra. William Grocyn (c. 1446-1519) introduced the study of Greek to Oxford University in 1491. Other scholars collected manuscripts for Duke Humphrey of Gloucester (later to form part of Oxford's Bodleian Library), while around the politician and scholar Thomas More in London a circle of other learned men welcomed Erasmus to England. In architecture a feeling of symmetry, with details in Italian style, appeared at Longleat House, Wiltshire, in 1568, well before Inigo Jones produced his finest Italianiate work in the Banqueting House in Whitehall, London, and the Queen's House at Greenwich. After the baroque architecture of Christopher Wren (itself developed from Italian ideas), the Palladian style dominated the English country house in the 1700s, and influenced architecture as far afield as Russia and North America.

English architecture Italian architecture

Italian art Renaissance architecture

Renaissance Architecture: Germany Renaissance art

Renaissance English literature Renaissance medicine

Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean architecture