What was the Renaissance? Europe's rebirth of art and ideas

The Renaissance was a movement in European culture, from about the 14th to the early 17th century, that set out to revive the learning and art of ancient Greece and Rome. It began in the cities of Italy, Florence above all, and spread north. What was the Renaissance in practice? New ways of studying texts, called humanism; painting built on mathematical perspective; buildings modeled on Roman ruins; and, after about 1450, printed books that carried all of it across Europe.

In short

• "Renaissance" means rebirth: its scholars believed they were bringing back an ancient culture after a long decline, and named the centuries in between the "Middle Ages".
• Its engine was humanism, the study of classical texts for what they taught about living, writing and governing, paid for by rich merchant cities like Florence.
• Historians now treat the label with care: the Middle Ages were not dark, and the change was gradual, uneven and not good news for everyone.

What does "Renaissance" mean, and who named it?

The word is French for "rebirth". The idea is older than the word: in the 1330s the Italian poet Petrarch described the centuries since Rome's fall as an age of decline, and in 1550 the painter and writer Giorgio Vasari spoke of a rinascita, a rebirth, of the arts that had begun with Giotto. But "the Renaissance" as the name of a whole period came from the 19th century. The French historian Jules Michelet used it in 1855, and the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt made it famous in 1860 with The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which pictured medieval people seeing the world through "a common veil" of faith and illusion, and Italians of the 15th century lifting it.

That framing matters, because the people who coined it were making a claim. Humanists invented the three-part history still taught in schools, ancient, medieval and modern, and in doing so put themselves at the start of the modern age.

What was humanism?

Humanism was a program of study, not a belief that humans matter more than God. Humanists wanted to read the works of Cicero, Virgil, Plato and others in their original languages, as their authors meant them, and to learn from them how to write well, argue, live a moral life and run a city. As the Library of Congress puts it, they believed the Greek and Latin classics held the lessons needed for a moral and effective life, and the best models of style. The subjects they championed, grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy, are the ancestors of today's "humanities".

To do this, they hunted manuscripts. Petrarch searched monastery libraries for lost works of Cicero. In 1417 the Florentine scholar Poggio Bracciolini found a copy of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, a Roman poem about atoms that had nearly vanished. Greek, barely known in the West, came with scholars from the Byzantine Empire: Manuel Chrysoloras began teaching it in Florence in 1397, and more teachers and manuscripts arrived after the Ottoman Turks took Constantinople in 1453. Humanists also learned to test texts. In 1440 Lorenzo Valla showed from its Latin that the Donation of Constantine, a document the papacy cited for its power, was a forgery written centuries after Constantine.

Why did it start in Florence?

No single cause is agreed, but several came together in Florence around 1400. It was a republic of merchants and bankers with a great deal of money and a civic pride that it expressed in buildings and art. Families like the Medici, bankers to the pope, spent fortunes on patronage. Its guilds competed for commissions, and in 1401 two young goldsmiths, Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, competed to make bronze doors for the city's Baptistery; some historians date the Renaissance from that contest. Italy was also full of Roman ruins, a daily reminder of what had been lost.

The Black Death of 1347 to 1351 had killed something like half of Florence's people, and a third or more of Europe's. Some historians link the period after it to new wealth for survivors and a sharper sense of mortality; how much it caused the Renaissance is argued.

What changed in art?

The great technical change was linear perspective: a way of drawing a flat picture so that it looks like a window onto three-dimensional space. Brunelleschi demonstrated it in Florence around 1415 to 1420 with a painted panel of the Baptistery, and Leon Battista Alberti wrote down the method in 1435 in On Painting. The rule is simple: parallel lines that run away from the viewer meet at one vanishing point on the horizon, and objects shrink in a fixed proportion with distance. Painters also studied anatomy, light and shadow, and oil paint, perfected in Flanders by Jan van Eyck, which allowed fine detail and soft blending.

Year	Event
1304–1374	Petrarch, the first great humanist
1397	Chrysoloras begins teaching Greek in Florence
1401	Ghiberti wins the Baptistery doors competition
About 1415–1420	Brunelleschi's perspective demonstrations
1420–1436	Brunelleschi builds the dome of Florence Cathedral, still the largest brick dome ever built
1432	Jan and Hubert van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece completed in Flanders
1435	Alberti's On Painting
1453	Constantinople falls to the Ottomans
About 1455	Johannes Gutenberg prints the Bible at Mainz with movable metal type
1501–1504	Michelangelo carves the David
About 1503–1519	Leonardo da Vinci paints and reworks the [[why-is-the-mona-lisa-famous
1508–1512	Michelangelo paints the Sistine Chapel ceiling
1517	Martin Luther's 95 theses; the Reformation begins
1543	Copernicus's sun-centered universe and Vesalius's anatomy are printed
1550	Vasari's Lives of the Artists
1564–1616	[[who-was-william-shakespeare

The ideal artist became an all-rounder. Leonardo was a painter, engineer and anatomist; Michelangelo a sculptor, painter, architect and poet. That is where the phrase "Renaissance man" comes from, and why the period is the classic home of the polymath. The World History Encyclopedia's survey of Renaissance art follows the leading artists one by one.

How did it spread beyond Italy?

Through trade, war, marriage and, above all, print. Gutenberg's press made books cheap enough to copy by the thousand: humanist editions, classical texts, and soon the arguments of the Reformation. The Northern Renaissance took its own path. In the Low Countries and Germany, painters like van Eyck and Albrecht Dürer were known for close detail and religious feeling more than for classical subjects. The Dutch scholar Erasmus used humanist methods on the Bible itself, publishing the Greek New Testament in 1516. In England the movement arrived late and peaked in literature, with Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Edmund Spenser in the late 16th century.

Were the Middle Ages really dark?

No. The "Dark Ages" is a label the Renaissance gave the centuries before it, not a finding of history. The medieval West built the first universities, at Bologna, Paris and Oxford; raised Gothic cathedrals; produced Thomas Aquinas's philosophy and Dante's Divine Comedy; and kept the Latin classics alive by copying them in monasteries. Much of Greek science and philosophy reached Western Europe through Arabic translations and scholars in the Islamic world, and the Greek texts the humanists prized had been preserved in Byzantium, the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which lasted until 1453. There had been revivals before, too: historians speak of a Carolingian Renaissance around 800 and a Renaissance of the 12th century.

Still argued

Historians argue over whether "the Renaissance" is a useful name at all. Burckhardt saw it as the birth of the modern individual. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga saw the same years in northern Europe as the late flowering of medieval culture. Joan Kelly asked in 1977 whether women had a Renaissance, and argued that elite women's freedom narrowed in this period. Others note that war, witch hunts and religious persecution grew worse. Many political and economic historians now prefer the neutral term "early modern". Art historians mostly keep "Renaissance" for the change in the arts, where the break is clearest.

So the most accurate answer is two-sided: a real and deliberate change in how Europeans studied, painted and built, and a story its own makers told about themselves. The art it left is one place to start understanding how art changes over time.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: what did humanists actually do, and why does "humanism" not mean putting people above God?
• Explain linear perspective in two sentences, as if to someone holding a pencil.
• Why do historians object to calling the Middle Ages the "Dark Ages"?

Sources

• Renaissance — Wikipedia
• Renaissance Humanism — World History Encyclopedia, Mark Cartwright, 2020
• Renaissance Art — World History Encyclopedia, Mark Cartwright, 2020
• Humanism, in Rome Reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture — Library of Congress
• The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy — Jacob Burckhardt, 1860, Project Gutenberg