The Renaissance: Humanism, Art and Science in Europe, c. 1350–1600

What was the Renaissance?

"Renaissance" means rebirth. It is the name historians give to a cultural movement in Europe from roughly the mid-fourteenth to the early seventeenth century, when scholars and artists set out to recover and imitate the literature, art and learning of ancient Greece and Rome. It began in the cities of northern and central Italy and spread, in changing forms, to France, the Low Countries, Germany, Iberia, England and Central Europe.

The idea of a rebirth came from the humanists themselves, who described the centuries before them as a dark middle age between antiquity and their own revival. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), turned this into a picture of the birth of modern individualism. Historians since have questioned both claims: medieval Europe had its own revivals of classical learning, in the Carolingian age and the twelfth century, and much of Renaissance life, from religion to social hierarchy, continued medieval patterns. The term remains useful as a label for a real shift in taste, education and art, as long as it is not read as a sudden awakening.

Why Italy? Cities, money and patrons

Northern Italy was among the most urbanised and commercial regions of fourteenth-century Europe. City-states such as Florence, Venice, Milan and Siena grew rich from banking, textiles and Mediterranean trade, including trade with the Mamluk and Ottoman lands. Their ruling families, guilds, confraternities and churches competed for prestige through buildings, paintings and learning. The Medici bank in Florence and the papal court in Rome became especially important patrons.

Italy was also surrounded by visible Roman ruins and Latin inscriptions, which made the ancient past feel like local history. The Black Death of 1347–1351, which killed a large part of the population, and later wars among the Italian states and foreign invasions after 1494 formed the harsher background to this culture of display.

Humanism: reading the ancients again

Renaissance humanism was above all an educational programme, the studia humanitatis of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy based on classical texts. Petrarch (1304–1374) hunted for lost manuscripts of Cicero and modelled his Latin on ancient authors. Later humanists such as Leonardo Bruni in Florence linked classical learning to civic life, while Lorenzo Valla used philology to show in 1440 that the Donation of Constantine, a document used to support papal claims, was a later forgery.

Greek returned to the Latin West mainly through Byzantine scholars. Manuel Chrysoloras began teaching Greek in Florence in 1397, Byzantine delegates came to the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–1439, and more scholars and manuscripts arrived as the Ottomans advanced, before and after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Marsilio Ficino translated Plato into Latin, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola tried to reconcile Plato, Aristotle, the Kabbalah and Christian theology. Much medieval learning that humanists built on, in medicine, mathematics, optics and philosophy, had reached Europe earlier through Latin translations of Arabic works by authors such as Avicenna and Averroes.

Art and architecture: from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo

In Florence, Filippo Brunelleschi designed the great dome of the cathedral, built between 1420 and 1436, and is credited with demonstrating a method of linear perspective in the early fifteenth century. Masaccio's paintings, Donatello's sculpture and Leon Battista Alberti's treatises spread these ideas. Around 1500 Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo, whose Sistine Chapel ceiling was painted between 1508 and 1512, worked for popes, princes and republics.

North of the Alps, painters such as Jan van Eyck developed oil painting and detailed realism in the Low Countries, and Albrecht Dürer combined Italian ideas with German printmaking. Women's opportunities were narrow, but some, such as Sofonisba Anguissola and later Artemisia Gentileschi, built international careers, and patrons such as Isabella d'Este shaped what was made.

Print, science and the wider world

Johannes Gutenberg's movable-type press in Mainz, in use by the 1450s, made printed books much cheaper in Europe; printing itself had a far longer history in China and Korea. Print spread humanist editions, the works of Erasmus and, from 1517, the debates of the Reformation. In 1543 Copernicus published his heliocentric model and Vesalius his anatomy, works often taken as the start of the Scientific Revolution.

The Renaissance coincided with European expansion. Portuguese voyages along Africa and Columbus's arrival in the Caribbean in 1492, sponsored by Spain, opened an age of conquest and enslavement, and some of the wealth that paid for art came from the Atlantic and Mediterranean slave trades. Enslaved people from the Black Sea, the Balkans and Africa also worked in Italian households in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Other renaissances

Historians also use "renaissance" for other periods of revived classical or literary culture, sometimes debating whether the European term fits. Examples include the Carolingian renaissance, the twelfth-century renaissance in Europe, the flowering of New Persian literature under the Samanids and the art and learning of Timurid Herat in the fifteenth century. Comparing them helps show that looking back to admired ancestors in order to create something new is a recurring pattern in many civilisations, not a European monopoly.

Frequently asked questions

When was the Renaissance?

Roughly from the mid-fourteenth to the early seventeenth century, with dates that vary by region: it began earlier in Italy, often dated from Petrarch, and later in northern Europe and England, where Shakespeare is sometimes counted part of it.

Why did the Renaissance start in Italy?

Historians usually point to wealthy, competitive city-states with strong banking and trade, abundant patronage from families such as the Medici and from the papacy, the visible presence of Roman ruins and texts, and close contact with Byzantine scholars who taught Greek.

Did Islamic science influence the Renaissance?

Yes, mostly indirectly. Latin translations made in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of Arabic works by scholars such as Avicenna, Averroes, al-Khwarizmi and Ibn al-Haytham were standard university texts in medicine, mathematics, optics and philosophy, and Renaissance scholars built on them even when they preferred to cite Greek authors.

Key events on the map

• 1130 CE · Toledo School of Translators
• 1320 CE · Dante Writes the Divine Comedy
• 1347 CE · The Black Death Reaches Europe
• 1436 CE · Brunelleschi's Dome Crowns Florence Cathedral
• 1440 CE · Gutenberg's Movable-Type Press in Mainz
• 1495 CE · Leonardo da Vinci: Artist and Engineer
• 1512 CE · Michelangelo Paints the Sistine Chapel
• 1543 CE · Copernicus Publishes Heliocentric Theory

Guided storylines

• Print, Reformation and Conquest in the Americas
• Monasteries, Cathedrals and Universities