What was the Renaissance?

Renaissance means rebirth, referring to renewed European engagement with the literature, philosophy, and art of ancient Greece and Rome. It began in the Italian city-states, particularly Florence, in the 14th century and spread north across Europe over the following two centuries. Wealth from banking and trade funded patronage, most famously by the Medici family, and competition between city-states and later between courts and the Church drove commissioning of art and architecture on a large scale. Humanism, the intellectual movement at its center, emphasized human potential, classical texts read in their original languages, and education in rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy.

The artistic changes were technical as well as thematic. Linear perspective, formalized in the early 15th century, allowed convincing depiction of three-dimensional space on a flat surface. Anatomical study improved the rendering of the human body. Oil paint permitted subtlety impossible in tempera. The results are the works that still define the period in popular memory, from Brunelleschi's dome in Florence through Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and later the Northern painters. Architecture returned to classical proportion and form after the Gothic era.

Two developments amplified everything else. Gutenberg's printing press, operating by the 1450s, collapsed the cost of reproducing text and made ideas transmissible at a speed and scale that had no precedent, which is a substantial part of why the Reformation spread as it did after 1517. And the same period saw European voyages that reached the Americas and established sea routes to Asia, transforming economies and beginning the colonial era with catastrophic consequences for indigenous populations. Historians now treat the traditional framing, of a dark medieval period suddenly illuminated, as substantially overstated, since medieval Europe had its own intellectual achievements and the transmission of classical texts owed a great deal to Islamic and Byzantine scholars who preserved and expanded on them for centuries.