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9.2: The Renaissance

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    Christ giving the keys to Peter, painted by Perugino.
    Linear perspective in Renaissance painting. Christ giving the keys to Peter. Perugino, c. 1482.

    The Renaissance is a period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, considered the bridge between the Middle Ages and modern history. It started as a cultural movement in Italy in the late medieval period and later spread to the rest of Europe. Some good early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the recycled knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later fifteenth century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe.

    As a cultural movement, it encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the fourteenth century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch; the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting; and gradual but widespread educational reform.

    In politics, the Renaissance contributed the development of the conventions of diplomacy, and in science an increased reliance on observation. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term “Renaissance man.”

    Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1492. Ink drawing.
    Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1492.

    There is a consensus that the Renaissance began in Florence, in the fourteenth century. Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time; its political structure; the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici; and the migration of Greek scholars and texts to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Other major centers were northern Italian city-states such as Venice, Genoa, Bologna, Milan, and finally Rome during the Renaissance papacy.

    The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and, in line with general skepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the nineteenth-century glorification of the “Renaissance” and individual culture heroes as “Renaissance men,” questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation. The art historian Erwin Panofsky observed of this resistance to the concept of “Renaissance”:

    It is perhaps no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been most vigorously questioned by those who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects of civilization—historians of economic and social developments, political and religious situations, and, most particularly, natural science—but only exceptionally by students of literature and hardly ever by historians of Art.

    Some have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural “advance” from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity, while social and economic historians, especially of the longue durée, have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, which are linked, as Panofsky himself observed, “by a thousand ties.”

    The word Renaissance, literally meaning “Rebirth” in French, first appears in English in the 1830s. The word occurs in Jules Michelet’s 1855 work, Histoire de France. The word Renaissance has also been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the twelfth century.

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