The Renaissance

Renaissance is a French word meaning “rebirth,” and it refers to a period in European civilization marked by a revival of Classical learning and wisdom.¹ It is conventionally described as the period in European civilization immediately following the Middle Ages, characterized by a surge of interest in Classical scholarship and values.¹ There is some debate over when exactly it began; it is generally believed to have begun in Italy during the 14th century, after the end of the Middle Ages, and to have reached its height there between the 1490s and the 1520s, the period referred to as the High Renaissance.¹ As a unified historical period, the Renaissance ended in Italy with the fall of Rome in 1527, and it was eclipsed by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation elsewhere in Europe by the end of the 16th century.¹

Events at the end of the Middle Ages, particularly beginning in the 12th century, set in motion a series of social, political and intellectual transformations that culminated in the Renaissance.¹ In Italy the Renaissance proper was preceded by an important proto-renaissance of the late 13th and early 14th centuries, which drew its inspiration from Franciscan radicalism.¹ The Met frames the Renaissance as the period in which Italy — and in the fifteenth century Florence above all — was the seat of an artistic, humanistic, technological and scientific flowering.² That culture was founded primarily on the rediscovery of classical texts and artifacts, promoted the study of the liberal arts, and centred on the individual’s intellectual potential.² UNESCO states that it is within the context of Florence that the concept of the Renaissance came to be.³ Florence is, in UNESCO’s words, the birthplace of modern humanism, inspired by Landino, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and others.³

While the spirit of the Renaissance ultimately took many forms, it was expressed earliest by the intellectual movement called humanism.¹ Humanism began and achieved fruition first in Italy.¹ Its predecessors were men like Dante and Petrarch, and its chief protagonists included Giannozzo Manetti, Leonardo Bruni, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo Valla and Coluccio Salutati.¹ The fall of Constantinople in 1453 provided humanism with a major boost, for many eastern scholars fled to Italy, bringing with them important books and manuscripts and a tradition of Greek scholarship.¹

In place of the medieval ideal of a life of penance as the highest and noblest form of human activity, the humanists looked to the struggle of creation and the attempt to exert mastery over nature.¹ The effect of humanism was to help men break free from the mental strictures imposed by religious orthodoxy and to inspire free inquiry, criticism and a new confidence in the possibilities of human thought and creations.¹ From Italy the new humanist spirit and the Renaissance it engendered spread north to all parts of Europe, aided by the invention of the mechanized printing press, which allowed literacy and the availability of Classical texts to grow explosively.¹ Foremost among northern humanists was Desiderius Erasmus, whose Praise of Folly (1509) epitomized the moral essence of humanism in its insistence on heartfelt goodness as opposed to formalistic piety.¹ The intellectual stimulation provided by humanists helped spark the Reformation, from which, however, many humanists, including Erasmus, recoiled.¹

At this time, Florence was a hub of humanist scholarship and artistic production, due largely to the funding of the powerful Medici family.² The Medici were merchants and bankers; although no member of the family held an official title until the sixteenth century, their enormous wealth and influence granted them virtual rule of Florence.² Foremost among the Medici as a poet, scholar and humanist, Lorenzo (1449–1492), called “the Magnificent,” came to power in 1469.² During their exile, the religious reformer Fra Girolamo Savonarola condemned the worldliness and corruption of the city, but he was tried and executed as a false prophet in 1498.² The Medici returned to power after 1512.² UNESCO records that Florence, the symbol of the Renaissance, rose to economic and cultural pre-eminence under the Medici in the 15th and 16th centuries.³

Ghiberti finished the east portal of the baptistery, with scenes from the Old Testament, in 1452 — the doors later called the “Gates of Paradise” by an admiring Michelangelo.² Among Brunelleschi’s most celebrated architectural projects is the ribbed dome for the cathedral in Florence, completed in 1436 and unprecedented in its time.² The architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti wrote the treatises On Painting (1435–36), On Architecture (around 1450) and On Sculpture (around 1464), each a vital contribution to its field.² Giorgio Vasari published the first edition of his Lives of the Artists in 1550, with a second, expanded edition in 1568, tracing the development of Italian painting from Cimabue to Michelangelo.² Vasari also designed the Palazzo degli Uffizi, begun in 1560 as a public office for Cosimo I de’ Medici.² The first art academy, the Accademia del Disegno, was founded in Florence in 1563.² UNESCO describes six hundred years of extraordinary artistic activity, visible above all in the 13th-century cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, the church of Santa Croce, the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace, the work of great masters such as Giotto, Brunelleschi, Botticelli and Michelangelo.³ Since the Quattrocento, UNESCO says, Florence has exerted a predominant influence on the development of architecture and the monumental arts, first in Italy and then throughout Europe.³

It was in art that the spirit of the Renaissance achieved its sharpest formulation.¹ Art came to be seen as a branch of knowledge, valuable in its own right and capable of providing people with images of God and his creations as well as insights into humankind’s position in the universe.¹ Renaissance art was to be based on the observation of the visible world and practiced according to mathematical principles of balance, harmony and perspective developed at this time.¹ In 1401–02 the goldsmith and painter Lorenzo Ghiberti won a competition held at Florence and was awarded the commission for bronze doors to be placed on the baptistery of San Giovanni.¹ According to traditional accounts, Brunelleschi, one of Ghiberti’s competitors, and his friend Donatello left for Rome soon after, immersing themselves in the study of ancient architecture and sculpture.¹ When they returned to Florence and began to put their knowledge into practice, the rationalized art of the ancient world was reborn.¹ The founder of Renaissance painting was Masaccio (1401–28), marked out by the intellectuality of his conceptions, the monumentality of his compositions and a high degree of naturalism in his works.¹ Architecture tells a parallel story: Renaissance architecture originated in Florence in the early 15th century and spread throughout Europe, replacing the medieval Gothic style, and Filippo Brunelleschi is considered the first Renaissance architect.⁹

Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus shows the goddess of love and beauty arriving on land, on the island of Cyprus, born of the sea spray and blown there by the winds Zephyr and, perhaps, Aura.¹⁰ The subject of the painting, which celebrates Venus as symbol of love and beauty, was perhaps suggested by the poet Agnolo Poliziano.¹⁰ It is highly probable that the work was commissioned by a member of the Medici family, although there is nothing written about the painting before 1550, when Giorgio Vasari describes it in the Medici’s Villa of Castello.¹⁰ Unlike the Allegory of Spring, painted on wood, the Birth of Venus was painted on canvas, a support widely used in the 15th century for decorative works destined to noble houses.¹⁰ The Birth of Venus is tempera on canvas, 172.5 × 278.5 cm, and it takes its pose from classical statues, with Venus’ long blond hair gilded.¹⁰ Outstanding among Botticelli’s works are the mythological allegories Primavera and The Birth of Venus, which display his lyrical handling of colour and line and reflect a contemporary celebration of classical poetry and mythological subjects.²

The revival runs from the proto-renaissance of Giotto to the generation of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael.¹ Around these names cluster the works that define the period for most readers, among them the Gates of Paradise, the dome of Florence Cathedral and the David.² Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is in the Uffizi.¹⁰ Leonardo’s Mona Lisa belongs to the Louvre.¹¹ Raphael’s School of Athens and Michelangelo’s ceiling are in the Vatican.¹²

Under Pope Sixtus IV, work on the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican was begun in 1473.¹² Donato Bramante’s move to Rome ushered in the High Renaissance, the period around 1500–20.⁹ A new Saint Peter’s, a central-plan church designed by Bramante, was begun in 1506; construction was barely under way when the architect died in 1514.¹² Charles VIII of France invaded Italy and seized Naples in 1494, launching the Italian Wars — a series of military conflicts between rival European powers, particularly France and Spain, for the takeover of several Italian city-states.¹²

Raphael settled in Rome, where, under the patronage of Pope Julius II and later his successor Leo X, he became the chief contributor to the decorative program for several rooms, or stanze, in the Vatican Palace.¹² The humanistic theme of his frescoes for the Stanza della Segnatura is exemplified in The School of Athens (1510–11), his great masterpiece depicting Plato and Aristotle surrounded by other philosophers.¹² In 1508 Julius II summoned Michelangelo from a sojourn in Florence to paint ceiling frescoes for the Sistine Chapel.¹² In 1527 an imperial army under Charles V sacked Rome; the weeklong pillage and destruction devastated the city, and in its wake many artists fled to safer and more prosperous cities.¹² Michelangelo was appointed architect of Saint Peter’s in 1546 and designed its hemispherical dome, left unfinished at his death; it was completed around 1590 under Giacomo della Porta.¹²

Compressed to its milestones, the story opens with the proto-renaissance of the late 13th and early 14th centuries and with the Black Death of 1348, which submerged the first revival of humanistic studies.¹ It runs on through the great Florentine commissions and the Rome of the popes, and its conventional close in Italy is the Sack of Rome in 1527.¹ The table below sets out the canonical dates between those edges, ending with the completion of the dome of Saint Peter’s around 1590.¹²

The Medici traded in all the major cities of Europe, and one of the most famous masterpieces of Northern Renaissance art, the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes around 1476, was commissioned by their agent, Tommaso Portinari.¹ Instead of being painted with the customary tempera of the period, the work is painted with translucent oil glazes that produce brilliant jewel-like color and a glossy surface.¹ Early Northern Renaissance painters were more concerned with the detailed reproduction of objects and their symbolic meaning than with the study of scientific perspective and anatomy even after these achievements became widely known.¹ In the north the movement’s foremost figure was Desiderius Erasmus, whose Praise of Folly (1509) epitomized the moral essence of humanism in its insistence on heartfelt goodness as opposed to formalistic piety.¹

The printing press had been introduced to Italy in 1464 in Subiaco, and the first printed book to include woodcut illustrations was published in Rome in 1467.¹² In Florence, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, published in 1550 and expanded in 1568, gave the age its enduring narrative of progress and revival, from Cimabue to Michelangelo.²

About 1520 the Renaissance gave way to Mannerism, wherein a sense of drama pervaded otherwise realistic art.¹⁶ Mannerism, the style of the Late Renaissance (1520–1600), was characterized by sophistication, complexity and novelty rather than the harmony, clarity and repose of the High Renaissance.⁹ The Mannerist elements were fully developed by Pontormo and his colleague Rosso Fiorentino (1494–1540), who became the chief exponents of Mannerism in central Italy.² Scholars have traditionally described the turn of the 16th century as the culmination of the Renaissance, when, primarily in Italy, such artists as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael made not only realistic but complex art.¹⁶

Interest in humanism, a philosophy that emphasized the individual and the human capacity for fulfillment through reason, transformed the Renaissance artist from an anonymous craftsman to an individual practicing an intellectual pursuit.¹⁶ The change is audible in the artists’ own voices: from 1558 to 1562 Benvenuto Cellini wrote his autobiography, a vibrant if exaggerated account of the artist’s adventures and a vivid portrait of sixteenth-century cultural life.² By the end of the 16th century the battle of Reformation and Counter-Reformation had commanded much of Europe’s energy and attention.¹

The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, the scholarly reference series used for its Florence and Rome chronologies, comprises more than 1,000 essays and 300 chronologies.¹⁷ The Uffizi catalogues its own Birth of Venus, from the goddess’s arrival on Cyprus to the painting’s technique and size.¹⁰ The Louvre’s research notes quote Vasari’s account that Leonardo undertook the portrait of Mona Lisa for Francesco del Giocondo and left it unfinished after working on it four years.¹⁸ Historians have sometimes contested the coherence of these testimonies, using the travel diary of Cardinal d’Aragon written by Antonio de Beatis.¹⁸ The Vatican Museums publish the history of the Sistine Chapel, from Sixtus IV’s Cappella Magna to Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.¹⁴

Vasari’s Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects is available in full through Project Gutenberg.⁴ Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is likewise a public-domain text.⁷ It remains in print in a modern Routledge edition.⁸ Machiavelli’s The Prince contributes a celebrated maxim: forced to choose, it advises, it is much safer to be feared than loved.¹⁹ The Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Gallica holds a French volume of Vasari’s lives of artists, including those of Botticelli and Perugino.²⁰ A peer-reviewed article in Renaissance Studies shows how the medieval–Renaissance divide has been used to rank institutions.⁵ Panofsky’s Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, first published in 1960 and reissued by Routledge in 2018, remains the classic study of the question.⁶

Giorgio Vasari called the arts’ recovery a second birth, and the language of rebirth has clung to the age ever since — as have the arguments over it.⁴