In 1439, Cosimo de' Medici — the wealthiest banker in Europe, the unofficial ruler of Florence, and a man who understood that culture was power — hosted the Council of Florence in his city. The Council had been convened to reunite the Eastern and Western Christian churches, a diplomatic initiative that ultimately failed. But Cosimo saw another opportunity in the Byzantine delegation: Greek scholars from Constantinople, some of them carrying manuscripts of Plato, Aristotle, and the ancient Greek mathematicians and scientists that Western Europe had lost for centuries, arrived in Florence speaking a language and bearing a culture that was both ancient and alive. When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, many more Greek scholars fled West, bringing their libraries with them. Cosimo funded the translation of Plato's complete works by Marsilio Ficino — a project completed in 1469 that would not have been possible without the Greek manuscripts the Byzantine refugees carried.
This confluence — Florentine wealth, competitive civic patronage, the influx of Byzantine learning, and the momentum of a century of humanist textual scholarship — was not the origin of the Renaissance but its acceleration. The movement had roots in Petrarch's fourteenth-century recovery of Latin texts, in Boccaccio's championing of Italian vernacular literature, and in the civic pride of Italian city-states that competed through art as much as arms. But the mid-fifteenth century was when the Renaissance became self-aware: when scholars, artists, and patrons understood that they were engaged in a rebirth of something that had been buried — the intellectual and artistic achievement of classical antiquity — and that this rebirth was transforming what it meant to be human.
The word "Renaissance" — French for rebirth — was not applied to the period until the nineteenth century, when the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt fixed it in his 1860 "The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy." But the people living through it had a version of the same perception: they called themselves moderni, the moderns, recovering the ancient world against what Petrarch had memorably called the dark middle ages separating them from Rome. They were wrong about the middle ages in ways that matter, but the self-understanding shaped what they created.
"We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may mold and carve yourself into the shape you prefer." — Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486)
Key Definitions
Renaissance — A European cultural, intellectual, and artistic movement lasting approximately 1300-1600, originating in the Italian city-states and spreading north, characterized by the recovery of classical Greco-Roman learning, the development of humanism, and new approaches to art, literature, science, and philosophy.
Humanism — The Renaissance intellectual program centered on the studia humanitatis (grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy), focused on classical texts, and characterized by a new emphasis on human dignity, achievement, and self-fashioning in this world. Not anti-religious but reorienting intellectual life toward human excellence.
Studia humanitatis — The five classical disciplines that defined the Renaissance humanist curriculum: grammar (Latin and Greek), rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy, studied through primary classical texts rather than medieval commentaries.
Linear perspective — A system of representing three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface as it appears to a single stationary observer, with parallel lines converging to vanishing points. Developed by Filippo Brunelleschi around 1413-1420 and codified by Leon Battista Alberti in "On Painting" (1435). Both a technical achievement and a philosophical statement: the human eye as the center of pictorial space.
Patronage system — The mechanism by which Renaissance art and scholarship was funded: wealthy individuals, families, guilds, and the Church commissioned specific works from artists, architects, and scholars in exchange for prestige, political influence, religious merit, or commemorative immortality. The Medici, papacy, Este, and Sforza families were the most important patrons.
Printing press — Johannes Gutenberg's development of movable-type printing in Mainz around 1440-1450, which enabled mass reproduction of texts and transformed the circulation of ideas. The enabling technology that turned the Renaissance from an elite scholarly movement into a continent-wide intellectual revolution, and then turned the Reformation from a theological dispute into a continental crisis.
The Renaissance man (uomo universale) — The humanist ideal of the complete person of universal competence: mastery of arts, letters, arms, learning, and social graces simultaneously. Leonardo da Vinci is the archetype; Castiglione's "Book of the Courtier" (1528) is the theoretical formulation.
The Northern Renaissance — The reception and transformation of Italian Renaissance ideas in France, Germany, the Low Countries, England, and Spain from the late fifteenth through the sixteenth century, producing Erasmus, Montaigne, Thomas More, Albrecht Durer, and the Elizabethan literary culture.
Preconditions: Why Italy, Why the Fourteenth Century
The Black Death as Paradoxical Catalyst
The Black Death of 1347-1351, which killed perhaps one-third of Europe's population, seems an unlikely foundation for cultural flowering. Yet historians have repeatedly noted the paradoxical connections. The massive labor scarcity created by demographic collapse drove up wages for surviving workers and artisans, creating a degree of social mobility — and a degree of questioning of inherited hierarchy — that had been impossible in the more rigid structures of peak medieval population. Survivors who had watched established authorities (the Church, the medical profession, the feudal order) fail catastrophically to explain or contain the plague were perhaps more open to questioning tradition and seeking new frameworks. The redistribution of wealth in a collapsed market — with fewer heirs competing for a fixed stock of land and assets — concentrated capital in ways that fed into the patronage systems that Renaissance art required.
The intellectual precondition was already developing. Petrarch (1304-1374) had been recovering and editing classical Latin texts throughout his life, writing in elegant Ciceronian Latin and Italian vernacular simultaneously, and articulating a vision of classical antiquity as a living resource for the present rather than a museum piece. His discovery of Cicero's letters to Atticus in the cathedral library at Verona in 1345 was a paradigm: real ancient voices, not filtered through medieval commentary, speaking directly across the centuries. Boccaccio, his friend and disciple, wrote the Decameron (1353) in vernacular Italian, legitimizing the vernacular as a literary medium equal to Latin.
Italian City-States and the Patronage Economy
The institutional context was the competitive world of the Italian city-states. Florence, Venice, Milan, Rome, and smaller centers like Ferrara, Mantua, and Urbino were sovereign polities competing for prestige, trade, and territory. Unlike the centralized monarchies of France, England, and the Iberian kingdoms, the city-states had developed mercantile economies that concentrated wealth in merchant families rather than in a landed aristocracy. The Medici banking network, with branches across Europe, financed the Florentine state and generated the surplus that Cosimo and then Lorenzo deployed on art, scholarship, and architecture.
Patronage was not philanthropy — it was investment in prestige, commemoration, and political legitimacy. When the Florentine wool guild commissioned Ghiberti's bronze doors for the Baptistery (1401-1424) and again Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise" (1425-1452), it was asserting Florence's civic superiority. When Nicholas V rebuilt Rome as a humanist capital — the Papal Renaissance of the 1440s-1450s — he was creating a visible claim to Rome's imperial inheritance for the papacy. When the Sforzas of Milan employed Leonardo da Vinci for seventeen years, they were buying not just paintings and equestrian statues but the cultural authority that Leonardo's universal genius represented.
Renaissance Humanism: The New Vision of the Human
Petrarch and the Recovery of Antiquity
Petrarch's contribution to the Renaissance was partly practical — his meticulous scholarly recovery of ancient texts, his insistence on reading primary sources rather than medieval commentaries, and his creation of an influential model of classical Latin style — but more fundamentally philosophical. He articulated the conviction that the ancient world represented a height of human achievement from which the intervening centuries had descended, and that recovering the ancient world would be morally and intellectually transformative.
He also modeled a new form of subjectivity. His "Secretum" is a dialogue between himself and an imagined Augustine about his spiritual condition — an introspective, self-examining mode of writing that was novel in its sustained attention to the individual interior. His collection of Italian love poems, the Canzoniere, devoted to Laura, gave the lyric self a central place in literary culture that it has never since lost.
Pico della Mirandola and Human Dignity
Pico della Mirandola's "Oration on the Dignity of Man" (1486), written as a preface to the nine hundred philosophical theses he planned to defend publicly in Rome (the papacy eventually prohibited the debate), made the most ambitious humanist statement of human nature. God, in Pico's account, has created humans last, when all fixed natures and places have been assigned. To Adam God says: "We have given you no fixed seat, no form of your very own, no gift peculiarly your own, so that whatever place, form, or gift you choose, you may have and keep through your own will and endeavor." Humans are the only creatures without a fixed nature: they can descend to the brute or ascend to the divine through their choices.
This was not Christian orthodoxy — it elevated human freedom and self-determination in ways that orthodox anthropology, which emphasized creaturely limitation and dependence on grace, did not endorse. But it captured something characteristic of the Renaissance cultural mood: the individual as self-fashioning agent, not a fixed type defined by birth, class, and divine assignment.
Art: The Visual Revolution
Linear Perspective and the Human Eye
Filippo Brunelleschi's demonstration of linear perspective, traditionally dated to around 1413-1420, was both a technical and philosophical event. By constructing a painted panel of the Florence Baptistery using the perspective geometry he had worked out, and having viewers compare the painting to the building through a hole while holding up a mirror, Brunelleschi demonstrated that the visible world could be rendered mathematically from a single viewpoint. Leon Battista Alberti codified the procedure in "On Painting" (1435), providing the geometrical rules that Renaissance painters then applied.
What perspective meant philosophically was that the human eye — the specific, positioned, embodied viewer — became the organizing principle of pictorial space. Medieval painting had organized space theologically, with important figures larger than minor ones regardless of position, with multiple moments in a narrative shown simultaneously. Perspective organized space from a single human viewpoint. The viewer became, as historians of science have noted, the measure of the pictured world. This was a humanist statement in paint.
Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was trained in the Florentine workshop of Verrocchio, which was simultaneously a training ground for painters, sculptors, and engineers. His two surviving completed masterpieces — "The Last Supper" (1495-1498, Milan) and "Mona Lisa" (1503-1519, Florence) — are widely regarded as among the greatest paintings ever made. "The Last Supper" solved the compositional challenge of depicting thirteen figures at a single moment of dramatic revelation (Christ's announcement that one of them will betray him) with psychological nuance in each apostle's response. The "Mona Lisa" achieved an atmospheric depth (sfumato — the gradual blending of tones without hard edges) and an ambiguity of expression that have made it the most examined and analyzed painting in history.
But Leonardo's notebooks — some 5,000 pages survive from an estimated 13,000 — reveal a mind for which painting was one activity among many. The notebooks contain designs for flying machines, hydraulic systems, military engineering, anatomical studies from direct human dissection (he dissected approximately thirty corpses, producing drawings of musculature, bone, and organ that were not surpassed for a century), geological observations, botanical studies, and theoretical reflections on art, science, and nature. The Renaissance man ideal was, in Leonardo's case, not a cultural affectation but a lived reality.
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) spent four years painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-1512) lying on his back on scaffolding sixty feet above the floor, executing what remains the most ambitious visual theological program in Western art: nine scenes from Genesis, surrounded by prophets, sibyls, and the ancestors of Christ, across five thousand square feet of ceiling. The physical and intellectual scale of the project was unprecedented. His "David" (1504), carved from a single block of marble, defined the classical nude figure for the Western tradition. His late career design for the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome remained the template for domed civic architecture for centuries.
Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520), working in Rome for Pope Julius II and Leo X, created the Vatican Stanze frescoes that set the standard for the grand decorative program. "The School of Athens" (1511), showing Plato and Aristotle at the center of a comprehensive assembly of ancient philosophers and scientists, is the visual manifesto of humanist learning: antiquity as living presence, philosophy as ongoing conversation.
The Printing Press: The Renaissance's Amplifier
Gutenberg's movable-type press, developed in the 1440s in Mainz, did not cause the Renaissance — that had begun a century earlier. But it transformed the movement's reach and speed. Before printing, reproducing a text required weeks or months of a trained scribe's labor and produced a single expensive manuscript. By 1500, printing presses in over two hundred European cities had produced approximately twenty million books — more than European scribes had produced in the preceding thousand years combined.
For the Renaissance, printing did several things simultaneously. It standardized texts: humanist scholars like Erasmus, who worked closely with the Aldine Press in Venice, could now publish definitive critical editions of classical texts — authoritative, consistent, correcting manuscript errors — that circulated identically across Europe. The Aldine Press's affordable octavo-format editions of Greek and Latin classics made books accessible to merchants, lawyers, and minor clergy, not just bishops and princes.
Printing also created the conditions for rapid intellectual exchange that the humanist "Republic of Letters" — the network of scholars corresponding across Europe — required. Erasmus could write a book in Rotterdam that was read in Florence within months. Ideas competed in a market, not just in the patronage economy of a single court.
The Northern Renaissance
Erasmus and Textual Criticism
Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536), the Dutch scholar who became the most celebrated intellectual in Europe, brought humanist textual methods to the New Testament itself. His 1516 critical edition of the Greek New Testament — the first printed edition, comparing manuscripts and identifying errors in Jerome's fourth-century Latin Vulgate — was a landmark in both scholarship and religious controversy. The Vulgate's rendering of Matthew 4:17 as "do penance" (act sacramentally) was shown to correspond to a Greek that actually meant "be repentant" (change your mind) — an example of translation error that undermined the textual basis of the Church's sacramental authority.
Erasmus's "In Praise of Folly" (1511), written in a week at Thomas More's house in England, used satirical irony to critique Church corruption, scholastic pedantry, and human self-delusion. He remained a Catholic, refusing Luther's invitation to break with Rome — but his editions and satirical critiques had prepared the intellectual ground for the Reformation.
Montaigne and the Essay Form
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) invented the personal essay in the "Essais" he began writing in 1572 after withdrawing from public life to his chateau in Bordeaux. The Essais are distinctive in their method: Montaigne uses himself — his body, his habits, his changing opinions, his fears and pleasures — as the subject of philosophical reflection. "What do I know?" (Que sais-je?) was his motto. The sceptical, introspective, digressive mode he created became a foundational literary form for the subsequent four centuries. The essay as a form embodies the humanist conviction that self-examination and personal experience are legitimate philosophical data.
Science and the Renaissance: Observing Nature
The Renaissance's relationship to the Scientific Revolution is mediated through the humanist program's emphasis on primary sources — including Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria, and the Greek mathematicians — and on careful observation modeled by artistic practice. Leonardo's anatomical studies were the product of the same observational discipline that made him a great painter; the artist's attention to the visible world required understanding its structure.
Andreas Vesalius's "De Humani Corporis Fabrica" (1543) applied direct human dissection to correct Galen's fourteen-century-old anatomical errors, reorienting medicine from textual authority to empirical observation. In the same year, Nicolaus Copernicus published "On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres," proposing the heliocentric model. Copernicus was educated at the University of Cracow and the University of Bologna — both humanist-influenced institutions — and drew on Aristarchus's ancient heliocentric proposal, recovered through humanist manuscript work.
The mathematical tools of perspective — Brunelleschi's and Alberti's geometry of visual space — contributed to a more general habit of applying mathematics to the physical world that flowered in Galileo's work at the University of Padua in the early seventeenth century.
Critiques: The Renaissance's Exclusions
Burckhardt's nineteenth-century celebration of the Renaissance as the origin of modern individualism obscures several of its most important features. The vast majority of Renaissance cultural life was conducted by men, for men, under institutional structures — guilds, workshops, academies, courts, the Church — that largely excluded women. A handful of remarkable women — Sofonisba Anguissola, Gaspara Stampa, Vittoria Colonna — achieved recognition, but they did so against the grain of structures that systematically denied women education, workshop access, and patronage.
The Renaissance also built on foundations that its humanist narrative obscured: the Islamic preservation and translation of Greek texts, conducted in Baghdad's "House of Wisdom" and in Andalusia between the eighth and twelfth centuries, transmitted Aristotle, Galen, and the Greek mathematicians to Europe. The Arabic numerals and algebraic notation that Renaissance mathematicians used were Islamic contributions. The Renaissance debt to Islamic scholarship was real and was generally denied by the humanists, who preferred the narrative of direct European inheritance from Greece and Rome.
For related topics, see what is the Enlightenment, what made the Industrial Revolution happen, and what is colonialism.
References
- Burckhardt, J. (1860/1990). The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (trans. S. G. C. Middlemore). Penguin.
- Kristeller, P. O. (1961). Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanistic Strains. Harper Torchbooks.
- Grafton, A., & Jardine, L. (1986). From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Harvard University Press.
- Brotton, J. (2002). The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo. Oxford University Press.
- Vasari, G. (1550/1998). The Lives of the Artists (trans. J. C. Bondanella & P. Bondanella). Oxford World's Classics.
- Hale, J. R. (1994). The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance. Atheneum.
- Westfall, R. S. (1977). The Construction of Modern Science: Mechanisms and Mechanics. Cambridge University Press.
- King, M. L. (1991). Women of the Renaissance. University of Chicago Press.
- Eisenstein, E. L. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge University Press.
- Pico della Mirandola, G. (1486/1965). Oration on the Dignity of Man (trans. A. R. Caponigri). Regnery Publishing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the Renaissance and why did it start in Italy?
The Renaissance — from the French for 'rebirth' — was a broad European cultural, intellectual, and artistic movement lasting roughly from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, originating in the Italian city-states and spreading north to France, the Low Countries, England, and Germany in what scholars call the Northern Renaissance. Its defining feature was a recovery and revaluation of classical Greco-Roman antiquity: ancient texts, artistic forms, philosophical ideas, and political models were excavated, translated, and made the basis of a new vision of human possibility. The movement started in Italy for reasons that were simultaneously geographical, economic, and historical. Italy had never fully lost contact with Rome's material legacy — ruins, inscriptions, and scattered manuscripts were everywhere; Latin was closer to living memory. The Italian city-states — Florence, Venice, Rome, Milan, Siena — were the wealthiest polities in Europe by the fourteenth century, their fortunes built on banking, textile manufacture, and long-distance trade. Wealth produced the patronage systems — the Medici in Florence, the papacy in Rome, the doges in Venice — that could employ scholars, artists, and architects. The competitive rivalry among city-states created additional incentive: to commission a great public building or celebrate a famous scholar was to assert your city's prestige. Italy was also the entry point for Byzantine manuscripts: Greek-speaking scholars from the Eastern Roman Empire, fleeing the Turkish advance on Constantinople that culminated in the fall of the city in 1453, brought their libraries west — and with them, access to Greek philosophical and scientific texts that had been unknown or unavailable in Western Europe for centuries.
What is Renaissance humanism?
Renaissance humanism was an intellectual program — not a religion or a philosophical system in the modern sense, but a set of educational and scholarly commitments centered on the studia humanitatis: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy, studied through the recovery and close reading of classical Latin and Greek texts. The humanists were not anti-religious (most were devout Christians) but they recentered intellectual life on human excellence, human dignity, and human achievement in this world, rather than exclusively on preparation for the next. Petrarch (1304-1374), often called the first humanist, pioneered the recovery of classical Latin texts — famously discovering Cicero's letters in Verona in 1345 — and modeled both the literary and intellectual program of recovering antiquity as a living resource rather than a museum piece. The most philosophically ambitious statement of humanist anthropology is Pico della Mirandola's 'Oration on the Dignity of Man' (1486), originally written as a preface to nine hundred philosophical theses Pico planned to defend in Rome. God, in Pico's telling, placed humans at the center of creation with no fixed nature: 'We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may mold and carve yourself into the shape you prefer.' Humans alone are self-fashioning creatures. This was a dramatic departure from a medieval framework in which human nature was fixed by God, sin, and one's estate. The humanist celebration of individual striving, excellence, and self-cultivation — the Renaissance man ideal — ran through Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks, Castiglione's 'Book of the Courtier,' and the entire culture of ambitious self-presentation that the Italian court world produced.
How did the printing press change the Renaissance?
Johannes Gutenberg's development of movable-type printing in Mainz around 1440-1450 was the enabling technology that transformed the Renaissance from a movement of court scholars and wealthy patrons into a continent-wide intellectual revolution. Before printing, reproducing a text meant paying a trained scribe to copy it by hand — a process that took weeks or months and produced an expensive object available only to institutions or wealthy individuals. A single printing press could produce hundreds of copies of a text in the time a scribe would take to make one copy, and the cost per copy fell by orders of magnitude. The first mass-printed book was the Gutenberg Bible (c.1455), but the technology rapidly spread beyond religious texts. By 1500, printing presses existed in over two hundred European cities, and some twenty million books had been produced. For the Renaissance, printing did several transformative things simultaneously. It standardized texts: humanist scholars like Erasmus, who worked with the Aldine Press in Venice, could now publish definitive edited versions of classical texts that spread identically across Europe, replacing the error-filled manuscript traditions. It created a reading public far larger than manuscript culture could sustain, including merchants, craftsmen, and minor clergy who could afford printed books but not manuscripts. It allowed new ideas to spread faster than ecclesiastical or political authorities could respond: Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses in October 1517, and within weeks printed copies had circulated across Germany — a propagation speed impossible before printing. By 1520, Luther's works had sold an estimated 300,000 copies, transforming a monastic theological dispute into a continental religious revolution. The printing press was the Renaissance's amplifier and the Reformation's accelerant.
Who were the key Renaissance figures?
The Renaissance produced an extraordinary density of individuals who achieved mastery across multiple fields — a cultural moment that idealized the homo universalis, the complete person of universal competence. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is the archetype: trained as a painter in Verrocchio's Florentine workshop, he produced 'The Last Supper' and 'Mona Lisa' while simultaneously filling thousands of notebook pages with studies of anatomy, hydraulics, flight, geology, botany, and mechanical engineering. His anatomical drawings, made from direct dissection of human corpses, were the most accurate in Europe and would not be surpassed for a century. Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) spent four years painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508-1512) — a project he initially resisted — producing what remains the most ambitious visual theological program in Western art, while simultaneously producing sculptures like the David and the Pieta and in his later career designing the dome of St. Peter's Basilica. Raphael (1483-1520) produced the Vatican Stanze frescoes, including the 'School of Athens,' in which Plato and Aristotle are depicted at the center of a comprehensive tableau of ancient philosophy — a visual statement of humanist ambition. On the literary and philosophical side: Petrarch pioneered the recovery of classical texts; Boccaccio's 'Decameron' established vernacular prose narrative; Machiavelli's 'The Prince' (1513) founded secular political science by analyzing power as it actually operates rather than as Christian political theology prescribed it should operate. In the North: Erasmus of Rotterdam brought humanist textual criticism to the New Testament itself; Thomas More imagined an idealized commonwealth in 'Utopia'; Montaigne invented the personal essay as a form — sitting down to write about himself as a means of understanding the human condition.
What does the Renaissance have to do with science?
The Renaissance's relationship to the Scientific Revolution is debated among historians, but there are direct connections. The humanist program of recovering classical texts returned to circulation the full range of ancient scientific and mathematical writing — not just the Aristotelian texts that had dominated medieval universities but also Archimedes, Hero of Alexandria, Plato's Timaeus, and the Greek medical writers. Access to a wider range of ancient authorities made it easier to question any single authority, including Aristotle. The emphasis on careful observation — modeled by artists like Leonardo and by humanist scholars like Vesalius — crossed disciplinary lines. Andreas Vesalius's 'De Humani Corporis Fabrica' (1543) used direct anatomical dissection to correct errors in Galen that had gone unchallenged for fourteen centuries; his method of observation over textual authority was a Renaissance legacy. In the same year Vesalius published, Nicolaus Copernicus published 'On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres,' proposing a heliocentric model of the solar system. Copernicus was a humanist-educated cleric who had studied in Bologna and Padua; his inspiration partly came from recovering ancient heliocentric proposals (Aristarchus) that the humanist recovery of texts had made accessible. The Renaissance also contributed specific tools: the mathematics of linear perspective (developed by Brunelleschi and Alberti) trained artists and engineers in spatial geometry; the quantitative approach to visual representation modeled a more generally mathematical approach to nature. The direct chain from Renaissance to Galileo runs through Padua, the most scientifically active university of the era, which combined humanist learning with empirical investigation in ways that produced the generation that launched the Scientific Revolution.
How did the Renaissance end?
The Renaissance did not end with a single event but dissolved into the movement that followed it — the Reformation and then the Baroque and the Scientific Revolution — through a series of overlapping transitions. Historians identify several factors that concluded the High Renaissance as a coherent cultural program. The Italian Wars (1494-1559), in which France, Spain, and the Holy Roman Empire fought for control of the peninsula, devastated the very city-states — Florence, Rome, Milan — that had been the Renaissance's nurseries of patronage. The Sack of Rome in 1527, when mutinous troops of Charles V pillaged the city for months, killed or scattered the humanist and artistic circles that had gathered around the papal court and shocked contemporaries as a sign that the confidence and civic optimism of Renaissance humanism were no longer sustainable. The Protestant Reformation, partly enabled by the printing press the Renaissance had spread, fractured the Christian world and redirected intellectual and religious energy into theological controversy, in which the universalist humanist dream of a restored classical civilization became politically loaded. In northern Europe, Reformed Christianity's suspicion of images affected art patronage and the visual culture that had been central to Renaissance expression. By the end of the sixteenth century, the style that replaced the balance and clarity of High Renaissance art was Mannerism — deliberately complex, emotionally intense, elegant and strange rather than harmonious and confident — and then Baroque, with its dramatic chiaroscuro and emotional power. What survived the Renaissance as its permanent legacy was humanism as an educational ideal (still structuring university curricula), the print culture it had spread, and the recovered classical tradition that continued to form the basis of European intellectual life until the nineteenth century.