Renaissance, Movements
Standing
Concerns Description
Currently States The Renaissance was a cultural movement that began in the Italian city states, above all Florence, in the fourteenth century and spread across Europe over the following two centuries, marked by renewed study of Greek and Roman antiquity, close observation of the natural world, and a new confidence in individual human achievement. Wealthy patrons, most famously the Medici family of Florence, funded painters, sculptors, and architects whose work pursued anatomical accuracy, linear perspective, and classical proportion, ideals realized in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and the sculpture and painting of Michelangelo. The movement also transformed architecture, reviving the dome and classical orders, and literature and philosophy, though its influence is most visible today in the visual arts it left behind in Italian churches, palaces, and museums. Its precise start and end dates are conventional rather than sharp breaks: scholars commonly place its opening in Florence around 1400 and its diffusion through Northern Europe continuing into the later sixteenth century, by which point Mannerist and early Baroque styles were already emerging from within it.
Source Gardner's Art Through the Ages, Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner)