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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.
Facts
Disputed
Start YearScholars place the Renaissance's opening anywhere from the early 1300s, with Giotto and Petrarch, to the conventional Florentine flowering around 1400 used here; there is no single agreed starting event. End YearThe Renaissance shades gradually into Mannerism and the early Baroque rather than ending on a fixed date; 1600 is a conventional marker for the close of the High Renaissance's influence in Italy, with Northern European Renaissance art continuing somewhat later. Founded In PlaceFlorence, in the Republic of Florence (present-day Italy) 1 Key PrincipleRenewed study of Greek and Roman antiquity joined to close observation of nature, pursued through linear perspective, anatomical accuracy and classical proportion 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
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Movement Members
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Gardner's Art Through the Ages
Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner), Cengage Learningchapters on the Italian Renaissance
1. Gardner's Art Through the Ages
Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner), Cengage Learningchapter on the Italian Renaissance
1. Gardner's Art Through the Ages
Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner), Cengage LearningMovement Members: Mona Lisa, chapter on the Italian Renaissance, section on Leonardo da Vinci
1. Gardner's Art Through the Ages
Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner), Cengage LearningMovement Members: Sistine Chapel Ceiling, chapter on the High Renaissance, section on Michelangelo, the Sistine Chapel ceiling
1. Gardner's Art Through the Ages
Fred S. Kleiner (after Helen Gardner), Cengage LearningMovement Members: David, chapter on the High Renaissance, section on Michelangelo
Wiktionary
Dissenting Readings (2 dissenting readings)
Description
The mainstream account, following Jacob Burckhardt's influential nineteenth-century history The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, treats the Renaissance as a decisive break with a preceding medieval "dark age," a genuine rebirth of classical learning and individual human achievement after centuries of stagnation. A documented dissenting view, the continuity thesis associated with medievalist historians from Charles Homer Haskins onward, holds that the sharp break is substantially a construct: Renaissance humanists themselves promoted the "dark age before us" narrative as self-promotion, medieval scholarship and art had already been reviving classical learning and naturalistic observation for centuries (Haskins himself identified an earlier "renaissance of the twelfth century"), and Burckhardt's own framing, cemented by nineteenth-century nationalism and a taste for periodization, overstates the discontinuity for a transition that was, on the continuity view, considerably more gradual.
A dissenting reading, from an independent laneEncyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Start Year
The mainstream circa-1400-Florence dating on this fact is not the only reading in the literature. Many scholars argue that the ideas characterizing the Renaissance had their origin in Florence at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, pointing in particular to the paintings of Giotto di Bondone (1267 to 1337), whose figures show a naturalism and depth of feeling art historians read as the first stirrings of Renaissance sensibility, roughly a century before the circa-1400 Florence figure this fact records.
A dissenting reading, from Historians tracing Renaissance origins to Giotto (turn of the 14th century)Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation
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