RENAISSANCE--back to history

 The Renaissance (UK /rɨˈneɪsəns/, US /ˈrɛnɨsɑːns/, French pronunciation: ​[ʁənɛsɑ̃ːs], French: 

 Renaissance, Original Italian: Rinascimento, from rinascere "to be reborn")[1] was a 

 cultural movement that spanned the period roughly from the 14th to the 17th century, 

 beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. 

 Though availability of paper and the invention of metal movable type sped the 

 dissemination of ideas from the later 15th 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 14th-

 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. Historians often argue 

 this intellectual transformation was a bridge between the Middle Ages and the Modern 

 era. 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".[2][3]
 There is a consensus that the Renaissance began in Florence, Italy, in the 14th 

 century.[4] 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;[5][6] and the migration of Greek scholars and texts to 

 Italy following the Fall of Constantinople at the hands of the Ottoman Turks.[7][8][9]
 The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and in line with general 

 scepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians 

 reacting to the 19th-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.[10] 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.[11]
 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 the 

 classical age,[12] while social and economic historians of the longue durée especially 

 have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras,[13] linked, as Panofsky 

 himself observed, "by a thousand ties".[14]
 The word Renaissance has also been extended to other historical and cultural movements, 

 such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th century.

 Overview

 The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual 

 life in the early modern period. Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the rest of 

 Europe by the 16th century, its influence was felt in literature, philosophy, art, 

 music, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. 

 Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, and searched for realism 

 and human emotion in art.[15]
 Renaissance humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini sought out in Europe's monastic 

 libraries the Latin literary, historical, and oratorical texts of Antiquity, while the 

 Fall of Constantinople (1453) generated a wave of émigré Greek scholars bringing 

 precious manuscripts in ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity in the 

 West. It is in their new focus on literary and historical texts that Renaissance 

 scholars differed so markedly from the medieval scholars of the Renaissance of the 12th 

 century, who had focused on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural sciences, 

 philosophy and mathematics, rather than on such cultural texts. In the revival of neo-

 Platonism Renaissance humanists did not reject Christianity; quite the contrary, many 

 of the Renaissance's greatest works were devoted to it, and the Church patronized many 

 works of Renaissance art. However, a subtle shift took place in the way that 

 intellectuals approached religion that was reflected in many other areas of cultural 

 life.[16] In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, 

 were brought back from Byzantium to Western Europe and engaged Western scholars for the 

 first time since late antiquity. This new engagement with Greek Christian works, and 

 particularly the return to the original Greek of the New Testament promoted by 

 humanists Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, would help pave the way for the Protestant 

 Reformation.
 Well after the first artistic return to classicism had been exemplified in the 

 sculpture of Nicola Pisano, Florentine painters led by Masaccio strove to portray the 

 human form realistically, developing techniques to render perspective and light more 

 naturally. Political philosophers, most famously Niccolò Machiavelli, sought to 

 describe political life as it really was, that is to understand it rationally. A 

 critical contribution to Italian Renaissance humanism Pico della Mirandola wrote the 

 famous text "De hominis dignitate" (Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486), which 

 consists of a series of theses on philosophy, natural thought, faith and magic defended 

 against any opponent on the grounds of reason. In addition to studying classical Latin 

 and Greek, Renaissance authors also began increasingly to use vernacular languages; 

 combined with the introduction of printing, this would allow many more people access to 

 books, especially the Bible.[17]
 In all, the Renaissance could be viewed as an attempt by intellectuals to study and 

 improve the secular and worldly, both through the revival of ideas from antiquity, and 

 through novel approaches to thought. Some scholars, such as Rodney Stark,[18] play down 

 the Renaissance in favor of the earlier innovations of the Italian city states in the 

 High Middle Ages, which married responsive government, Christianity and the birth of 

 capitalism. This analysis argues that, whereas the great European states (France and 

 Spain) were absolutist monarchies, and others were under direct Church control, the 

 independent city republics of Italy took over the principles of capitalism invented on 

 monastic estates and set off a vast unprecedented commercial revolution which preceded 

 and financed the Renaissance.

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