History of the Renaissance- An 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.
Renaissance humanists such as Pogo Bracingly sought out in Rupee’s monastic libraries the Latin literary, historical, and oratorical sets of Antiquity, while the Fall of Constantinople (1453) generated a wave of Г©magiГ© 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 Renaissances 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. 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 Lorenz Villa 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 Passion, Florentine painters led by Mosaic strove to portray the human form realistically, developing techniques to render perspective and light more naturally.
Political philosophers, most famously NiccoleГ¶ 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 Miranda wrote the famous text “De hominid designate” (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. In all, the Renaissance could be viewed as an attempt by intellectuals to study and improve the secular and worldly, both through the revival f ideas from antiquity, and through novel approaches to thought.
Some scholars, such as Rodney Stark, 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, took over the principles of capitalism invented on monastic estates and set Off vast unprecedented commercial revolution which preceded and financed the Renaissance.
