• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Meaning and Characteristics of the Italian Renaissance

What characteristics distinguish the Renaissance from the Middle Ages?

The Making of Renaissance Society

What major social changes occurred during the Renaissance?

The Italian States in the Renaissance

How did Machiavelli’s works reflect the political realities of Renaissance Italy?

The Intellectual Renaissance in Italy

What was humanism, and what effect did it have on philosophy, education, attitudes toward politics, and the writing of history?

The Artistic Renaissance

What were the chief characteristics of Renaissance art, and how did it differ in Italy and northern Europe?

The European State in the Renaissance

Why do historians sometimes refer to the monarchies of the late fifteenth century as “new monarchies” or “Renaissance states”?

The Church in the Renaissance

What were the policies of the Renaissance popes, and what impact did those policies have on the Catholic Church?

* * *

CRITICAL THINKING

How did Renaissance art and the humanist movement reflect the political, economic, and social developments of the period?

* * *

* * *

WERE THE FOURTEENTH and fifteenth centuries a continuation of the Middle Ages or the beginning of a new era? Both positions can be defended. Although the disintegrative patterns of the fourteenth century continued into the fifteenth, at the same time there were elements of recovery that made the fifteenth century a period of significant political, economic, artistic, and intellectual change. The humanists or intellectuals of the age called their period (from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century) an age of rebirth, believing that they had restored arts and letters to new glory after they had been “neglected” or “dead” for centuries. The humanists also saw their age as one of accomplished individuals who dominated the landscape of their time. Michelangelo, the great Italian artist of the early sixteenth century, and Pope Julius II, the “warrior pope,” were two such titans. The artist’s temperament and the pope’s temper led to many lengthy and often loud quarrels between the two. The pope had hired Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, a difficult task for a man long accustomed to being a sculptor. Michelangelo undertook the project but refused for a long time to allow anyone, including the pope, to see his work. Julius grew anxious, pestering Michelangelo on a regular basis about when the ceiling would be finished. Exasperated by the pope’s requests, Michelangelo once replied, according to Giorgio Vasari, his contemporary biographer, that the ceiling would be completed “when it satisfies me as an artist.” The pope responded, “And we want you to satisfy us and finish it soon,” and then threatened that if Michelangelo did not “finish the ceiling quickly,” the pope would “have him thrown down from the scaffolding.” Fearing the pope’s anger, Michelangelo “lost no time in doing all that was wanted” and quickly completed the ceiling, one of the great masterpieces in the history of Western art.

The humanists’ view of their age as a rebirth of the Classical civilization of the Greeks and Romans ultimately led historians to use the French word Renaissance to identify this age. Although recent historians have emphasized the many elements of continuity between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the latter age was also distinguished by its own unique characteristics.

* * *

Meaning and Characteristics of the Italian Renaissance

* * *

FOCUS QUESTION: What characteristics distinguish the Renaissance from the Middle Ages?

* * *

Renaissance means “rebirth.” Many people who lived in Italy between 1350 and 1550 believed that they had witnessed a rebirth of antiquity or Greco-Roman civilization, marking a new age. To them, the thousand or so years between the end of the Roman Empire and their own era constituted a middle period (the “Middle Ages”), characterized by darkness because of its lack of Classical culture. Historians of the nineteenth century later used