The Renaissance: how art, science and new ideas remade Europe, 1400–1600

The movement began in Florence, Italy, in the 14th century and first spread to other Italian city-states such as Venice, Milan, Bologna, Ferrara and Rome, before reaching France and the rest of western and northern Europe during the 15th century, according to History.com and the World History Encyclopedia. Economic prosperity in Italian city-states and renewed study of ancient Greek and Roman texts created the conditions for the shift.

Humanism: the intellectual core

At the center of the Renaissance was humanism, an intellectual movement that drew on classical Greek and Roman literature, architecture and art to generate ideas applicable to the contemporary world, according to the World History Encyclopedia. The Musée protestant, a museum focused on the history of Protestantism, describes humanism more broadly as a movement combining renewed study of ancient Greek and Latin texts with growing interest in the arts, sciences, and questions of governance and education.

Humanism originated in Florence during the era of the Medici family and then spread across Europe, according to the Musée protestant. In the Netherlands, the Rotterdam-based scholar Erasmus (1469–1536) became an influential humanist voice; in France, Guillaume Budé (1468–1540) advised King Francis I, who went on to found the Collège de France; in England, humanist education shaped writers including Thomas More (1478–1535).

The Musée protestant also links humanist scholarship to the Reformation: the close study of biblical languages that humanists promoted made new vernacular translations of scripture possible in German, French and English, and both Martin Luther and Jean Calvin were shaped by humanist education.

A new visual language in art

Renaissance art developed over roughly 1400 to 1600 and introduced techniques that changed how painters and sculptors represented the world, according to the World History Encyclopedia. Artists adopted mathematical perspective to create convincing depth on a flat surface, increasingly worked in oil paint rather than tempera for richer color and tone, and used light-and-shadow techniques such as chiaroscuro and sfumato.

The shift built on earlier experiments by artists such as Giotto (died 1337), who began exploring more realistic figures before the Renaissance proper. By the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the movement produced three towering figures: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo (1475–1564) and Raphael (1483–1520).

Patronage was essential to this output. The Medici family, especially Lorenzo de' Medici (1449–1492), backed artists and thinkers in Florence and built a collection of ancient art that other artists studied, according to the World History Encyclopedia. The Medici ruled Florence for more than 60 years and were among the movement's most prominent backers, according to History.com. The Catholic Church was the other major patron, commissioning altarpieces and frescoes for churches and chapels, according to the World History Encyclopedia.

Printing, science and the road to the Scientific Revolution

Johannes Gutenberg's invention of a printing press using movable type, which History.com dates to the 1450s, allowed ideas — including humanist texts — to spread far more quickly across Europe than hand-copied manuscripts had allowed.

Scientific inquiry advanced alongside art and humanist scholarship. History.com cites Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), who proposed that the Earth and other planets orbit the sun rather than the reverse, and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), who used telescopes to observe Jupiter's moons and the rings of Saturn. The philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) is described by History.com as a father of modern philosophy. These developments are generally seen as laying groundwork for the later Scientific Revolution.

Why the period waned

History.com attributes the decline of the Renaissance to several overlapping factors: wars disrupted Italian territories, shifting trade routes hurt the economic base that had funded patronage, and the Counter-Reformation brought tighter censorship of artists along with an Inquisition, established by the 1545 Council of Trent, that made challenging Church doctrine punishable by death.