Renaissance: History, Features, Highlights

The Vitruvian Man is one of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpieces. This drawing is a perfect example of the Renaissance focus on humans. Public domain image.

The Renaissance was a cultural movement in Europe from the 14th to the 16th century, marking the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern Age. It was a gradual transition, because it maintained characteristics of the Middle Ages while seeking to break with tradition and establish new paradigms. However, its impact did not remain restricted to culture, but rather extended to politics, economy, religion, and societal mentality in Europe. Renaissance thought was based in Greco-Roman culture and it sought to replace Catholic dogmas with science.

Context of the Renaissance

In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church monopolized culture and education. Priests taught that God was at the center of everything (Theocentricism) and was the source of all knowledge. Although religious schools and universities taught in Latin, a language that not even feudal lords knew, Christian doctrine was followed by everyone — for it was supposed to be the basis of society.

By the 14th century, certain factors would incentivize a change:

Feudalism was collapsing and so was its agricultural economy. In urban areas, trade began to thrive, leading to significant wealth accumulation by merchants. These traders sponsored works of art, because they wanted to gain social prestige in times when it was usually acquired by noble birthright.
In 1453, the Byzantine Empire was defeated by the Ottomans. Greek scholars who lived in its capital, Constantinople, emigrated to Italy, bringing with them important texts and other sources of knowledge. This influx of information inspired a new appreciation for Greek and Roman philosophy.
Bourgeois jurists wanted to legitimize the centralization of power in the hands of kings, so they turned to the Greek and Roman texts, which emphasized the role of individuals, rather than God, as masters of the world.

These factors culminated in the emergence of an ideology called Humanism, because it placed humans, rather than God, at the center of the universe. It was not a complete break with the Church, because humans were considered God’s most perfect creation — to value humans meant valuing God himself.

Beginning in the Italian Peninsula, Renaissance art would adopt an humanistic ethos. Later on, it would spread all over Europe, because of the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, around 1440. This device allowed the printing of texts in greater quantity and speed. It helped to lower the price of books and ended up increasing the amount of readers among Europeans.

The printing press was a huge machine that allowed faster and cheaper printing of books. Its first models appeared in the midst of the 15th century. © CS Media.

Characteristics of the Renaissance

Although the Renaissance tried to be an universal art movement, it varied from place to place, according to local traditions. As a whole, these were the main characteristics of this art style:

Humanism or Anthropocentrism: the idea that humans are at the center of the universe. Accordingly, Renaissance art would illustrate common scenes from human daily life, and would place an emphasis in faithfully illustrating the human body’s traits and features.
Individualism: humans wanted to display their own talents and fulfill their ambitions. It was believed that individual rights were above social ones.
Rationalism and Scientism: Renaissance art was based upon the idea that science was better than religion at explaining the world. In fact, some believed that reason was the sole means for acquiring knowledge.
Classicism: Renaissance art was inspired in the Classical culture of Greeks and Romans, which highlighted form, simplicity, proportion, clarity of structure, perfection, restrained emotion, and explicit appeal to the intellect. The name “Renaissance” would be coined retrospectively in the 16th century, emphasizing the period’s rejuvenation of Greco-Roman culture.

Phases of the Renaissance

Usually, the Renaissance is divided into three periods, which correspond to three centuries in the context of Italian cultural history:

The Trecento (14th century, 1301-1400) was an early phase of the Renaissance, when some artists and writers combined medieval forms of expression with newer forms. In literature, the most important writer was Dante Alighieri, author of the Divine Comedy. In the visual arts, the highlight was painter Giotto di Bondone, who began to break with medieval traditions.
The Quattrocento (15th century, 1401-1500) was a fully-fledged phase of the Renaissance, during which the it had already begun to spread throughout Europe. Painters began to create oil painting and frescos — painting in wet murals, so that the works of art become a part of walls themselves.
The Cinquecento (16th century, 1501-1600) was a period in which the Italian Peninsula faced intervention from foreign powers, such as France and Spain. This meant that Renaissance art declined there, while it blossomed in other regions of Europe, where medieval art had not yet been overcome.

Greatest Italian Renaissance Artists and Scientists

The Creation of Adam is a fresco by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, located in the current Vatican City. Public domain image.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321): he was an Italian poet most famous for authoring the Divine Comedy, after being forced to leave Florence. In clear contrast to the usage of Latin by the Church, he wrote the Divine Comedy in Latin. However, its plot had connections with religion — the main character traveled through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337): he was an Italian painter and architect. He broke with medieval tradition by adopting naturalist tendencies in his paintings, such as trying to portray human bodies in depth and movement.
Sandro Botticelli (1446–1510): as a painter of the Late Gothic and Early Renaissance period, he mixed these two tendencies. His paintings are known for its graceful forms, as seen in The Birth of Venus and Primavera.
Michelangelo (1475-1564): using the fresco technique, he painted the The Creation of Adam on the ceiling and The Last Judgment on the altar of the Sistine Chapel, in the current Vatican City. He was also a sculptor, and his most famous sculptures were the Pietà, representing Jesus and Mary, and David, representing the biblical figure that opposed Goliath.

The Last Supper is a mural painting by Leonardo da Vinci, currently located in Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan. Public domain image.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519): he invented the sfumato technique to dilute human contours and make paintings more realistic. His most notable paintings were the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and the Vitruvian Man. Yet Da Vinci was much more than a painter: his notebooks contained drawings and notes about many subjects, such as anatomy, astronomy and engineering.
Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520): he became widely known for his frescos, which are characterized by harmony, balance, clarity of form and ease of composition. His most important works include The School of Athens, The Sistine Madonna and numerous Madonna paintings.
Filippo Brunelleschi (1337-1446) and Donato Bramante (1444-1514): they were architects who introduced balanced forms, with harmonious proportions, to buildings. Their constructions had columns, arches and vaults, much like Roman, Greek and Latin ones.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642): he was a physician and astronomer who proposed scientific methods to understanding reality. This put him in direct opposition against the Church, especially when he validated the Copernican notion that the Earth that rotates around the sun (Heliocentrism), and not the other way around. Because of this, he was placed in house arrest.

Renaissance Beyond the Italian Peninsula

During the 16th century, the Cinquecento was characterized by the complete expansion of Renaissance beyond the Italian Peninsula. In several parts of Europe, the Renaissance style was introduced alongside the Gothic style that prevailed during the Middle Ages — thus giving rise to peculiar works of art.

In the Netherlands, there emerged the Flemish painting style. It was based on improvements made to oil paintings that allowed artists to benefit from infinite variations in color, lightning and shadows. It began in the the Flemish south, but painters from the North were important as well. Some major artists were the brothers Hubert Van Eyck, who left many unfinished paintings when he died, and Jan Van Eyck, who was erroneously considered the inventor of the oil painting. Other important painters were Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516), who adopted a mystical ethos, and Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1525-1569), who portrayed the simple life that peasants carried on at the time.

In Spain, El Greco (Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos) (1541-1614) was a Greek painter, sculptor and architect who is considered a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism — art styles that would only appear in the 20th century.

Christ Healing the Blind, an oil painting by El Greco, has three different variations, painted during various periods of his life. Public domain image.

In the Holy Roman Empire, Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) specialized in engravings, in which he illustrated both people like himself and landscapes.

Finally, the Renaissance also gave rise to some of the world’s most renowned writers up to this day:

Thomas More, author of Utopia (1516).
Luís Vaz de Camões, author of The Lusiads (1572).
William Shakespeare, author of Romeo and Juliet (1597) and Hamlet (1601).
Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote (1605 and 1615).