AP European History

Barron’s

The Italian Renaissance

Overview

While the Renaissance was a period of artistic, cultural, and intellectual revival, the term renaissance, a rebirth, can be misleading. It implies that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries marked a distinct awakening for Europeans from the “darkness” of the Middle Ages. Actually, the medieval period gave rise to the basic institutions of Europe: its laws, languages, and economics. The elite culture that developed during the fifteenth century in the city-states of the Italian peninsula not only borrowed from ancient Greece and Rome, but also expressed a new conception of humankind, individualism, through innovative art and literature. It was in these independent domains, governed by a merchant class, by despots, or by republicans, that pure secularism (a belief that life was more than a preparation for the hereafter) first appeared in the modern world. The name Renaissance was not used until Jules Michelet employed it in the late nineteenth century, which explains why some historians may now see the delineation of the Renaissance as a separate era from the Reformation, the Age of Exploration, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution as arbitrary. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks caused many scholars of the Byzantine Empire to relocate in Italy, which helped usher in the Renaissance.

Humanism (a literary and educational movement that was truly modern in that a class of non-clerical writers concerned themselves with secular issues but based their answers to current problems on the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans), rose in Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. With their special affinity to classical Greek and Roman culture, schools such as the Florentine Academy emerged based upon studying classical authors such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. In northern Europe, the “pagan” humanism of the Italian Renaissance was rejected in favor of a blend of religion and classical literature. Christian Humanists, such as Erasmus and Thomas More, tried to recapture the moral force of early Christianity by studying the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers.

Whether or not the Renaissance marks the beginning of the modern age, it provided a conception of the role and destiny of humankind vastly different from the ideas of the Middle Ages, and its artistic achievements influenced the culture of all Europe.

Since the Renaissance is defined less by specific events than by individual accomplishments and ideas, the following review focuses on significant personalities, achievements, and concepts. First, though, a few words about the setting for one of the most creative periods in all of human history.

The Italian City-States

Italy was not so much a nation as an idea in the fifteenth century. It was an amalgamation of many distinct political entities known as city-states. By the fifteenth century, certain northern Italian towns that had been trade centers of the Roman Empire expanded into independent city-states that ruled wide areas of the surrounding countryside.

“Geography is destiny” proved true for the Italians of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Fragmented as a nation since the fall of Rome, and their land becoming a battleground for the more unified peoples of Europe, Italians took advantage of their proximity to the sea. They applied the energy that springs from being always at the focus of crisis to establish a seagoing trade with the peoples in the eastern Mediterranean. They became the “middlemen” of Europe.

The Major City-States
The Medici Family

This was the most famous dynasty of those merchants and bankers who used their vast wealth both to govern the city-states and to patronize illustrious creators in the arts.

The Medici family ruled the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, of which Florence was the principal city, well into the eighteenth century. Two popes, many cardinals, and two queens of France belonged to the family.