Renaissance Italy

The Italian Renaissance (approximately 1300-1600 CE) — the intellectual and artistic movement that marked Europe's transition from the medieval to the modern world — began in the city-states of northern Italy (Florence, Venice, Milan, Rome) where merchant wealth funded artistic patronage and the recovery of classical Greek and Roman texts. The humanist movement placed human beings and their rational capabilities at the center of intellectual life, in contrast to medieval theology's focus on God and salvation. Key Renaissance figures span extraordinary range: Dante Alighieri (Divine Comedy, 1320 — Italian vernacular literature); Petrarch ('first humanist,' discovered Cicero's letters, 1345); Boccaccio (Decameron, 1353); Brunelleschi (dome of Florence Cathedral, 1436 — solved an engineering problem deemed impossible); Donatello (revolutionary realistic sculpture); Botticelli (Birth of Venus, Primavera — mythological themes in sacred art); Leonardo da Vinci (painting, sculpture, anatomy, engineering, science — the original Renaissance man); Michelangelo (Sistine Chapel ceiling, David, Pietà); Raphael (School of Athens). The printing press (Gutenberg, 1440s) amplified the Renaissance by making texts available at unprecedented scale, contributing to the Protestant Reformation.