Renaissance

Period of development in European arts, science and philosophy between the late fourteenth and early seventeenth centuries, driven by a revival of interest in Classical Greco-Roman scholarship towards a rationalist outlook rather than the interests of medieval Christian theology. The Renaissance (French, ‘rebirth’) originated in the humanist thought of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Florence; it received impetus from the arrival of Greek and Latin scholars in Italy from the erstwhile Eastern Roman Empire after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. As it spread across the rest of Europe over the course of the fifteenth century, art became rooted in the observation of nature and a scientific study of human anatomy; perspective and proportion became key features of painting, sculpture and architecture. Among various developments, this period witnessed the invention of the Gutenberg press; publication of Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, considered the first modern atlas; the founding of Protestantism and the Church of England; the development of heliocentrism; and the beginning of European colonialism. Today, the Renaissance is often conflated with the short period of the High Renaissance in Italy (c. 1490–1527) — defined by the production of some of the most important works of art by Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.