The Great Renaissance

The Renaissance was one of the greatest cultural movements and it started in the early 1300's in Italy then later spread to other countries in Europe. The word renaissance comes from the act of being reborn. The reason this is used to describe this period in history is that many artists and scholars were studying the way of life in ancient Rome and Greece. To be more specific they were trying to restart the essence of the Roman and Greek cultures in their own ways through artistic, literary and philosophical works. The changes that occurred during the renaissance led way for many important discoveries in the future.

The Renaissance began a little before the end of the middle ages but continued until about the 1600's. There were many controversies about the beliefs and ideas of the middle ages. During the middle ages, they focused on theology while the Renaissance scholars studied primarily humanity and different cultures, focusing on ancient Greek and Roman cultures. There was also a change in the type of art found in the middle ages and the Renaissance. In the middle ages, most art was based on religious symbols and were rather unlifelike and unrealistic. While Renaissance artists tried to capture the true beauty oh human beings in a natural and realistic setting. Even though today we think of the Renaissance as a very important period in history, the ideas did not catch on as quickly as it would be thought. Even at the peak of the Renaissance, which occurred during the 1400's and early 1500's, the beliefs were not widely accepted throughout Europe. It was

only for future generations that man truly understood what the importance was of their studies.

At the beginning of the Renaissance, Italy was composed of mainly city-states and was controlled by the Holy Roman Empire. Eventually some major cities came under the control of single families; this soon led to the creation of a new form of government called the signoria which was ruled by the signore . Republicanism is another form of government that arose in other Italian cities, which was controlled by the members of the ruling class. The ruling class was compromised of the cities wealthiest families all of whom thought themselves to be better than the lower classes. The ruling classes in the major cities like Florence and Venice wanted to have their cities resemble those of ancient Greek and Roman cities and so they sponsored Renaissance artists and architects to construct great monuments and public buildings. Even though Florence was under a Republicanism government, there was a time in the 1430's where the Medici family controlled the ruling class so it resembled a signorial system.

There was one main intellectual development in the Renaissance, humanism. It was a different way of thinking than people were used to. Humanism was a mix between the history of human beings and religious beliefs. Humanists set out to find how people have acted in the past and the outcome to figure out how to live their lives. They believed that the classical antiquity held the key for learning about this since they did so well in

the past. Since all of the texts that the humanists wanted to read, were in either ancient Greek or Latin, they first had to study philology . Philology and history became their main concerns because they needed philology and they found that studying great people in history would help them understand what actions to pursue.

During the Middle Ages sculptors tried to represent God in it's glory, and created all there buildings to be grand to show how great God was. Renaissance sculptors and painters tried to show the beauty of man in a realistic fashion and they structured they're buildings to show the majesty of man. Brunelleschi was a great sculptor and the Renaissance's first person to construct buildings