Renaissance

The word renaissance means “rebirth,” and it is used to denote the whole transition from theMiddle Ages to the Modern World.During the Renaissance, individuals showed an increasing concernfor worldly life and self-consciously aspired to shape their destinies - an attitude that is the key to modernity.This rebirth began in Italy during the fourteenth century and gradually spread north and west to Germany, France, England, and Spain during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Renaissance was one avenue to modernity; another was the ReformationIt also accentuated the importance of the individual person, a distinctive feature of the modern outlook. It stressed individual conscience rather than clerical authority, insisted on a personal relationship between each man or woman and God, and called attention to the individual’s inner religious capacities.

Renaissance artists and writers were fascinated by the cultural forms of Greece and Rome; they sought to imitate classical style and to capture the secular spirit of antiquity.In the process, they broke with medieval artistic and literary forms. They valued the full development of human talent and expressed a new excitement about the possibilities of life in this world.Individualism was another hallmark of the Renaissance.Renaissance Italy produced a distinctive human type, the “universal man”: a many-sided person, who not only showed mastery of the ancient classics, an appreciation of and even talent for the visual arts, and a concern for the day-to-day affairs of his city, but also aspired to mold his life into a work of art.Renaissance artists portrayed the individual character of human beings, captured the rich diversity of human personality,produced the first portraits since Roman times, and affixed their signatures to their works.Renaissance writers probed their own feelings and manifested a self-awareness that characterizes the modern outlook.This new outlook, however, applied almost exclusively to an elite princes, courtiers,court ladies, wealthy urban families,and exceptionally talented artists and writers

During the Renaissance, the secular spirit andthe concern with the individual found expression in the intellectual movement called humanism and in a political theory that separated politics from Christian principles.Erasmus  belongs the credit for making Renaissance humanism an international movement.The great Renaissance artists are Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), and Raphael Santi (1483–1520). Aided by the invention of printing, the Renaissance spread to Germany, France, England, and Spain .The Renaissance, then, marks the birth of modernity in art, in the idea of the individual’s role in history and nature, and in society, politics, war, and diplomacy. Renaissance set an example of what people might achieve in art and architecture, taste and refinement, education and urban culture. In many fields, the Renaissance set the cultural standards of the modern age.