The Renaissance: What It Was, When It Began, and Why It Changed Europe

The Renaissance begins in the Italian city-states, not on a single date. Treccani describes a period that had already taken on fairly precise features around the middle of the fourteenth century, but notes that historians don’t agree on one range: some start it in 1400 and close it in 1550, others frame it between 1492 and 1600.

The roots go back further still. What scholars call pre-humanism, based on the research of Remigio Sabbadini, reaches to the early fourteenth century and is centered on northern Italy, well before Florence becomes the movement’s main workshop.

Humanism and the Renaissance: two words, one common mix-up

Humanism, in Treccani’s definition, is the specifically philological side of the Renaissance: a literary period peaking in the fifteenth century, focused on recovering and critically studying ancient texts. The Renaissance is the broader container, which also includes painting, sculpture, architecture and science, and which in the most common historical usage runs from the late fifteenth century through the end of the sixteenth.

Treccani calls Petrarch the true starting point of humanist literature: the movement, in the encyclopedia’s own phrasing, converges in his work. Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of the Florentine republic, brought classical eloquence into the city’s politics; Leonardo Bruni, his successor at the chancellery, became its Latin historian. Lorenzo Valla applied the philological method to theology and law, and his critical approach later passed to Erasmus of Rotterdam, who carried it beyond Italy in the sixteenth century.

The cities that served as a workshop

The movement develops mainly in the republics of Florence and Venice, where cultural inquiry was tied to the work of chancelleries and courts. In Florence, under Lorenzo de’ Medici, the Florentine Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, author of the Theologia platonica, held an appeal that Treccani says lasted across Europe until the end of the seventeenth century. Recovering the classical texts involved concrete searches through monastery libraries: Poggio Bracciolini searched the Swiss monasteries of St. Gall, Reichenau and Einsiedeln, while Ambrogio Traversari carried out his own search through central and northern Italian monasteries between 1432 and 1434; Giovanni Aurispa, on a trip to Greece in 1421, gathered 238 volumes of ancient works.

A practical example: picture a Florentine chancellor in the early fifteenth century, someone like Leonardo Bruni. His job wasn’t purely administrative: he wrote in classical Latin, quoted Cicero in official documents, and used ancient rhetoric to defend the republic’s political choices before its citizens.

In Venice, the key figure is Aldus Manutius, whose press fulfilled what Treccani describes as Cardinal Bessarion’s wish: to hand the message of Greek learning down to humanity intact. Official teaching of Greek in Florence began in 1396, with Manuel Chrysoloras; in 1439 the ecumenical council relocated to the city, bringing with it Georgius Gemistus Pletho and other Byzantine scholars. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, further Greek scholars fled the collapsing Byzantine Empire, carrying ancient manuscripts with them into Italy.

The arts and the method of observation

On the artistic side, Donatello, Masaccio and Filippo Brunelleschi shape the Florentine scene in the first half of the fifteenth century. Brunelleschi develops the study of perspective as a tool for representing reality, later formalized by Leon Battista Alberti, whose De re aedificatoria lays out the model of a rationally planned city. Archaeological finds in Rome, such as the Laocoön between the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, feed a growing interest in classical art.

The High Renaissance, the best-known stretch even outside specialist circles, actually occupies a narrow window: Leonardo finishes the Vitruvian Man around 1492 and The Last Supper around 1498; Michelangelo works on the Pietà between 1497 and 1500, completes the David in 1504, and paints the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel between 1508 and 1512; Raphael finishes the frescoes in the Vatican Stanze, including The School of Athens, in 1511.

Readers wanting the medieval backdrop the Renaissance broke away from can turn to our Middle Ages summary; to see what humanists were actually looking for in ancient texts, our Recaps on Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire cover the two civilizations they studied.

How printing carried the Renaissance beyond Italy

Johannes Gutenberg began his printing experiments in the 1440s and set up his press in Mainz in 1450; his printed Latin Bible of 1456 is the first major work to come off the press. The earliest presses outside Germany opened in Subiaco in 1465 (the first in Italy), then in Rome in 1467 and Venice in 1469; by the start of the sixteenth century, even smaller towns had their own press.

The effect on the circulation of ideas was enormous. Before printing, according to World History Encyclopedia, at most one person in ten could read extended texts; printed books, in addition, cost around an eighth of a handwritten copy, making them far more accessible. European book production went from around 2 million copies in the first decade of the 1500s to around 20 million by 1550, and to around 150 million by 1600. That, together with the movement of scholars and merchants, is one of the forces that carried humanist ideas and new artistic techniques beyond Italy’s borders.

Scientifically, the Renaissance broke with the Aristotelian empiricism that had dominated for centuries, opening the way to the modern scientific revolution, of which Galileo Galilei would become a leading figure; Copernicus published his heliocentric theory in 1543. The same method of direct observation that painters developed through perspective, looking at reality with fresh eyes instead of simply repeating ancient authority, carried over from artists’ workshops into scientific laboratories.