Literature & Art

The Renaissance, which flourished in Europe from roughly the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, brought a remarkable flowering of literature and art. Beginning in the city-states of Italy and spreading northward, it was inspired in part by a renewed interest in the learning, texts, and artistic ideals of classical antiquity.

In literature, humanist scholars revived ancient authors and wrote in both Latin and the vernacular, producing works ranging from Petrarch's poetry and Machiavelli's political writing to the later achievements of Cervantes and Shakespeare. The spread of printing after the mid-fifteenth century vastly broadened access to books and ideas.

In the visual arts, painters and sculptors such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Botticelli developed techniques of perspective, anatomy, and naturalism that transformed European art. Coinciding with the religious upheaval of the Reformation, this era reshaped Western culture and helped lay the foundations of the modern world.