Italian Renaissance

The Italian Renaissance was the cultural flowering that began in the city-states of northern and central Italy, centred above all on Florence, and lasted roughly through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; some historians stretch it from about 1300 to 1600. Driven by wealthy merchant elites and a revived interest in classical antiquity, it transformed painting, sculpture, architecture, literature and thought, and from the late fifteenth century spread across Europe as the wider Renaissance.

By the later Middle Ages northern and central Italy was among the richest parts of Europe. Venice, Genoa and Pisa dominated trade with the eastern Mediterranean, the Po Valley was fertile, and Florentine and Sienese bankers made the gold florin a currency of international trade. Self-governing communes, run largely by merchants, had slipped free of bishops and counts. The fourteenth century brought crisis: famine, the failure of the Bardi and Peruzzi banks in the 1340s and, worst of all, the Black Death, which cut Florence's population by a quarter to a half. Some historians argue that the survivors, richer per head and short of safe investments, spent more on art and culture.

The poets Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, and the painter Giotto with his new realism, are usually counted as forerunners. Humanist scholars hunted for lost Latin texts in monastic libraries, and Greek learning returned with Byzantine scholars, especially after a church council in Florence in 1439 and the fall of Constantinople in 1453. In Florence, Brunelleschi's church of San Lorenzo and Pazzi Chapel, Donatello's sculpture and Masaccio's frescoes, such as the Holy Trinity in Santa Maria Novella, applied mathematical perspective and classical forms. Hans Baron argued that Florence's long struggle against Milan, which ended when Giangaleazzo Visconti died during his 1402 siege, helped forge a proud republican ideology.

Cosimo de' Medici, head of Europe's largest bank, returned from exile in 1434 and made his family the leaders of Florence while leaving its republican forms in place. He helped negotiate the Peace of Lodi of 1454, which brought forty years of relative stability. His grandson Lorenzo de' Medici, in charge from 1469, survived the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478 and became a great patron. The new culture spread to Milan under Francesco Sforza, to Ferrara, Mantua and Urbino, to Naples, and to Venice, where the Aldine Press, founded in 1494, pioneered italic type and printed editions of Greek texts. In Rome, rebuilt from 1447 under Pope Nicholas V, Sixtus IV commissioned the Sistine Chapel.

Around 1500 painting reached a new balance and harmony in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo: the Last Supper, the Mona Lisa, the School of Athens and the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Bramante's Tempietto (1502) and his plan for a new St Peter's Basilica (1506) brought the style to Rome. Writers such as Machiavelli, in The Prince, and Castiglione, in The Book of the Courtier, examined power and manners, while painters in Venice, Milan and Parma favoured highly illusionistic scenes of the natural world. In 1550 Giorgio Vasari described the age as a "rebirth" of the arts.

Political stability did not last. The French invasion of 1494 opened the Italian Wars, which ended the independence of many city-states, and the sack of Rome on 6 May 1527 crippled papal patronage for two decades. In Florence the friar Savonarola's rule of 1494–1498 saw art burned in the Bonfire of the Vanities. The Counter-Reformation brought the Roman Inquisition in 1542 and an index of banned books, while painting moved into Mannerism. Meanwhile Leonardo left for France in 1516, artists at Fontainebleau carried Italian forms north, and the Atlantic replaced the Mediterranean as Europe's main trade route. Italian ideas lived on in the Northern Renaissance and, through figures like Galileo, in the Scientific Revolution.

Our 1400, 1492 and 1530 maps show the patchwork of Italian states, including the Republic of Venice and the Papal States, before and during the Italian Wars.