How the rediscovery of ancient Greece and Rome began in the city-states of Italy, how the printing press carried new ideas across Europe, and how artists in Flanders, Germany and Hungary took them up.
Stop 01 · c. 1345–1400
Why Italy?
Around 1400, northern Italy was a patchwork of rich, competing city-states: Florence, Venice, Milan, Genoa, and the Papal States around Rome. Their merchants shipped spices, silks and dyes from the Levant to the rest of Europe, Florentine bankers lent money to kings, and ancient Roman ruins stood all around them. The Black Death had recently killed about a third of Europe's people. Scholars called humanists, following the poet Petrarch, hunted for lost Latin texts and wanted to revive the culture of the ancient world. In 1345 Petrarch himself found an unknown collection of Cicero's letters in the cathedral library at Verona. He is also credited with inventing the idea of a 'Dark Age' between Rome and his own time.
Da Vinci Vitruve Luc ViatourLeonardo da Vinci · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Around 1400, northern Italy was a patchwork of rich, competing city-states: Florence, Venice, Milan, Genoa, and the Papal States around Rome. Their merchants shipped spices, silks and dyes from the Levant to the rest of Europe, Florentine bankers lent money to kings, and ancient Roman ruins stood all around them. The Black Death had recently killed about a third of Europe's people. Scholars called humanists, following the poet Petrarch, hunted for lost Latin texts and wanted to revive the culture of the ancient world. In 1345 Petrarch himself found an unknown collection of Cicero's letters in the cathedral library at Verona. He is also credited with inventing the idea of a 'Dark Age' between Rome and his own time.
Florence led the way. Its banking family, the Medici, paid for buildings, paintings and scholars. Cosimo de' Medici, whose bank had branches in Rome, Venice and Geneva, came back from a year's exile in 1434 and dominated the city until his death in 1464. Brunelleschi worked out the rules of linear perspective and, after winning a design competition in 1418, built the great dome of Florence Cathedral between 1420 and 1436. It was the first octagonal dome ever raised without a temporary wooden frame to hold it up. Donatello revived classical sculpture; his bronze David, made for the Medici, was the first freestanding male nude since antiquity. Masaccio painted figures that seemed to stand in real space, and died at 26.
Western Europe had largely lost the ability to read ancient Greek. In 1397 the Byzantine diplomat Manuel Chrysoloras began teaching it in Florence; his pupil Leonardo Bruni recalled that nobody in northern Italy had studied Greek for 700 years. Other scholars followed, bringing manuscripts of Plato and other Greek authors, and in 1439 a Byzantine delegation at the Council of Florence agreed a union of the Greek and Latin churches. The flow increased as the Ottoman Turks closed in on Constantinople. Mehmed II took the city on 29 May 1453 after a 53-day siege, and the last emperor, Constantine XI, died in the fighting. Cardinal Bessarion, a Greek who settled in Italy, gave his huge library to Venice in 1468.
Around 1450, in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg began printing with movable metal type. His Latin Bible was ready around 1454–55, in perhaps 160 to 180 copies; in March 1455 the future Pope Pius II saw sample pages at Frankfurt and wrote that the type could be read without glasses. Printers spread with astonishing speed, many of them Germans: to Subiaco near Rome by 1465, Rome itself by 1467, Venice by 1469, Paris by 1470, Kraków by 1473, and Westminster, where William Caxton set up England's first press, by 1476. By 1500 around 270 European towns had seen printers at work, and presses had turned out more than 20 million copies. Ideas could now travel in thousands of identical copies.
From 1469 Cosimo's grandson Lorenzo de' Medici, the Magnificent, led Florence. Taught by the philosopher Marsilio Ficino and the Greek scholar John Argyropoulos, he wrote poetry and backed artists such as Botticelli and the young Michelangelo. On Sunday 26 April 1478, during High Mass in the cathedral, conspirators backed by Pope Sixtus IV attacked the two Medici brothers: Giuliano was stabbed to death, while Lorenzo escaped with a wound to the neck. More than eighty people were executed in reprisal. The Pope and the King of Naples then made war on Florence, and Lorenzo ended it by travelling to Naples in person, where the king held him for several months. Two years after his death in 1492, France invaded Italy.
Around 1500, the popes made Rome the capital of the Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael all worked there or in Florence and Milan. In Milan, for Duke Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo painted the Last Supper in about 1495–98 with experimental tempera on a dry wall, so little of his original paint survives. Work on a new St Peter's Basilica, designed principally by Bramante and later Michelangelo, began on 18 April 1506 and took 120 years; selling indulgences to pay for it helped provoke the Reformation. Michelangelo, who thought of himself as a sculptor and suggested Raphael instead, painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1508–1512. Nearby, Raphael painted the School of Athens for Pope Julius II in 1509–1511.
North of the Alps, the Renaissance took its own shape. In Bruges, Jan van Eyck, court painter to the Duke of Burgundy, used oil paint with new brilliance; the Ghent Altarpiece, designed by his brother Hubert and painted by Jan, was finished by 1432. Later writers called him the inventor of oil painting, an oversimplification. Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg travelled to Venice twice, in 1494–95 and 1505–07, and brought Italian ideas home. Erasmus of Rotterdam, the leading humanist scholar, published the first Greek New Testament to reach the public in 1516, printed by Johann Froben in Basel. In Hungary, King Matthias Corvinus gathered some 3,000 manuscripts in Buda, by contemporary accounts the largest library north of the Alps.
Italy's wealth made it a prize. In 1494 Charles VIII of France invaded to claim Naples, opening the Italian Wars, in which France, Spain and the Holy Roman Empire fought over the peninsula until 1559. The Florentine official Niccolò Machiavelli lost his post when the Medici returned in 1512 and, banished from the city, wrote The Prince, a blunt guide to winning and keeping power. Then, on 6 May 1527, the unpaid and mutinous army of Emperor Charles V, some 14,000 Germans (many of them Lutherans) and 6,000 Spaniards, stormed Rome. Pope Clement VII fled to Castel Sant'Angelo. By one estimate 45,000 civilians were killed, wounded or driven out. It is often seen as the end of the High Renaissance.
By the mid-1500s Renaissance ideas had spread across Europe, from England to Poland, and the printing press had made them permanent. In 1550 the painter and architect Giorgio Vasari published his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, telling the stories of artists such as Leonardo and Michelangelo and describing their age as a rinascita, a 'rebirth'. The Renaissance put the individual and the natural world at the centre of art and learning. It also set the stage for what came next: the Reformation, which used the printing press to split the Church, and the Scientific Revolution, which Copernicus opened in 1543 by putting the Sun at the centre.