15 challenging questions on the Renaissance — Leonardo, Michelangelo, the Medici, Galileo, Gutenberg and the rebirth of European culture.
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The Renaissance was a sweeping cultural awakening that transformed Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries, beginning in the city-states of northern Italy and radiating outward across the continent. Born from a renewed fascination with classical antiquity, it celebrated the dignity of the individual, the precision of science and the beauty of the natural world. Florence stood at its heart, where banker-princes like the Medici poured their fortune into chapels, libraries and workshops. From this single city emerged Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli and Brunelleschi, whose work still defines our idea of artistic genius.
The era's achievements feel almost impossible in their scale. Brunelleschi's great dome crowned Florence Cathedral in 1436. Michelangelo's David rose from a single block of marble between 1501 and 1504. Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Last Supper redefined what painting could be. In Rome, Raphael filled the Vatican with the philosophers of the School of Athens, while in Mainz, 's movable-type press, perfected around , set knowledge free to travel faster than its censors. By the time published his heliocentric theory in and turned his telescope toward Jupiter in , the medieval cosmos had cracked open for good.
The Renaissance was also a story of upheaval — the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Sack of Rome in 1527, the Reformation that split Christendom. Yet through plague, war and exile, the movement gave the Western world its language of perspective, anatomy, humanism and reason. To explore it is to wander through workshops in Venice, courts in Urbino and printing houses in Antwerp — and to glimpse the moment when the modern mind began to imagine itself.