Renaissance (“rebirth”) is the name given to a complex current of thought that worked deep changes in Europe from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. It began in Italy. By rediscovering and imitating their ancient Greco-Roman forebears, Italians hoped they could bring about the rebirth of their glorious past. It was an unrealistic idea, which came to nothing in political terms. Instead of becoming a new Roman empire, Italy at the end of the Renaissance consisted of the same pack of warring city-states that had been at each other’s throats all through the Middle Ages.

However, the revival of Greek and Roman culture provided a powerful model for new values, first in Italy and then the rest of Europe. In the words of a famous nineteenth-century historian, the Renaissance involved “the discovery of the world and of man.” This was the age of Columbus and Magellan, Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, and Shakespeare. Medieval society was stable, conservative, authoritarian, and oriented toward God. The Renaissance laid the groundwork for the dynamic Western world we know today, a world in which human beings and nature, rather than God, have become the measure in philosophy, science, and art.

Renaissance artists strove to make their work more relevant to people’s needs and desires. They began to reinterpret the world around them — the architect’s world of space and stone, the painter’s world of images, the musician’s world of sound — in new ways to meet these ambitions.