The word renaissance was first used in the sixteenth century to refer to a historical moment. At that time it meant the rebirth of classical poetry, prose, and art of that period alone. Only later did historians borrow the word to refer to earlier rebirths. One of the first persons to herald the fifteenth-century Renaissance was the Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) in his Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors (1550). Vasari argued that Greco-Roman art declined after the dissolution of the Roman Empire, to be followed by a long period of barbarity. Only in the past generations had Italian artists begun to restore the perfection of the arts, according to Vasari, a development he called rinascita, the Italian for “rebirth.” It was the French equivalent—renaissance—that stuck.

Referring initially to a rebirth in the arts and literature, the word renaissance came to mean a new consciousness of individuality and genius. Prizing the ancient world, Renaissance humanists were convinced that they lived in a new age that recalled that lost glory. They called the period between their age and the ancient world “the Middle Age.” (That’s why today we call it the Middle Ages.) They reveled in their human potential and their individuality.

The Renaissance was an important movement in Italy, France, Spain, the Low Countries, and central Europe. The word itself acquired widespread recognition with the 1860 publication of Jakob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. A historian at the University of Basel, Burckhardt considered the Renaissance a watershed in Western civilization. For him, the Renaissance ushered in a spirit of modernity, freeing the individual from the domination of society and creative impulses from the repression of the church; the Renaissance represented the beginning of secular society and the preeminence of individual creative geniuses.

Although very influential, Burckhardt’s ideas have also been strongly challenged by many recent scholars. Some point out the various continuities between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, others argue that the Renaissance was not a secular but a profoundly religious age, and still others see the Renaissance as only the beginning of a long period of transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. The consensus among scholars today is that the Renaissance represents a distinct cultural period lasting from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, centered on the revival of classical learning. Historians disagree about its significance, but they generally understand it to represent some of the complex changes that characterized the passing from medieval society to the modern age.