Key figures of the Renaissance

What the Renaissance was, and when

Renaissance means rebirth. The Italian painter and writer Giorgio Vasari used the word rinascita in 1550 for the revival of art after what he saw as centuries of decline, and the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt made “the Renaissance” a period name in his book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Most historians date it from about 1350 to about 1600: it starts in Florence and the other Italian city-states, reaches the rest of Europe in the late 1400s and 1500s, and fades into the Reformation, the wars of religion and the Scientific Revolution.

Five things defined it:

• Humanism: scholars such as Petrarch (1304 to 1374) hunted for lost Latin manuscripts and studied grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy, the studia humanitatis. After 1453, Greek scholars from Constantinople brought more Greek texts west.
• New ways of seeing: Brunelleschi worked out linear perspective in Florence in the early 1400s and Alberti wrote the rules down in On Painting (1435).
• Money and patronage: bankers such as the Medici, dukes, popes and guilds paid for buildings, paintings and scholars, partly as display of power.
• Printing: after about 1450, movable type made books cheaper and texts identical from copy to copy.
• Conflict: the era also saw the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion of Jews from Spain, the start of the Atlantic slave trade, the Reformation and decades of religious war.

Forerunner and enabler: Dante and Gutenberg

Dante Alighieri (1265 to 1321) is medieval in his beliefs but sits at the start of most Renaissance courses. Exiled from Florence in 1302 under threat of death, he wrote the Divine Comedy (about 1308 to 1320) in the Tuscan Italian people spoke rather than in Latin, which helped make Tuscan the basis of modern Italian. His guide through Hell and Purgatory is the Roman poet Virgil, a sign of the respect for the ancients that humanists would build on. Boccaccio wrote the first life of Dante and gave public lectures on the poem in Florence in 1373.

Johannes Gutenberg (about 1400 to 1468) was a goldsmith in Mainz who developed printing with movable metal type around 1450: a hand mould for casting letters, an oil-based ink and a press. His 42-line Latin Bible was finished by about 1455; in a letter of that year the future Pope Pius II said he had seen pages at Frankfurt and could read them without glasses. Gutenberg lost his workshop in a 1455 lawsuit with his financier Johann Fust, and almost everything we know about him comes from legal and financial records. By 1500 printers were working in more than two hundred European towns.

The Italian artists: Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519) was born near Vinci, the son of a notary, and trained in Andrea del Verrocchio's workshop in Florence. Seeking work in Milan around 1482, he wrote to Duke Ludovico Sforza listing bridges, siege engines and cannon first and painting only near the end. He painted the Last Supper in Milan (about 1495 to 1498) and began the Mona Lisa around 1503, and kept notebooks in mirror writing on anatomy, water, flight and machines; more than seven thousand pages survive. He finished few paintings, and he died in France in 1519 as a guest of King Francis I.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475 to 1564) thought of himself as a sculptor first. He carved the Pietà in St Peter's (1498 to 1499), his only signed work, and the marble David for Florence (1501 to 1504). Pope Julius II then had him paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling (1508 to 1512), and he wrote a comic sonnet complaining about his bent neck and the paint dripping on his face, ending that he was no painter. He painted the Last Judgement on the chapel's altar wall (1536 to 1541), became chief architect of St Peter's in 1546 and worked until his death at 88.

Raphael (1483 to 1520), from Urbino, was the youngest of the three and the most sociable. He painted the School of Athens (1509 to 1511) in the Vatican, a gathering of ancient philosophers with Plato and Aristotle at the centre. He ran a large workshop, became architect of St Peter's, and around 1519 wrote, with his friend Baldassare Castiglione, a letter urging Pope Leo X to stop builders burning ancient Roman ruins for lime. He died in Rome on 6 April 1520, aged 37.

For how the two great rivals compare, see Leonardo vs Michelangelo.

Power, politics and the new sky: Machiavelli, Isabella, Copernicus and Catherine de' Medici

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 to 1527) served the Florentine Republic as a senior official and diplomat from 1498 to 1512 and watched Cesare Borgia at work up close. When the Medici returned to power in 1512 he was dismissed, and in 1513 he was imprisoned and tortured on suspicion of conspiracy. Released, he wrote The Prince (published 1532), which says a ruler who cannot be both loved and feared should choose to be feared but must avoid being hated, and the longer Discourses on Livy, which prefers republics. Read both before deciding what “Machiavellian” means.

Isabella I of Castile (1451 to 1504) became queen of Castile in 1474 and, with her husband Ferdinand of Aragon, joined the crowns that became Spain. In 1492 alone she saw the conquest of Granada, signed the order expelling Jews who would not convert, and agreed to back Columbus's voyage; that year Antonio de Nebrija dedicated to her the first grammar of the Castilian language. She learned Latin as an adult and had her daughters educated in the humanities. She also sponsored the Spanish Inquisition from 1478, so her reign shows both faces of the age.

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 to 1543) studied in Kraków, Bologna and Padua and spent his working life as a cathedral canon at Frombork on the Baltic. He circulated a short sketch of a sun-centred system around 1514 but held back the full book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, until 1543, the year he died. It is a Renaissance work in method: he cites ancient Greeks who had imagined a moving Earth. See Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo for what came next.

Catherine de' Medici (1519 to 1589), a great-granddaughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, married the future Henri II of France in 1533 and became the mother of three kings. As regent and queen mother she tried limited toleration for Protestants (the Edict of January 1562) and paid for buildings such as the Tuileries palace. Her part in the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572 is still argued over: historians disagree on whether she planned only the killing of a few Protestant leaders or expected the slaughter that followed.

The Renaissance reaches England: Shakespeare

William Shakespeare (1564 to 1616) never went to university, but he grew up on a grammar school diet of Latin authors such as Ovid, and he borrowed from translations of the classics. Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra follow Thomas North's 1579 English version of Plutarch's Lives closely. He wrote about 39 plays and 154 sonnets, was a sharer in the company that built the Globe in 1599, and retired to Stratford. His colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell collected 36 of his plays in the First Folio of 1623. For the court he wrote for, see key figures of Tudor England.

Renaissance timeline

Big themes and debates about the Renaissance

• Was it really a rebirth? The label came from people who wanted to look new. Medieval historians point to earlier revivals, such as the “twelfth-century renaissance” described by Charles Homer Haskins in 1927, and to the universities, cathedrals and Arabic translations the Renaissance built on.
• Who paid, and why? Most masterpieces were commissions with contracts that set subjects, sizes and even the amount of costly blue pigment. Ask what each patron wanted the work to say.
• Science and art. Leonardo's anatomy and Copernicus's astronomy grew from the same habit of checking ancient authorities against observation, but Leonardo's notebooks were not published and had little influence at the time.
• Women in the Renaissance. Joan Kelly's 1977 essay asked “Did women have a Renaissance?” and answered mostly no. Isabella and Catherine held real power; most women did not, and few were trained as artists.
• The darker record. The same rulers who paid for art ran the Inquisition, expelled minorities and began colonising the Americas. A fair account keeps both in view.

Primary sources to read

• Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550, revised 1568): the lives of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. Lively, partisan, sometimes wrong.
• Leonardo's notebooks, including the draft letter to Ludovico Sforza (about 1482). Many pages are digitised by the British Library and the Royal Collection.
• Machiavelli, The Prince, chapters 15 to 18 and 25, and the letter to Vettori of 10 December 1513.
• Michelangelo's sonnet to Giovanni da Pistoia on painting the Sistine ceiling (about 1509 to 1510).
• Copernicus, the dedication of On the Revolutions to Pope Paul III (1543).
• Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486): the humanist case for human potential.
• Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1528): how a Renaissance gentleman and lady were supposed to behave.
• Dante, Inferno, Canto 1, and Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2, side by side with North's Plutarch.

How to study the Renaissance: projects

• Patron and artist role play. One student writes a commission contract for a painting (subject, size, deadline, price, materials); another must answer it as the artist. Compare with what is known of real contracts.
• Read The Prince as advice and as satire. Split the class: one half argues Machiavelli meant every word, the other uses the Discourses to argue he was a republican writing for survival.
• Perspective lab. Draw a room with one vanishing point, then find the vanishing point in the School of Athens or the Last Supper.
• Print versus manuscript. Copy one page by hand and time it, then estimate how long a scribe would need for a Bible of roughly 1,280 pages like Gutenberg's.
• Interview an artist. Use the historical figure interview project and the questions to ask Leonardo da Vinci. You can practise by voice with Leonardo on Yuga, an AI recreation built from his notebooks and the record. It is not the man and can make mistakes, so cite the notebooks and Vasari, not the app.