Renaissance Flashcards
Who coined the term “Renaissance?” When did the Renaissance occur?
Georgio Vasari, Renaissance means rebirth. It occurred during the 15th and 16th centuries.
What happened during the Renaissance?
Artists and intellectuals thought that their achievements owed nothing to the backwardness of the Middle Ages and instead were linked to the Greek and Roman world. It was a time of contributions to Western civilization, particularly in literature, art, philosophy, history, and politics.
What was individualism?
It was a type of thought that developed in the Renaissance period where people received personal credit for their achievements instead of all the glory going to God.
Where did the Renaissance first take place in?
Italian city-states
What allowed for the spread of cultural trends?
The printing press
The printing press allowed for the creation of what movement in Northern Europe?
The Northern Renaissance
How did the Renaissance lay the foundations for the Protestant movement (synthesis point)?
Italian Renaissance writers allowed for the development of secularism. The Northern Renaissance dealt with religious concerns.
What was the Holy Roman Empire?
A loose collection of territories that had a weak leader called the Holy Roman Emperor that extended from Germany to Austria to parts of Italy. It was ended by the Confederacy of the Rhine established by Napoleon.
What was a description of the political and social life of the city-states in Italy during the Renaissance?
The city-states were relatively independent and were centers of economic vibrancy. The old landowning nobility conflicted with a new class of merchants; both contended with the urban underclass for wealth and power.
Who were the popolo?
The urban underclass in Italian city-states
What was the Ciompi Revolt?
The popolo in Florence staged a brief struggle against the government. The revolt resulted in a short time in which the poor ruled the government.
What were political changes as a result of the Ciompi Revolt?
City-states appointed tyrants, or signor, who used mercenaries called condottieri to keep power
What was the political makeup of the major Italian city-states?
Florence and Venice were republics dominated by a few families, Milan was an autocracy.
Who were the Medicis?
They were the most powerful family in Florence who established their wealth through banking and were hereditary rulers of the city.
What were the dominant city-states in Italy?
Florence, Milan, Venice, the Papal States, and Naples
What were the economies of Italian city-states like?
They were more economically vibrant than the rest of Western Europe. There were many merchants and banking became important.
What were patrons and what did they do?
They were wealthy Italians who insisted on the development of secular art forms.
What was humanism?
Humanism was the study of Greco-Roman works and a program of study involving rhetoric and literature.
Who was the father of humanism?
Francesco Petrarch
What did Petrarch do?
He learned classical Latin and read the texts of Cicero, and he admired him for his Latin prose and accounts of the collapse of the Roman Republic. He was accused of abandoning Christianity, although he did not reject it; he called for the universality of the ideas of the classical age and the ability for their application in the current age.
Who was the most significant and most studied philosopher during the Renaissance? What did he believe?
Plato. Plato thought that ideals like beauty and truth exist beyond the ability of our senses to recognize, and we could train our minds to make use of the ability to reason.
What were works that expressed Platonism?
Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man was famously Platonic. The Florentine Platonic Academy, founded by Cosimo d’Medici, merged Platonism with Christianity to form Neoplatonism. It said that God is everything and humans were born divine but live material lives.
What was civic humanism?
It was the study of Greco-Roman works and literature in order to advance the public good.
What was one of the book that defined the ideal man of the age?
Castiglione’s The Courtier. It defined such a man as one who knew several languages, was familiar with classic literature, and skilled in the arts.
Who was Lorenzo Valla?
He proved that the Donation of Constantine was not written by Constantine, which undermined the authority of the Church. He also pointed out errors in the Bible.
What was the role of women in the Renaissance?
Women learned how to read and write, especially wealthy, secular women. Leonardo Bruni even created an educational program for women, although it was distinctly different from male education.
Who was the most famous female writer?
Christine de Pisan countered the notion that women were inferior to men and incapable of making moral choices.
How did Renaissance reflect the shift toward individualism?
Renaissance artists were regarded as important. They competed fro patronage and prestige. The subjects of art glorified their achievements rather than the spiritual message of Medieval Art. Artists used a more natural style.
What were new techniques that Renaissance artists used?
Renaissance artists used chiaroscuro, the use of contrasts between light and dark to create three dimensions. They also used single-point perspective, where all elements converge to a single point in the distance. They did not use the Medieval techniques of scaling in proportion to the spiritual significance. It often focused on human images in the center of the frame, exhibiting symmetry.
What was the High Renaissance?
It was an era from the end of the 15th century to the 1520s in the Renaissance where there was an immense amount of Renaissance art developed where the center of the Renaissance moved from Florence to Rome as popes sponsored artists.
What was mannerism?
It was Late Renaissance art that showed distorted figures and confusing themes that reflected the growing sense of crisis in the Italian world due to religious and political problems.
Who was Leonardo da Vinci?
He was a Renaissance man, being a military engineer, an architect, a sculptor, a scientist, and an inventor. He was an avid painter, painting the Mona Lisa.
Who was Raphael?
He was a High Renaissance artist who painted The School of Athens, which depicted Plato and Aristotle in a classical structure that uses the single-point perspective characteristic of Renaissance style.
Who was Michelangelo?
He was a skilled artist who created the sculpture David. The Pope Julius II employed Michelangelo to create the Sistine Chapel, the most famous part of which being Final Judgement.
What were questions typical of the Northern Renaissance?
Northern Renaissance writers questioned religion and struggled to deepen Christian beliefs and display good humanist thought. Writers in the Northern Renaissance are generally referred to as Christian Humanists who criticized the Church but merely wanted to reform it.
Who was the most famous northern humanist?
Desiderius Erasmus was the most famous northern humanist. He wrote Adages, which collected proverbs; in Praise of Folly, he criticized problems in the Church; in Handbook of the Christian Knight, he emphasized the idea of inner faith as opposed to the outer forms of worship, such as the partaking of the Sacraments. Erasmus initially supported Luther, but wanted to reform the Church instead of abandoning it.
Who was another famous northern Humanist (English)?
Sir Thomas More. He wrote the work Utopia, which criticized society and sought to depict a civilization in which political and economic injustices were limited by having all property held in common.
Who was a famous Northern Renaissance artist?
Albrecht Durer made powerful woodcuts that helped support Martin Luther.
Where was the most growth in Renaissance culture? Who were some authors and what was this era called?
The place of greatest change during the Northern Renaissance was in England, called the Elizabethan Renaissance. It was a time when Geoffrey Chaucer wrote Canterbury Tales and William Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and King Lear.
Who created the printing press?
Johannes Gutenberg
Why was the printing press so important?
There was significant increase in literacy in the sixteenth century as a result of the printing press. It also allowed the spread of information to disseminate quickly and provided the basis for the Reformation’s spread.
