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.