Renaissance

Question 1

Who coined the term “Renaissance?” When did the Renaissance occur?

Answer 1

Georgio Vasari, Renaissance means rebirth. It occurred during the 15th and 16th centuries.

Question 2

What happened during the Renaissance?

Answer 2

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.

Question 3

What was individualism?

Answer 3

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.

Question 4

Where did the Renaissance first take place in?

Answer 4

Italian city-states

Question 5

What allowed for the spread of cultural trends?

Answer 5

The printing press

Question 6

The printing press allowed for the creation of what movement in Northern Europe?

Answer 6

The Northern Renaissance

Question 7

How did the Renaissance lay the foundations for the Protestant movement (synthesis point)?

Answer 7

Italian Renaissance writers allowed for the development of secularism. The Northern Renaissance dealt with religious concerns.

Question 8

What was the Holy Roman Empire?

Answer 8

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.

Question 9

What was a description of the political and social life of the city-states in Italy during the Renaissance?

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

Who were the popolo?

Answer 10

The urban underclass in Italian city-states

Question 11

What was the Ciompi Revolt?

Answer 11

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.

Question 12

What were political changes as a result of the Ciompi Revolt?

Answer 12

City-states appointed tyrants, or signor, who used mercenaries called condottieri to keep power

Question 13

What was the political makeup of the major Italian city-states?

Answer 13

Florence and Venice were republics dominated by a few families, Milan was an autocracy.

Question 14

Who were the Medicis?

Answer 14

They were the most powerful family in Florence who established their wealth through banking and were hereditary rulers of the city.

Question 15

What were the dominant city-states in Italy?

Answer 15

Florence, Milan, Venice, the Papal States, and Naples

Question 16

What were the economies of Italian city-states like?

Answer 16

They were more economically vibrant than the rest of Western Europe. There were many merchants and banking became important.

Question 17

What were patrons and what did they do?

Answer 17

They were wealthy Italians who insisted on the development of secular art forms.

Question 18

What was humanism?

Answer 18

Humanism was the study of Greco-Roman works and a program of study involving rhetoric and literature.

Question 19

Who was the father of humanism?

Answer 19

Francesco Petrarch

Question 20

What did Petrarch do?

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

Who was the most significant and most studied philosopher during the Renaissance? What did he believe?

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

What were works that expressed Platonism?

Answer 22

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.

Question 23

What was civic humanism?

Answer 23

It was the study of Greco-Roman works and literature in order to advance the public good.

Question 24

What was one of the book that defined the ideal man of the age?

Answer 24

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.

Question 25

Who was Lorenzo Valla?

Answer 25

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.

Question 26

What was the role of women in the Renaissance?

Answer 26

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.

Question 27

Who was the most famous female writer?

Answer 27

Christine de Pisan countered the notion that women were inferior to men and incapable of making moral choices.

Question 28

How did Renaissance reflect the shift toward individualism?

Answer 28

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.

Question 29

What were new techniques that Renaissance artists used?

Answer 29

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.

Question 30

What was the High Renaissance?

Answer 30

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.

Question 31

What was mannerism?

Answer 31

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.

Question 32

Who was Leonardo da Vinci?

Answer 32

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.

Question 33

Who was Raphael?

Answer 33

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.

Question 34

Who was Michelangelo?

Answer 34

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.

Question 35

What were questions typical of the Northern Renaissance?

Answer 35

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.

Question 36

Who was the most famous northern humanist?

Answer 36

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.

Question 37

Who was another famous northern Humanist (English)?

Answer 37

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.

Question 38

Who was a famous Northern Renaissance artist?

Answer 38

Albrecht Durer made powerful woodcuts that helped support Martin Luther.

Question 39

Where was the most growth in Renaissance culture? Who were some authors and what was this era called?

Answer 39

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.

Question 40

Who created the printing press?

Answer 40

Johannes Gutenberg

Question 41

Why was the printing press so important?

Answer 41

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.