What Was the Renaissance?

What Was the Renaissance?
 
In early January 1506, a farmer was working in his vineyard on a hillside near the city of Rome. (A vineyard is an area of land where grapes for winemaking are grown.) Suddenly, he felt something hard in the ground. It wasn’t a rock or a boulder but something much, much bigger.

He dug deeper and deeper. What was there? A marble statue that was more than eight feet tall. The farmer did not know it, but the statue had been made about fifteen hundred years earlier during the period in history known as classical antiquity.

The statue was of a bearded man and his two sons struggling against giant sea serpents. Their faces showed terror, agony, desperation.

Their bodies twisted and turned attempting to get free. Everything looked real. It was possible to imagine actual muscles and bones underneath the marble skin.

A famous sculptor heard about the farmer’s discovery and went to see it. His name was Michelangelo. He wanted his own statues to look as lifelike as the one found at the vineyard. So did many other artists at the time.

In fact, all over Europe, there was renewed interest in ancient European cultures. It brought forth an explosion of creativity and new ideas—not only in art but in science, math, astronomy, and architecture. This period lasted from about 1400 to 1600. It became known as the Renaissance. In French that means “rebirth.”

Yet the Renaissance didn’t start in France. It started in Italy. The farmer’s accidental discovery of an eight-foot-tall sculpture helps explain the reason why.

In ancient times, Rome was the center of a vast empire that for a time included Greece, the Middle East, northern Africa, and parts of Europe.

Even after the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 CE, reminders of its greatness were everywhere in the city of Rome. Sometimes they were still in plain sight, like the giant arena known as the Colosseum, and the Pantheon, a temple to the Roman gods. Sometimes they lay buried right under people’s feet. This is why a farmer working on his land as he did every day could stumble upon something extraordinary.

Chapter 1
A New Way of Thinking
 
During the Renaissance, there arose a new way to look at life and its meaning. It was called humanism. Its followers believed that people were basically good and could do great things.

Followers of humanism got many of their ideas from studying the written works of ancient Greek philosophers. (A philosopher is someone who seeks wisdom and the meaning of life.) The philosophers from the classical past, ancient Greece and Rome from about 800 BCE to 400 CE, believed people should strive to live a happy life and that they could judge for themselves what was right and wrong.

Until the dawn of the Renaissance around 1400, works by these philosophers had largely been forgotten. No one was reading them anymore. Still, scholars knew of their existence and so they began searching for them. Sometimes they found copies on the dusty shelves of old libraries. Sometimes travelers brought back copies from Constantinople. (Constantinople was the name for the city now known as Istanbul in Turkey.) It had remained a center of learning throughout the Middle Ages.
 
Art Before the Renaissance

The Middle Ages was a period that lasted from about 400 to 1400. During that time, the Catholic Church held tremendous power over almost everyone living in Western Europe. Paintings were meant to send a religious message. Seeing the figure of Jesus on the cross, for example, reminded Christians of their faith.

The names of artists from the Middle Ages are rarely known to us. They didn’t sign their work because they weren’t considered important enough to do so. They were merely craftsmen.

But during the Renaissance, artists were appreciated for their creativity. Some, like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, were recognized as geniuses.
 
Who were some of the most famous Greek philosophers?

One was Socrates (c. 469–­399 BCE). He lived in Athens, the capital of ancient Greece. He could usually be found in the marketplace, talking to people. He didn’t give lectures. He liked to ask questions that made people think about truth, bravery, and justice. Socrates never wrote down anything. What is known about him comes from others. In 399 BCE, Socrates was sentenced to death for challenging beliefs about the Roman gods. Surrounded by friends, he was forced to drink a cup of poison called hemlock.

Plato (c. 427–­347 BCE) was one of Socrates’s students. Plato started a school that met outdoors in Athens. He had many ideas about what made good government. His most famous work,  Republic, is still taught in college classes today.

Aristotle (384–­322 BCE) was a student of Plato’s. He wrote that happiness was the meaning and purpose of life. He thought that doing good deeds made people happy. He is known as the first scientist. The son of a doctor, Aristotle was very interested in anatomy (studying the human body).

As for the humanists, Francesco Petrarca (1304–­1374) was the first. In English he is called Petrarch. He was born in Arezzo, Italy, and encouraged scholars to read the works of ancient Greek philosophers. His father was a lawyer and wanted Petrarch to become one, too. Instead, he wrote poetry. Petrarch looked for and found many classical works, including volumes of letters written by a Roman philosopher named Cicero. Petrarch was such an admirer  of Cicero’s that he wrote letters to him as if they were friends. (By then, Cicero had been dead for way more than a thousand years.)

Leon Battista Alberti (1404–­1472) was another humanist from northern Italy. He became famous as an author, artist, and architect. (He also liked inventing secret codes!) Alberti wanted the designs of new buildings to have columns, arches, and domes so they’d resemble ones from antiquity. His ideas influenced many of the artists and architects of the Renaissance.

The humanist Thomas More (1478–­1535) was from London, England. He wrote a famous novel called Utopia about an imaginary island. No one there owned private property; all the food was shared. According to More, Utopia was the ideal place to live. In fact, today, the word utopia means “an earthly paradise.”

For a time, Thomas More was the most important and valued adviser to King Henry VIII. More also remained a faithful Catholic throughout his life. This eventually caused a terrible rift between himself and the king. Henry had decided that England would break away from the Catholic Church. Why? The pope (the head of the Church) would not allow the king to get a divorce.

So Henry started his own church—­the Church of England—­with himself as head of it. Thomas More, however, would not go along with the king. For angering the king, he paid a heavy price. The king had Thomas More beheaded in 1535.

From its beginnings in Italy, humanism spread quickly across Western Europe. Why did the movement catch on so rapidly? It was because of one invention: the printing press.

Chapter 2
The Miracle of Printing
 
It’s hard to exaggerate the importance of the invention of the printing press. Beginning in the Renaissance, information could reach masses of people quickly. Like the internet in the late ­twentieth century, the printing press was a total game changer.

In the Middle Ages, there hadn’t been many books. Every single one had to be copied out by hand. Word for word, sentence by sentence, page by page. Most books were about religion. It might take as long as a year for a scribe (the person doing the writing) to copy the entire Bible.

Because of how few books there were, they were very expensive. Only the rich and powerful could afford to own them. A king or emperor might pay to have a book made to order. It would usually include a calendar of the months and prayers for different times of the day. The buyer would also say how many illustrations there had to be and whether they’d be in black and white or in color, which was much more expensive. Called illuminated manuscripts, these books are among the most treasured artworks from the Middle Ages.

Not much is known about the man who, around 1440, developed a machine for printing books. His name was Johannes Gutenberg and he lived in Mainz, Germany. He was a craftsman who made beautiful objects—­goblets, candlesticks, and plates—­from gold.

Why did Gutenberg want to make a printing press? Did he love to read? Did he want to own books himself  ? Did he see a chance to earn a lot of money?

No one knows.

Gutenberg was not the first to develop a way to print books. However, his machine was a big improvement over anything that had come before.

Gutenberg’s new printing press made use of what’s called movable type—­tiny blocks of metal, each with a raised letter on top. The blocks could be arranged in any way and used over and over again.

Words were made by putting the letter blocks in the proper order. A whole page of type would be fitted into a frame, laid on a platen (a flat piece of wood), and inked all over. Then a piece of paper was placed on the inked surface and another platen pressed down on it. The result was a single printed page.

Soon Gutenberg’s press was producing three hundred pages a day. He printed so many copies of the Bible that it no longer cost all that much to buy one. Today, fewer than forty printed editions of the original Gutenberg Bibles still exist. Each is worth millions of dollars.

Just fifty years after the invention of the printing press, there were twenty million books in Europe! There were printing presses in all the big cities. Bookstores too. The availability of inexpensive books meant that many more people learned to read and hear about new ideas, including those of the Renaissance.