What Was the Renaissance? Where, When and Why It Mattered

The Renaissance was a European cultural movement — and, by extension, a period — marked by the rediscovery and revival of the literary, philosophical and artistic achievements of classical antiquity. Wikipedia describes it as first centred in the Republic of Florence, spreading to the rest of Italy and later throughout Europe. Almost everything else about it, from its dates to its name to whether it was really new, is argued over, and that argument is worth understanding before memorising any list of painters.

Three answers to "when"

Wikipedia gives two standard definitions: the 15th and 16th centuries, or more broadly the 14th century to the 17th. One source it cites dates the period 1350 to 1620. In Italy the end is conventionally placed at the waning of humanism, with one of three markers: the Reformation (1517), the Sack of Rome (1527) or the Counter-Reformation (1545).

Those choices give very different lengths:

The broadest version is twice as long as the narrowest. Some writers even fix a precise start: Wikipedia mentions 1401, when Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi competed to make the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery (Ghiberti won). Others trace first signs to the late thirteenth century, in the writings of Dante (1265–1321) and the paintings of Giotto (1267–1337). Why historians draw these lines differently is the subject of periodisation in history.

Why Florence, and why then

Wikipedia is frank that it "remains much debated" why the movement began in Italy and when it did. The candidate explanations it lists are:

• Patronage. The Medici, a banking family and later a ducal house, sponsored artists; Lorenzo de' Medici (1449–1492) encouraged commissions from Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli and Michelangelo. Wikipedia adds that the Renaissance was under way before the Medici achieved dominance, so patronage cannot be the whole story.
• City-states and commerce. Italy was divided among Naples, Florence, Rome, Milan, Genoa, Venice and smaller states, and fifteenth-century Italy was one of the most urbanised parts of Europe. Florence was a textile capital and Venice a gateway to Eastern trade, which paid for large commissions.
• Plague. Florence's population was nearly halved in 1348. One theory holds that familiarity with death turned thinkers toward earthly life; another, that it prompted a wave of piety and religious art. Wikipedia notes the Black Death hit all of Europe, so it does not explain why Italy specifically. More on the pandemic is in the Black Death explained.
• Greek scholars and texts. Wikipedia dates the return of Greek literary study in the West to Coluccio Salutati's 1396 invitation to the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras to teach Greek in Florence, and describes a further wave of émigré scholars after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. That inheritance is traced in Byzantium's thousand years.

Its own conclusion is that the Italian emergence was most likely the result of a complex interaction of these factors.

Latin first, then Greek

Wikipedia separates Renaissance humanism into two phases. In a fourteenth-century Latin phase, Petrarch, Salutati, Niccolò de' Niccoli and Poggio Bracciolini searched Europe's libraries for works by Cicero, Lucretius, Livy and Seneca; by the early fifteenth century most surviving Latin literature had been recovered. A Greek phase followed, bringing back Homer, the dramatists, Demosthenes and Thucydides — literary and historical works that, Wikipedia says, had been studied in the Middle Ages only by Byzantine scholars.

That is a different emphasis from earlier medieval revivals. Greek and Arabic works of science and philosophy had already reached Latin Europe through translation centres such as the Toledo School of Translators between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries — a transmission Wikipedia calls one of the greatest in history. The scholars behind those texts are covered in scholars of the Islamic Golden Age.