This term as used and heard It refers to an intellectual and artistic movement in which rebirth is about to return to the values of the classical world with its rules and its of perfection and beauty standards. The classical world is clearly to greek and roman ancient, with theoretical treatises, sculptures, buildings and painted vases. The concept of rebirth began to be used in the Italian cultural environments in which it was believed that art and literature were flourishing again after ancient centuries of oblivion.
The list of artists of the Renaissance would be very long, but a summary it can be groped. Filippo Brunelleschi in architecture, in sculpture Donatello and Masaccio in painting they are definitely among the first and most important Renaissance artists. The other fundamental triad for this movement in its mature phase It consists of Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci.
In architecture, the peak was reached by Bramante. Abroad, they also distinguished Albrecht Durer and Jan Van Scorel. The Renaissance began in the fifteenth century and he reached its peak in the sixteenth century and declines thereafter towards the Mannerism and the Baroque.
The climax was reached between 1500 and 1520, a period that is called the High Renaissance. The cradle of the Renaissance is Italy and especially Florence and Rome, although in the sixteenth century Rome and Venice became equally significant artistic centers, without forgetting Ferrara, Urbino, Milan and Mantua. But in 1500 the ideals of the Renaissance also began to spread in the rest of Europe and especially in Germany, Holland, France and England.
The Renaissance developed in a period of profound change. Among the fifteenth century and sixteenth centuries, he discovered America, opening the way of colonization, there was the Protestant Reformation sparked by Martin Luther, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire, She gave birth to the national monarchies in France, Spain and England. While Italy, divided into so many small states and courts, often at war with each other, he lived a moment of great artistic ferment and culture, marked by freedom and individualism by man in politics and life in general.