Renaissance
Renaissance,the great flowering of art, architecture, politics, and the study of literature, usually seen as the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern world, which came about under the influence of Greek and Roman models. It began in Italy in the late 14th cent., culminated in the High Renaissance in the early 16th cent. (the period of Michelangelo and Machiavelli ), and spread to the rest of Europe in the 15th cent. and afterwards. Its emphasis was humanist: that is, on regarding the human figure and reason without a necessary relating of it to the superhuman; but much of its energy also came from the Neoplatonic tradition in writers such as Pico della Mirandola . The word Renaissance has been applied in the 20th cent. to earlier periods which manifested a new interest in and study of the classics, such as the 12th cent. and the period of Charlemagne. But the Italian Renaissance is still seen as a watershed in the...
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