Download The Renaissance

Agenda
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Homework: collect, distribute
Ishmael questions/test/jeopardy
Video: Michael Wood on the Renaissance.
Video: The Machine That Made Us –
Gutenberg’s Printing Press -https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=O6KmzuULPmQ
•  Finish last lecture: new national monarchies.
•  Essay on Wednesday.
How to re-establish order and sanity
in the terrible 14th century?
1.  The National Monarchies Arise
2.  Reform the Catholic Church
(Western Christianity).
The Cure –
the National Monarchies
•  With the slow decline of the Papacy and
Western Christianity during the 14th
century, monarchs projected power.
•  Think of Henry 4th of the Holy Roman
Empire; of Philip 4th of France
handpicking his own Pope; of Henry 2nd
of England quarreling with Archbishop
Thomas Becket.
•  Feudalism = decentralization; National
Monarchies = centralization
•  The new National Monarchs meant
order in a time of disorder. They also
meant that the balance between the
Church and State in the West was
shifting toward the State.
The Powers of Monarchs Grew
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The rise of the new National Monarchies occurred over 400 years, starting at
about 1000 c.e.
Monarchs consolidated their holdings (lands) by many means: marriages, wars,
and treaties. Over 400 years, these consolidations of kingdoms led to ‘super
kingdoms’ with great resources (land, money, artisans)
We see the change reflected in new terms for those who rule and those that are
ruled: Kings became monarchs; subjects were soon to become citizens.
To rule effectively, the kings needed better administration. They created
better tax systems, larger bureaucracies, bigger armies – all because of increased
revenues. The bureaucrats = bailiffs, sheriffs.
When bankruptcy threatened, monarchs now had new sources of wealth – like
Jacob Fugger and Jacques Coeur. Monarchs fostered ties with the rising
merchant middle class in the towns. In return, the new monarchs ennobled
these merchants – and angered the older nobility.
Fugger and Coeur were bourgeois merchants – the first bankers of Europe.
France Centralizes
and Leads the way
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By 1285, Philip IV of France, envious of the
Pope’s authority to tax and try Catholics in
France, arrest Pope Boniface VIII.
Philip’s complaints: the church did not pay
enough taxes to his royal courts; the Church
claimed immunity from royal laws, it insisted
on filling church positions with the enemies of
Philip.
Philip roughs up Pope Boniface, hastens his
death, and then moves papacy to Avignon in
France and handpicks the Pope’s successor.
So much for Papal Supremacy and
Infallibility…
Philip the 4th was a sign of things
to come – the new national
monarch.
Philip IV of France,
looking very imperial.
Philip 4th of France
(left, seated)
receives the homage of
Edward 1st of England.
Other States Followed suit:
Spain is born
•  By 1492,Ferdinand
and Isabelle in Spain
created one of these
‘superkingdoms’:
Spain.
•  The kingdoms of
Castille and Aragon
are linked through
royal marriage.
•  Spain in the New
World, in Italy
The Consequences
Never again did the popes in the late Middle
Ages have the power that the early medieval
popes had.
By the 13th century, the French monarchy
was the best governed and wealthiest in
Europe.
A sign of things to come…
Important Royal Houses or
Dynasties of Europe
As smaller kingdoms were
consolidated into larger
kingdoms, a few royal families
controlled Europe
•  Hapsburgs à Austria and
Spain
•  Plantagenet and Tudor à
England
•  Bourbon and Valois à France
The odd man out:
The Holy Roman Empire
•  An elected king ruled over
240 principalities and
duchies.
•  The Emperor had to concede
power to others in order to
remain king. No centralized
power existed.
•  And this decentralization of
power explains the late
unification of Germany (in
1870) and Italy.
Italy is the exception:
The City-States Were Divided
•  Italy was not unified: it had three parts:
•  The Papal states stood apart, ruled by the
Pope.
•  The northern City-States were
independent and powerful: falling
between the Holy Roman Empire and the
Papal States, they gained their
independence.
–  The City-States were of two kinds:
Republics and Despotisms ruled by a
powerful family.
•  The Kingdom of Naples to the south was
poor.
Let’s Sum It Up
1300-1466
1. 
After 300 years of growth, expansion, and the creation of a
stable feudal order, Medieval Europe went on the skids by
1300.
2.  Man-made and natural causes led to the death of half of the
population in the West in less than 100 years. The Black
Plague (1348) killed most, but famine and warfare also were
costly – the most destructive war being the Hundred
Years War between France and England.
3.  The effects of this population decline were many, The key
one is this – the medieval order based on manorialism and
feudalism began to decline.
4.  A new order or spirit was about to appear – with new
political ideas, new cultural ideals, and new art and
literature. It’s called the Renaissance.
Italy:
Birthplace of the Renaissance
C.E. 1300-1640
World Map
Definitions of the Term
Renaissance
•  The Renaissance was a rebirth of Greco-Roman
learning that led Renaissance men and women to
redefine their place in the world.
•  About 1300 to 1640.
•  The Renaissance was also a set of transformative ideas
that marked a break with Medieval Europe
(500-1300).
•  Four of these ‘transformative ideas’ were –
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Individualism
Realism
Secularism
Activism
Other Renaissance Values that were
NEW
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1. 
2. 
3. 
4. 
Individualism
Activism
Realism
Secularism or
Worldliness
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In the Renaissance, elite society began
to drift from communal values (where
anonymity is a virtue) to the values of
the individual (where Fame and
Celebrity are valued). One sign of this:
the birth of the “genius”.
Activism: it was not enough to isolate
oneself in a monastery and to pray,
untempted by ambition and desire.
One SHOULD actively seek to change
This-World.
How to do this? Through Realism in
Art – a new concern for seeing ThisWorld As It Is.
Secularism = a concern with ThisWorld, not the next; secularism means
to be free from religious rule and
teachings.
The Two Historical Periods:
Medieval v. Renaissance
The Medieval World
500-1500
The Renaissance World
1300-1640
•  Reliance on the bible and
the Early Christian
Fathers as interpreted by
the local priest.
•  Perfecting the Christian
community through selflessness, obedience,
tradition.
•  A focus on The-OtherWorld: on god and the
hearafter.
•  A revival of Roman and
Greek antiquity – their
philosophies, literature,
political thought,
architecture….
•  Perfecting the Individual
rather than the
community.
•  A focus on This-World:
on secularism and living
in the world.
Humanism
A Key Concept of the Renaissance
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To understand the Renaissance, one must understand Humanism.
Humanism was a new view of man’s place in the world.
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By 1330, humanism was a 1.) teaching method and a 2.) program that
focused on remaking our understanding of the world through a study of the
Roman and Greek past. It was opposed to Scholasticism.
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A Rejection: Humanism actively rejected a blind obedience to medieval
values, such as theology and the other world. It saw the Gothic as barbaric;
it embraced change.
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A Recovery: Humanists believed in going directly to the primary sources
instead of just accepting what people said about the Greco-Roman past. The
past they found in the Republican Roman past was “of the human” – about
eloquence, the world, trade, the arts. THIS-world rather than the OTHERworld.
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Moving from the narrow, abstract theology of Medieval Europe,
Humanism sought to create a broad, general education instead. It
concentrated on the traditional liberal arts: rhetoric, grammar, philosophy,
ethics, poetry, and history – not just theology and the afterlife.
Renaissance Education and
Philosophy
•  The Renaissance witnessed a great
push to find, recover, and clarify
what the classical past was. For
humanists, Republican Rome
stressed activity and engagement in
life, not monastic withdrawal.
•  Humanists stressed individual selfdevelopment, action rather than
pious passivity and retreat, a life in
which reason and will would be
used to improve this world, not the
next.
Petrarch, Trailblazer
Petrarch – the Essential Humanist
(1304-1374)
Petrarch of Florence
•  Petrarch, a Florentine, embodied the New
Spirit of humanism. He was a poet, scholar,
and book-collector -- the father of humanism.
•  To Petrarch the medieval world was small and
cramped – a suffocating world in need of
fresh air. Instead of a focus on the Bible and
the papacy, he chose to focus on nature and
reason.
•  He used the humanist method: research,
comparing of texts for accuracy, dating and
quoting precisely. The Roman orator Cicero
was Petrarch’s spiritual father.
•  But it took more than a love of the GrecoRoman past to bring about the Renaissance. It
took new inventions.
The Printing Press, 1454
•  New Ideas without a way
to spread the new ideas =
a dead end.
•  Literacy and a reading
public are born.
•  The printing press
reduced the price of
books through mass
production
•  It broke the monopoly of
the literate elite on
education and learning.
Technology Matters:
The West on the Rise
Firearms
Magnetic / Nautical Compass
Sea charts (maps) and pilot books
Why did the Renaissance Start
in Italy?
•  Though the Renaissance would
become a European-wide
movement, it began in Italy by
1300.
•  The revival of Commerce and
Town Building was more
intense in northern Italy than
anywhere else because of its
nearness to the Mediterranean
and the Byzantine Empire.
•  In Italy, in the wake of the
Black Plague, luxury goods
were sought after. Prices
plummeted as supply over-ran
demand. Trade was brisk.
•  The presence of antiquity was
stronger in Italy than
elsewhere in Europe.
It was primarily the northern
Italian city-states that
dominated the Italian
Renaissance. The central
and southern cities
remained agricultural.
Note that each city-state, as
a city-state, was
independent of the others.
Also, they controlled the
surrounding region and
specialized in certain
industries.
They would sometimes go to
war with each other.
Florence is the City-State
in Which the Renaissance
Flourished First
Coluccio Salutati
Florentine Humanist-Politician-Cultural Leader
Salutati and the
“Republic of Letters”
•  Salutati lived from 1331-1406 and was the
Chancellor of Florence before the Medicis
ruled Florence.
•  Diplomat, book-collector, humanist. Master of
the formal letter.
•  The Writer: “The Ape of Cicero”: why?
•  A Scholar: he discovered Cicero’s lost Letters
to his Friends and had an 800-volume library.
•  A Public Officer: appointed magistrate of
Lucca, papal diplomat, and chancellor.
•  “I have always believed," Salutati wrote ”that I
must imitate antiquity not simply to reproduce
it, but in order to produce something new.”
•  Salutati illustrates the humanist love of
learning, the past, activism in politics, and
books.
Cosimo de Medici of Florence
1389-1464
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While there were several powerful
families in the city-state of Florence,
the one that emerged as the leader of
the city-state was the Medici family.
This was in 1434.
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This is primarily due to the skill of
Cosimo de Medici, a banker. Cosimo
was a brilliant political tactician and
also a brilliant businessman. He ruled
indirectly.
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He amassed a huge banking fortune
and used it to buy political power as
well as financing art projects in
Florence. He funded the wool industry
in Florence.
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But where there is great wealth to be
gained, there are many rivals.
Marsilio Ficino –
Florentine Humanist
•  Cosimo de Medici was also a patron of
the arts and learning, a new
combination then.
•  Charlemagne had Alcuin; Cosimo di
Medici had Marsilio Ficino.
•  Backed by Cosimo de Medici’s money,
Ficino (1433-1499) translated all of
Plato into Latin – the first full
translation in the West.
•  He imported scholars from the East
because of their knowledge of Greek
and their ownership of copies of the
Aristotle, Plato, and others.
The Final in History 1
•  December 17, 2014 (Wednesday), 10:30 to
12:30
•  Bring:
–  A green or blue book to write your answers in.
–  A pen or pencil
–  Your notes (worksheets too!)
–  Your take home essay assignment
Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence
1449-1492
•  A few years after
Cosimo de Medici died,
his grandson Lorenzo
took power at 20
(1469).
•  Lorenzo, of course,
came to be known as
Lorenzo the
Magnificent.
Lorenzo Il Magnifico,
…looking quite happy with himself…
•  In this painting, note
the peace and
prosperity of the
Tuscan countryside
over Lorenzo’s
shoulder.
And Why Was Lorenzo the
Big Man on Campus?
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One big reason is the massive effect he had on the
Florentine Renaissance. He sponsored a great deal
of art and literature with the Medici fortune in
banking. In this he imitated his grandfather,
Cosimo.
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A few of the artists who enjoyed his patronage were
Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Donatello.
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He also helped to start philosophical academies that
reexamined ancient Classical works and
philosophies.
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He was a Renaissance Man – an athlete, a patron of
the arts, a soldier, a diplomat, a grower of exotic
fruit trees…
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Note his activism and individualism
Lorenzo’s Archenemy:
Savonarola
•  The materialism and luxury and
money of the Medicis was not
universally approved in Florence
and elsewhere.
•  Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican
priest, and the Bonfire of the
Vanities, 1497.
•  A year after the Bonfire, Savonarola
was burned at the stake as well.
•  Savonarola shows us that the new
worldliness of the Renaissance was
not universally welcomed, especially
by the Catholic Church.
A New Style of Princely Governing:
Machiavelli
•  Niccolo Machiavelli, 1469-1527, a Florentine,
diplomat, humanist, and political analyst.
•  He was absorbed by one big question: How to
gain and hold power?
•  The old ruling style in medieval Europe:
pretend that ethics matters, that policy is set
by obedience to what is right – but do what
you want.
•  The new ruling style: stop pretending that
Christian morality rules state affairs: lying is
sometimes justified.
•  Machiavelli’s Rule #1: If you must choose
between being loved or feared as a Prince,
choose being feared. The State comes first,
not morality.
The New Renaissance State System
(Who are the heavy hitters?)
The Holy Roman Empire
v. the Papacy
Venice
Florence
Milan
Genoa
The Papacy v.
The Holy Roman Empire
Renaissance Europe was dominated
by three great powers – the
Catholic Church in Rome,
France, and the Holy Roman
Empire
In between fell the Italian CityStates, rich and bustling with trade.
…they were fought over by these
three Great Powers.
Renaissance Society
Or, the Further Decline of Feudal Bonds
•  Renaissance society was not
medieval or feudal. At the top
were warriors and princes, as
usual, but now bankers and
merchants joined them – the
bourgeoisie.
•  The city-states where were this
new Middle-Class amassed their
wealth.
•  See Signior Frederico da
Montefeltro, 1476, in Urbino –
condottieri.
•  Marriages were frequently
arranged to strengthen business
ties
Renaissance Society
•  Extreme social stratification
divided into factions around
the wealthiest merchant
families
•  Class division sharpened at
this time. The poor
increasingly attempted to
improve their social status
--The Ciompi Revolt (1378)
-- “populo minuto” or lower
classes.
•  The Art created by this new
merchant elite reveals many
things, such as the “The Cult
of the Individual”
Renaissance Society
•  A Father’s authority over his
family was unquestioned – as
ever.
•  Some wealthy women played an
important role in Italian citystates
--Isabella d’Este of Mantua
•  Concentration of wealth among
great families
-- “populo grosso”
Renaissance Economics
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By 1400, in the wake of the Black
Plague and constant warfare,
profit-making for many became
more important than Church
doctrine and leading the Christian
life.
To overcome guilt, profit-makers
indulged in philanthropy
Guilds were in decline….
High profits led to economic
diversification: into banking,
mining, global trade, luxury goods
The search for new markets and
resources eventually led
Europeans to search beyond
Europe – and the discovery of the
“New World.”
Renaissance Economics
•  Whereas Medieval Society
tended to be agrarian and small,
Renaissance Society saw the rise
of cities and long-range trade
routes – routes that went into
the China and India.
•  The world was opening up by
1500
•  With the rise of cities – as in
L.A. – cultural influences were
many and the art scene grew.
•  Art became the way to advertise
economic success – one’s status.
Renaissance Economics
•  The vast number of
portraits painted during this
era reveals a focus on the
individual
•  The art shows a growing
humanism and
secularism in a Christian
context
•  Man was seen less as a
prisoner of his fate (the
Medieval man), more as a
take-charge business-man
who could shape his world.
•  Why wait for the next life?
Bling was to be had here
and now.
Bling Today
Renaissance Bling
Most medieval art tended to be very
flat and nearly always had
religious subject matter.
Look at these pre-Renaissance
(medieval) paintings.
Renaissance Art
A transformation of European society,
economics, and politics changed the way
European people saw the world.
The new reality of Renaissance Europe
required a new way of representing that
reality.
The biggest innovation was the use of perspective.
When you look at a scene, parallel lines seem to get
closer to each other the farther in the distance they go.
Eventually they meet at a vanishing point.
Think of standing on a railroad track and looking down
them.
The Renaissance artists reduced this visual
commonplace to a mathematical formula and sought to
create the ‘perspective effect’ in their art.
Renaissance artists started exploiting
perspective or this optical illusion in their
art.
The advantage of it is that you created the
illusion of a three-dimensional image on a
flat, two dimensional surface.
The image looked more true-to-life. Realism
was improved.
Before and After:
Medieval and Renaissance Views of the Last Supper
Leonardo da Vinci, “Last Supper”
1500
1016 ce.
“Last Supper” Perspective
Not One, but Two
Renaissances
(1300-1640)
Southern
•  Centered on Northern
Italy and the City-States
•  Started earlier – by 1300
•  Key figures:
–  Michelangelo
–  Leonardo Da Vinci
–  Petrarch
•  Chief achievement: art,
architecture, political
theory
Northern
•  Centered in England and
France
•  Starts by 1550
•  Key figures:
–  Desiderius Erasmus
–  Thomas More
–  William Shakespeare
•  Chief Achievement:
religious reform, plays,
humanities in higher
education
Will the Real Father of the Renaissance Stand Up?
Erasmus -- Catholic Reformer
•  Lives from 1466-1536
•  Rotterdam: Dutch
•  Dutch Renaissance humanist,
Catholic priest, social critic,
teacher, and theologian.
•  New translations of the Bible
•  Praise of Folly (1509)
•  Erasmus as a bridge between the
Renaissance and the Reformation.
•  He illustrates the Renaissance
values of individualism, reverence
for the Roman past, and
secularism.
Three Points on the Renaissance
1300-1640
•  The Renaissance period in European history was a
sharp break with what had gone before – the
Medieval.
•  Renaissance thinkers remade their view of the
world by attempting to re-interpret the works of
Greek and Roman culture. They looked to the past
(to history) to change the present.
•  In art this rethinking led to more realistic (threedimensional) art; in political thought, it led to a
greater concern not with the after-life, but with
This-World.
How does Europe in 1500 differ
from our world today? (cont.)
•  You can’t get ahead (be real), so be happy
with your social position.
•  If you own land, you’re somebody.
Otherwise….
•  The best technology has no computer
parts, few moving parts, and uses human
power to run it. The Fork.
•  Terms that will get you thrown in jail:
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democracy
personal freedom
get-rich-quick
equal rights
careers open to merit.
How does Europe in 1500 differ
from our world today?
•  It is a world lit by candles.
•  The social pyramid is topped by powerful
warriors, not corporations or rich men.
•  There are no community colleges anywhere.
•  You have no social security card or passport or
ID.
•  What’s important to know is ancient: it’s what
your priest and lord says it is.
•  There are no female teachers, female
administrators, or female governors.
•  No one can read – so there are no libraries or
books or magazines.
•  All of us farm, just like our fathers did -- so grab
that plow and pray for rain.
Pico Di Mirandola
•  He was the student of Marsilio Ficino.
•  Man is the measure of all things.
(individualism)
Lorenzo Valla
Renaissance
How did the Renaissance Differ from
the Middle Ages?
What comes to mind when you hear the
word “Renaissance”?
In-Class Essay
You will have the rest of the class to write this
essay. You may use your notes so long as they
are handwritten and your own.
Think about the key values of the Renaissance:
individualism over community, realism over faith, and
activism over passive obedience.
In what ways do contemporary U.S. society and culture
also exhibit or show these values? In what ways are
they expressed in public policy today? Be specific in the
examples you use.
Plagues, Wars, and new Nation
states…but European Culture Thrived
Thomas Aquinas:
The Einstein of the Middle Ages
What Aquinas Did
•  It fell to Aquinas to reconcile Greco-Roman
culture and Latin (Catholic) Christianity.
•  He built upon the work of Anselm and
Abelard and other Scholastic churchmen.
•  To show that Faith and Reason were not
contradictory, he wrote the Summa
Theologica – a mashup of the Bible,
Greco-Roman philosophers, and common
sense which showed that –
•  ‘Since the Divine has made both reason and
faith, they are not at odds with each other,
but parts of a harmonious whole.
Language and Literature
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Latin was the language of the Roman
Catholic (or Western) Church. To be
educated was to know Latin –
“Schoolman’s Latin”
Illiteracy rules: few books, no
printing press, no journals, and hence
no general reading public
Vernacular = a local dialect of
Latin; in time, these dialects become
French, Spanish, Italian.
Chaucer in England and Dante in
Florence, Italy are the first to turn
these dialects into rich, poetic, and
expressive languages.
Language = History
Each Word Comes from Somewhere
and Tells a Story
Indo-European
Language:
A “protolanguage”
Latin
Germanic
language
Language
from Latin, lingua = tongue
History
from Greek, historia = story
Slavic
language
English is Many Languages
Anglo
Saxon
Latin,
Greek,
Sanskrit
French
English
Medieval European Literature Took
many forms in the middle ages
Hymns, prayers, and sacred songs
Mystery, Passion, and Morality Plays
Church histories and Saints’ Lives
National Epics: El Cid, the Song of Roland, the
Nibelungenlied.
•  Arthurian Prose ‘romances’ and Courtly Love
•  Fabliaux and the rise of the Middle Classes
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Geoffrey Chaucer
in England
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Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 1400) was an
English author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat,
courtier and diplomat. He liked stories.
Although he wrote many works, he is best
remembered for his unfinished frame
narrative The Canterbury Tales. See the “Wife
of Bath Tale”
Sometimes called the father of English
literature, Chaucer is credited by some
scholars as the first author to demonstrate the
artistic legitimacy of the vernacular English
language, rather than French or Latin.
Edward III granted Chaucer "a gallon of wine
daily for the rest of his life" for some
unspecified task.
Dante Alighieri in Italy
•  Durante degli Alighieri (1265 –
1321), commonly known as Dante,
was an Italian poet of the Middle
Ages. His Divine Comedy, originally
called Commedia and later called
Divina, is often considered the
greatest literary work composed in the
Italian language and a masterpiece of
world literature.
•  In Italy he is known as "the Supreme
Poet" (il Sommo Poeta) or just il
Poeta. Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio
are also known as "the three
fountains" or "the three crowns".
•  Dante is also called the "Father of the
Italian language".
Dante Alighieri
Florentine
•  The City-State of Florence by 1300
•  Dante and Beatrice
•  The Divine Comedy
–  Inferno
–  Purgatorio
–  Paradiso
Why is Dante’s work an encyclopedia
of the Middle Ages? What does it
tell us about medieval society?
Map of Europe – The Focus of this
Class
Other ‘Super-kingdoms’ began to
Centralize as Well….
•  Austria and the Netherlands combined, leading
by 1500 to Charles 5th of Spain and Ferdinand 1st
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
•  The nation state would become the basis of
European politics for the next 300 years: a new
state system appeared.
•  Fewer states existed, but those that did were
bigger, better organized, and more powerful.
What was the Renaissance?
• 
It is a period, between 1300 and 1640, when Europe embraced
new ideas, ideas very different from those that dominated the
Medieval period (500-1500).
• 
A ‘rebirth’ – but a rebirth of what?
• 
The term “Renaissance” refers to the period of about 1300-1600
that was a new period of learning and creativity in Europe.
• 
As some historian critics note, this doesn’t mean that medieval
period was a dark age. There was still culture, learning, and such
going on then.
• 
At this time, however, there’s a sudden explosion of it and it takes
a markedly different form from what was seen during the Middle
Ages.
• 
Other critics argue that this period only introduced change for the
upper classes while the lower classes largely led the same
miserable existence as they always had.
The Video Questions
•  List three important themes mentioned in
the video we’ve just seen.
•  Taking each theme separately, discuss why
each theme is important. Argue for its
importance.
•  List two further questions that you still
have about the video.
Questions on the Video
The Renaissance
•  Who was Giotto? Why is he mentioned in
the video?
•  Who was Leonardo Bruni? What was his
achievement?
The Mess that was The Holy Roman Empire –
About 1528
The Borgia’s in Rome
•  Rome and the Papacy after 1417 and the
Great Schism.
•  Martin 5th: his problems, his solution.
•  Pope Alexander 6 – a Borgia – and St.
Peter’s.
•  Julius 2 and the Sistine Chapel.
–  Julius was to Rome what Cosimo de Medici was
to Florence: a patron of the arts, a wise leader.
•  ddd
Connect to Today Question
Think about these key values of the
Renaissance: individualism over community,
realism over faith, and activism over passive
obedience.
What examples can you cite from the world
today wherein societies have censored religious
criticism or suppressed individual liberties to
strengthen the community? What do you think
of such measures?
Some Questions
What were the new values embraced by
Renaissance thinkers and artists?
What was humanism?
The Video: What were some of the key
points in the Michael Wood video?
A New Merchant Elite Appeared
During the Renaissance
• 
Art was powered by economics in this period. As Trade increased, it
produced Wealth. A part of that Wealth funded Art.
• 
Trade was very important the Italian city-states. Demand for luxury
goods increased trade. Increased trade led to more tradesmen
becoming wealthy and wanting more luxury goods, and on and on.
• 
It wasn’t uncommon for the merchants to be richer than the local
nobles.
• 
Due to the power and wealth of the merchants and guilds, the feudal
system broke down here. Feudal lords didn’t run the show anymore,
which helped to secure money and remove laws that inhibited
commerce.
• 
Commercial values – values about profit and financial gain – began to
take the place of religious values, such as piety and faith.
The Most Powerful Man in
Renaissance Europe…?
Anton Fugger
(1493-1560) -Banker to the
King,
Merchant,
Member of Third
Estate or Order