Download The Great Artists and Philosophers of the Renaissance

The Great Artists and Philosophers of the Renaissance
Global History and Geography I
Name: ____________________
Leonardo da Vinci:
Leonardo da Vinci was a true Renaissance man. Born in the small Italian
village of Vinci in 1452, da Vinci had many interests and much skill.
Leonardo became an artist, scientist, engineer, and inventor. In 1503,
Leonardo completed his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa. Another
important painting was Leonardo’s Last Supper. As a scientist, Leonardo
drew natural objects and in dozens of notebooks recorded what he saw. He
even dissected dead human bodies for study. In his notebooks, he also drew
a bicycle, canon, machine gun, submarine, flying machine, and even a
parachute long before these items were ever invented.
Michelangelo:
Michelangelo was born near Florence in 1475. At the age of 23, he
became famous as a sculptor for his carving the Pieta. The sculpture shows
Mary, the mother of Jesus, holding his dead body. Michelangelo also
completed a statue of David. When he was thirty-three, the pope asked him
to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. Michelangelo
insisted that he was a sculptor and not a painter but the pope would not take
no for an answer. Michelangelo painted the ceiling while lying on his back,
80 feet above the floor. It took four years to complete. He painted more
than 300 people and pictures on the ceiling.
Perspective in Art: A Lesson from the Renaissance
Machiavelli:
Machiavelli was a famous writer and historian. He had a job as a secretary
to a government council that traveled throughout Italy. During these trips,
Machiavelli met many rulers. He wondered how they got and kept power.
As a result, he watched how they acted.
Based on what he saw, Machiavelli set up his own ideas about how to rule.
He stated them in a book titled The Prince. He believed that for a ruler, the
ends justify the means. In other words, the usual rules for behavior do not
apply to rulers. Rulers must do whatever is necessary to maintain power.
Machiavelli believed that rulers should focus on power and success only.
More Highlights of the Renaissance:
William Shakespeare:
The ideas of the Renaissance eventually spread to other regions. William
Shakespeare wrote many plays whose popularity has endured for centuries.
His dramas include Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet. He explored
the full range of human activities and emotions. He was another great artist
of the Renaissance.
Galileo Galilei:
Galileo Galilei rejected reliance on authorities and developed a more
scientific method, which emphasized direct observation, measurement, and
experimentation. This great Renaissance scientist challenged the Roman
Catholic Church when he supported Nicholas Copernicus’ thesis that the
earth and the other planets revolved around the sun. This contradicted
Church teachings which stated that the earth was the center of the universe.
Of course, Copernicus and Galileo were correct!
Miguel de Cervantes:
Another leading writer of the Renaissance was Miguel de Cervantes, a
Spanish writer. He created the wonderful character of Don Quixote.
Cervantes published the first part of his novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha,
in 1605. Quixote sees himself as a knight who must right the wrongs of the
world. With his servant, Sancho Panza, he rides throughout Spain. They
have one adventure after another. Don Quixote is a comic character. People
have loved Don Quixote for over 400 years. Thanks to the creation of
moveable type, a printing press, developed by Johann Gutenberg in the
1400s, books became more readily available.
Questions from yesterday and today:
1: What was the Renaissance?
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2: Define humanism.
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3. Define secularism.
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4. Where, when and why did the Renaissance begin?
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5. Who did Renaissance thinkers study? Why?
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6. Who was Machiavelli and why was he important?
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7. Do you agree or disagree with Machiavelli? Explain your
answer.
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8. Who was Leonardo da Vinci and what were his
accomplishments?
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9. What is perspective in art?
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10. Who was Michelangelo and what were his accomplishments?
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11. Why did Galileo Galilei get in trouble with the Roman Catholic
Church?
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12. Why did the scientific method often lead to conflict with the
Roman Catholic Church?
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13. Who was Cervantes and why is he remembered?
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14. Who invented moveable type and the printing press? How did
this invention change world history?
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15. Who was William Shakespeare and why is he considered a
great Renaissance writer?
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16. How does the Renaissance still influence us today?
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The Scientific Revolution
The Scientific Revolution began during the Renaissance and continued
through the 17th and 18th centuries. It rejected traditional authority and
church teachings in favor of a new scientific method, in which scientists
observed nature, made hypotheses (educated guesses) about relationships,
and tested their hypotheses through experiments. During this period,
scientists invented new scientific tools and new ways of looking at the
world. Scientists invented the telescope and many other instruments that
helped them observe and measure the natural world. Scientists like Galileo
Galilei used the telescope to observe the planets. Galileo concluded that a
previous scientist’s (Copernicus’) theory that the planets revolved around the
sun was correct. The Catholic Church believed that the planets revolved
around the earth and imprisoned Galileo for such heretical beliefs! Galileo
Galilei also tested the movements of falling objects. However, the most
influential thinker of the Scientific Revolution was Sir Isaac Newton.
Newton developed a theory to explain both the movements of planets and
how objects fall on earth. Newton reduced all these patterns to a single
formula: the law of gravity. Newton’s discovery raised hopes that the entire
universe acted according to certain fixed and fundamental laws. It seemed
that all scientists had to do was to apply observation, experimentation, and
mathematics to understand and predict the natural world. The Scientific
Revolution greatly changed the way people thought.
Questions:
1- Why do you think the Scientific Revolution began during the
Renaissance?
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2- Describe the scientific method or the scientist’s way of reaching
conclusions about the natural world?
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3- Why was the Roman Catholic Church threatened by the Scientific
Revolution?
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4- Who was Galileo and why was he important?
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5- Who was Sir Isaac Newton and why was he important?
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Throughout the Middle Ages, Europeans’ scientific knowledge had
experienced little change because the Catholic Church had preserved the
acceptance of a system of beliefs based on the teachings of the ancient
Greeks and Romans which it had incorporated into religious doctrine.
During this period there was little scientific inquiry and experimentation.
Rather, students of the sciences simply read the works of the alleged
authorities and accepted their word as truth. However, during the
Renaissance, this passivity began to change. The quest to understand the
natural world led to the revival of the sciences.
These scientific observers were surprised to find that their conclusions did
not always match up with the accepted truths, and this finding inspired
others to delve further into the study of the world around them. Scientific
study quickly extended from the earth to the heavens, and Nicolas
Copernicus, upon examining the records of the motions of heavenly bodies,
soon discarded the old geocentric theory that placed the Earth at the center
of the solar system and replaced it with a heliocentric theory in which the
Earth was simply one of a number of planets orbiting the sun. Though this
scheme seemed to comply better with the astronomical records of the time,
Copernicus had little direct evidence to support his claims. However,
eventually through the use of a telescope, Galileo Galilei was able to prove
Copernicus’ theory.
How did scientific thinking differ from the religious thinking of the
medieval period:
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Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Isaac Newton promoted the idea that knowledge should
be based on
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2.
3.
4.
the experiences of past civilizations
experimentation and observation
emotions and feelings
the teachings of the Catholic Church
During the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, one similarity in the work
of many scientists and philosophers was that they
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2.
3.
4.
relied heavily on the ideas of medieval thinkers
favored an absolute monarchy as a way of improving economic conditions
received support from the Catholic Church
examined natural laws governing the universe
Which statement best describes the effects of the works of Nicolaus Copernicus,
Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, and René Descartes?
1.
2.
3.
4.
The acceptance of traditional authority was strengthened.
The scientific method was used to solve problems.
Funding to education was increased by the English government.
Interest in Greek and Roman drama was renewed.
Galileo Galilei, (1564-1642) the gifted and extremely curious Italian
scientist, made great use of the telescope to discover such unsettling things
as the irregularities of the moon's surface; it was believed at the time to be
perfectly smooth, a belief which conformed to Catholic dogma. Moreover,
Galileo's observations with the telescope led him to the conclusion that
Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) was right: the earth did indeed orbit around
the sun and not vice versa. Such a viewpoint cast great doubt on the accepted
natural philosophy (first enunciated by Aristotle) of a geocentric universe
and thus of human beings' centrality in the universe. Thus the conflict
between religion and science in the seventeenth century was begun. Galileo
also discovered the moons of Jupiter from January to March, 1610. This
discovery cast even greater doubt on the perfection of the Aristotelian
universe which had been described by the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy in
the second century, A.D.
List Four Facts About Galileo Galilei:
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In the 1633 trial of Galileo Galilei, two worlds come into cosmic conflict.
Galileo's world of science and humanism collides with the world of
Scholasticism and absolutism that held power in the Catholic Church. The
result is a tragedy that marks both the end of Galileo's liberty and the end of
the Italian Renaissance.
Galileo Galilei was born in 1564 - the same year that Shakespeare was born
and Michelangelo died. From an early age, Galileo showed his scientific
skills. At age nineteen, he discovered the isochronisms of the pendulum.
By age twenty-two, he had invented the hydrostatic balance. By age twenty-
five, Galileo assumed his first lectureship, at the University of Pisa. Within a
few more years, Galileo earned a reputation throughout Europe as a scientist
and superb lecturer. Eventually, he would be recognized as the father of
experimental physics. Galileo's motto might have been "follow knowledge
wherever it leads us."
At the University of Padua, where Galileo accepted a position after three
years in Pisa, he began to develop a strong interest in Copernican theory or
the revolutionary idea that the Sun was at the center of the universe and that
the Earth--rotating on an axis--orbited around the sun once a year.
Copernicus' theory met mostly with skepticism. Skeptics countered with the
"common sense" notion that the earth they stood on appeared not to move at
all--much less at the speed required to fully rotate every twenty-four hours
while spinning around the sun. Sometime in the mid-1590s, Galileo
concluded that Copernicus got it right.
Galileo's discovery of the telescope in 1609 enabled him to confirm his
beliefs in the Copernican system and emboldened him to make public
arguments in its favor. Galileo decided that Copernicus was worth a fight.
He decided to address his arguments to the enlightened public at large, rather
than the academics. Galileo published a book involving a debate between a
supporter of Copernicus and a supporter of the Church. The Church was
angered by Galileo’s book and brought him to trial. Galileo was found
guilty of heresy and placed under house arrest. Eventually, Galileo went
blind from looking at the sun through his telescope. While the Church
temporarily succeeded in silencing scientists, science could not be
permanently silenced.
Would you have challenged the Church as Galileo did? Explain your
answer.
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