Renaissance

Renaissance (rebirth) characterizes the impulse, initiated in Italy, towards improving the contemporary world by discovering and applying the achievement of classical antiquity. The movement was at its strongest from the time of Petrarch (1304–74) through the ‘long 16th cent.’ (1450–1625). ‘Renaissance’ is now generally used to describe the politics, beliefs, philosophy, science, scholarship, discourse, literature, handwriting, printing, painting, engraving, sculpture, architecture, and music of that period.

‘Renaissance’ was first used alone in the 19th cent., though Giorgio Vasari (1550) saw a ‘rinascità delle arti’ in his own time, and Voltaire two centuries later a ‘renaissance des lettres et des beaux‐arts’ in Medicean Florence. The concept of an epoch marked by ‘the discovery of the world and of man’ was taken up in Jakob Burckhardt's Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860). For Burckhardt the defining emphasis of the Renaissance was secular and individual; the new attitudes he detected in the Italy of that epoch to nature, morality, religion, affairs, art, and literature made him see it as inaugurating the modern era.

The English Renaissance was influenced by the Italian indirectly, through France, Burgundy, and the Netherlands, as well as directly. In its earliest phase, the patronage and book collections of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester (1390–1447), were important; later, under Henry VII, William Grocyn and Thomas Linacre won a reputation for Greek. From about 1500, however, the chief force in English humanism was the concept of pietas literata, or evangelical humanism, associated with Erasmus. The friendship of Erasmus with John Colet and with Thomas More was particularly significant; he and More translated Greek together.

England produced no humanist scholar of the first rank during the Renaissance, More's Utopia being the finest Latin achievement of its early Tudor phase. Many classical and humanist works were translated into the vernacular, however. A pattern of civility on the Italian model was offered by Sir Thomas Elyot (Book Named the Governor, 1531) and Sir Thomas Hoby(translation of Castiglione's Courtier, 1561). Greek studies were notable, from the 1520s especially in association with the Reformation. Erasmus' Greek New Testament with Latin translation (1516–19) was used by Martin Luther for his German New Testament (1521): William Tyndale used both for his English version (1526–34).

The visual arts and architecture of Renaissance England remained predominantly traditional, in spite of the presence of Italian sculptors and of north European painters such as Hans Holbein the Younger, Rubens, and Van Dyck. The first English architect and designer of international stature was Inigo Jones, the Palladian (1573–1652). Music similarly remained traditional until the flowering of the Italian fashion (1575–1625).