The Italian Renaissance

The Italian Renaissance was a major turning point in world history. The phrase “Renaissance” actually means rebirth. This time period was the time of rebirth and invention. Right after the Medieval period, people started getting new ideas and started wondering about the workings of the world. Many topics where researched in the name of science and discovery.

A Separated Italy

Although this was the Golden Age of Italy, the country was not as we know it today. It was separated into city states, after the rise of the region following the fall of the Roman Empire. Each city state was, most of the time, controlled by a royal family of Italy. The ones most known are:

• Republic of Florence- The Medici Family/Bank
• The Papal State- The Borgia family for a time when Alexander Borgia became the Pope
• Kingdom of Naples- At one point was one of the most powerful states in Italy (never truly had a ruler the city-state switched monarchs from time to time.
• Milan- House of Sforza

The Artists

There were many artists during the Renaissance. Some of the most famous are Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael. These artists were some of the few who renewed art at a whole new level. They, along with artists all over the world, started the era of realism. Paintings started becoming more and more realistic. Along with realism, there were a few more techniques that where invented naturalism, shadows, light, emotion, perspective, etc. As a result of this, more and more rich families, such as the Medici or the Borgia, paid a lot of money for paintings.

Leonardo Da Vinci was the most famous artist in all of Italy. Even after his passing, he has remained a very famous and inspiring historical figure. Unlike some of his rivals, such as Michelangelo or Donatello, he did much more than paint and sketch. He might have been one of the most brilliant minds to ever live. He, out of curiosity, took hung corpses and dissected them to find out how the human body worked. His sketches where like something we see in a textbook today.

Leonardo was an inventor. He thought of the tank, or as he called it an armored cart, over 500 or years before it was actually invented. To add on to that, he created many other forms of weaponry, years before anyone else would have thought of it. Now if that surprises you, Leonardo also was obsessed with flying. After years of researching birds, he created a version of something we know today as a plane.

It has been proven that Da Vinci’s inventions would have worked had we built versions of them in our times. But hears the most exciting part, planes today work as gliders, just propelled forward by jet engines. His used nothing but a few gears. The plane he created flew with the wings being able to move up and down and propelling the air craft up, as if it were a bird. When scientists tried to create a plane that worked on the same concept, it was able to fly for 3 minutes in the air. Almost 800 years before the first plane. Leonardo was a true genius and an amazing artist. He was truly a Renaissance man!