During the Middle Ages gothic art and architecture had been created all over Europe. The Renaissance was a rebirth of art and architecture, when artists and craftsmen looked back to the work of the Greeks and Romans for ideas. The Renaissance first emerges in Italy in the 1400s and spreads through Spain, France and Germany, eventually arriving in England in the late 1500s.

Florence

The Medici family of Florence, Italy were great partons of the arts and they are given much credit for the flourishing of the arts in Florence during the Renaissance. One of the best early examples of Reaniassance architecture is the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore which still stands in Florence today.

Renaissance artists began to study the geometry of shapes and the science of how to construct beautiful buildings. Symmetry was very important in the Renaissance. The Greeks and Romans were a great help to them in developing these ideas.

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Rome

As a political and religious center of Italy, Rome attracted many great minds and artists during the Renaissance. No place in Rome is more spectacular in its presentation of Renaissance ideals than St. Peter's basilica:

Notice the use of columns, the dome or rotunda that towers above the center of the building, and how the rest of the basilica is spread out symmetrically around the dome. If you hold your mouse over the image, you'll see a line slice the basilica right down the middle. Notice how the left side looks like a mirror image of the right side. These are all ideas from the earlier architects of Greece and Rome.

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Renaissance Men

Andrea Palladio	Michelangelo Buonarroti	Leonardo da Vinci	William Shakespeare
Palladio's "Four Books of Architecture" later influenced English architects like Jefferson and Wren.	Michelangelo's work as a sculptor and painter is considered to be some of the most inspired of the Renaissance.	Leonardo is perhaps the greatest of the Renaissance men, achieving great work in the arts and the sciences.	Shakespeare is a celebrated playwright whose Globe Theater was an important building in Renaissance London.

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Additonal Research: