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How Did The Renaissance Start In Italy

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The Renaissance was a period of time between the mid-fourteenth century and mid-sixteenth century in which art, engineering, architecture, and music flourished, mainly due to engineers and artists. One of the most debated questions that historians discuss about the Renaissance is why and how the Renaissance started in Italy because there are no specific events that started the Renaissance. Rather, it was a string of events with no clear beginnings except for basic ideas and theories. Wealth and humanism started the Renaissance in Italy by providing a motive to learn, causing art and engineering to flourish.
The creation of humanism, influenced by the Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch, helped set the path of the Renaissance due to …show more content…

Because of his rejection of the medieval ways of thinking, his insistence of using thought and reason became the basis of humanism. “These [humanists] sought out and delved into classical texts and believed that education could improve not only the individual, but also society” (Blackwell). In general, most Italian humanists wanted to look at the literary and philosophical works of the ancient Romans and Greeks. The Italian humanists believed that the ancient works were the best guides for living and, more importantly, learning. From inspecting the ancient world, Italian humanists could compare their own civilization and give them a basis for which they could form opinions and criticize their own civilization. Because of that, the method of criticism emerged. Eventually, most people during the Renaissance reverted to the classical way of thinking. This impacted people, such as Niccolò Machiavelli, who criticized people in their leadership skills. He also wrote the novel, The Prince, which talks about achieving goals to acquire power and leadership including “the ends justify the means”, no matter the cost. Humanism also impacted art because the main purpose of humanism was to focus more on the human

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