The Renaissance

c. 1450 CE — Italy, Renaissance Italy

Today: Italy (Florence, Rome, Venice)

In the wealthy city-states of Italy, a rediscovery of classical Greek and Roman learning — much of it preserved and advanced in the Islamic world, and some carried west by scholars fleeing Constantinople — sparked an explosion of art, science, and a new confidence in human possibility. Merchant money from banking families like the Medici paid for Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the rest. It is what happens when a flood of recovered ideas meets a flood of new money: not a single invention, but a change in what people believed they were permitted to think.

Worth knowing: Michelangelo was so determined to understand the body that he dissected corpses by candlelight in a monastery basement — the abbot supplied the bodies, and Michelangelo paid him with a carved wooden crucifix that still hangs there.

Pattern: Ideological movement — A belief system rises, spreads, institutionalizes, and then schisms — changing the rules people accept as legitimate.

Entry 149 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.