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Entry 149 of 240Reform

The Renaissance

c. 1450 CE/Italy/Renaissance Italy
Today Italy (Florence, Rome, Venice)Span The Renaissance · c. 1350–1600 CE

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 knowingMichelangelo 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.
◆ The mechanismIdeological movement

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

Also: Information-medium revolution · Trade-route shift

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