The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period. Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, its influence was

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Many argue that the ideas characterizing the Renaissance had their origin in Florence at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, in particular with the writings of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Petrarch (1304–1374), as well as the paintings of Giotto di Bondone(1267–1337).

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Humanism
In some ways, Renaissance humanism was not a philosophy but a method of learning. In contrast to the medieval scholasticmode, which focused on resolving contradictions between authors, Renaissance humanists

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Conception
The Italian artist and critic Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) first used the term rinascita in his book The Lives of the Artists(published 1550). In the book Vasari attempted to define what he described as a break with the

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The term Renaissance has also been used to define periods outside of the 15th and 16th centuries. Charles H. Haskins (1870–1937), for example, made a case for a

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• Index of Renaissance articles
• Outline of the Renaissance
• List of Renaissance figures

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In the 15th century, the Renaissance spread rapidly from its birthplace in Florence to the rest of Italy and soon to the rest of Europe. The invention of the printing pressby

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