What the word means
Renaissance is French for “rebirth.” The term was coined retrospectively by the French historian Jules Michelet in the 19th century to describe what 14th- and 15th-century Italian writers had called rinascita: a perceived revival of classical Greek and Roman culture after what they considered the cultural sleep of the medieval period.
The “medieval as dark age” framing has been substantially revised by modern scholarship — the period from 500 to 1400 produced its own substantial intellectual achievements — but the term Renaissance has stuck as a label for the specific Italian-centered cultural movement.
Origins in Florence
The Renaissance is conventionally dated from the work of the Tuscan writers Dante (1265–1321), Petrarch (1304–1374), and Boccaccio (1313–1375). Petrarch in particular is sometimes called the “father of the Renaissance” — he actively sought out and copied classical Latin manuscripts in medieval European monasteries, reviving the practice of close textual scholarship that would become humanism.
The economic conditions were specific: 14th-century Florence and the other northern Italian city-states (Venice, Genoa, Milan, Siena) had accumulated unprecedented mercantile wealth through Mediterranean trade. The wealth funded a substantial private patronage of art and learning. The Medici family in Florence — bankers and de facto rulers from 1434 — became the most famous patrons but were not alone.
The fall of Constantinople
The 1453 Ottoman conquest of Constantinople ended the Byzantine Empire and sent thousands of Greek-speaking scholars west into Italian universities, carrying with them Greek manuscripts that had not been read in the Latin west for centuries. The renewed access to classical Greek philosophy and science accelerated the movement substantially. Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, and Archimedes all returned to active European intellectual life through these scholars.
Art
The Italian Renaissance art of the late 15th and early 16th century is the period’s most famous output. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), and Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520) are the canonical High Renaissance figures, all working in Florence and Rome during the same generation. The Sistine Chapel ceiling (Michelangelo, 1508–1512) and the Mona Lisa (Leonardo, c. 1503–1519) are the most-reproduced images of the period.
Science and the Reformation
The Renaissance also produced the foundations of the Scientific Revolution — Copernicus (1473–1543), Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), Kepler (1571–1630), and Galileo (1564–1642) all worked in the late Renaissance. The period also produced the Reformation, Martin Luther’s 1517 break from the Catholic Church, which would reshape European politics and religion for the following two centuries.
The Northern Renaissance
The cultural movement spread from Italy to the Low Countries, Germany, France, and England across the 15th and 16th centuries. The Northern Renaissance is associated with figures including Jan van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch in the Low Countries, Albrecht Dürer in Germany, Erasmus of Rotterdam (the most prominent humanist of the early 16th century), and William Shakespeare in England (a generation later than the Italian peak).
What ended it
The Renaissance is conventionally said to have ended around 1600. The Reformation had by then produced sustained religious warfare across Europe. The Italian city-states had been politically eclipsed by the rising centralised monarchies of Spain, France, and England. The cultural movement transitioned into what is now called the Baroque period — broadly continuous in personnel but tonally different. Galileo, who lived until 1642, is often described as the last great Renaissance figure and the first great modern scientist.