Book Report

“Turning Points in World History The Renaissance” Is a book over viewing the Start of modern ages in western civilization.  The Renaissance is a time period in Europe right after the Plague had started to disappear. The Europeans where now not being decimated as they were before by the plague in which destroyed over half the population of Europe. Europe was now full of Artists and was a very significant period.

            The fruitful times of 1500 to the 1530s is considered the high time in the Renaissance. This time created many of the most famous artists we know today such as Michelangelo and Leonardo Davinci. Leonardo created many paintings where as Michelangelo was only a sculptor. During this period artists had managed to fix many of the problems that art could not figure out. They now know about perspective, light an shade, foreshortening space and composition, painting in oil, and texture and movement. There was also northern renaissance art. The significant artistic achievements of the Italians did not go unnoticed by northern Europe and Germany. In a culture where tradition was powerful, the art of the north remained codified and ritualized; at the end of the fifteenth century it looked to the past for protection and guidance rather than to the future.

            The images of the renaissance are more familiar than ever before due to the power of the modern technology, but the Renaissance can’t be thought only in terms of art. In its literacy and scholarly manifestations the Renaissance involved both looking back to the past and looking inward. The result of so much reflection was a new kind of self knowledge and a new way of thinking that is far more modern than medieval.  Every age has to make its own terms with the Renaissance. Our own age is so dominated by its visual imagery that our iconographic vocabulary is in serious danger of getting out of step with the verbal. Whether we notice it or not, our world is full of objects whose form stems from enthusiasms kindled in the 15^th century Italy. We are surrounded by exercises in the architectural grammar relearnt with the renewed study if Vitruvius. It is as if the renaissance started an end game which is still being played out.

            The Renaissance is looked at as an artsy period n reality it is but there are many things we still get today. The Renaissance played a major role in today’s technology and the way we learn and out our knowledge to discovering new cures and fighting diseases. The Renaissance may just be the most important time in the western world.