Renaissance, period of European history that saw a renewed interest in the arts and in the classical past. The Renaissance began in 14th-century Italy and had spread to the rest of Europe by the 16th and 17th centuries. In this period, the fragmented feudal society of the Middle Ages, with its agricultural economy and Church-dominated intellectual and cultural life, was transformed into a society increasingly dominated by central political institutions, with an urban, commercial economy and lay patronage of education, the arts, and music.

The term renaissance, meaning literally “rebirth”, was first employed in 1855 by the French historian Jules Michelet to refer to the “discovery of the world and of man” in the 16th century. The great Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt, in his classic The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), expanded on Michelet’s conception. Defining the Renaissance as the period between the Italian painters Giotto and Michelangelo, Burckhardt characterized the epoch as nothing less than the birth of modern humanity and consciousness after a long period of decay.