Timeline of European Renaissance

During the middle ages, when Feudal Europe witnessed a period of intellectual and cultural stagnation, the cities of Italy such as Venice, Florence, and Milan prospered as trading posts connecting Europe to the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim world via the Mediterranean Sea. Unlike the rest of Europe, feudalism had not established itself in Northern Italy, where commerce and mercantilism became an integral activity of daily life.

The Black Death that caused widespread devastation in Europe during the 1350’s struck Florence hard, causing the loss of almost 90 percent of its populace. This familiarity with death made survivors dwell more on their lives on Earth, rather than on spirituality and the afterlife. The Italian people, especially the educated middle class, became interested in individual achievement and emphasized life in this world, as opposed to preparation for life in the next world. Side by side, the Black Death also prompted a new wave of piety that manifested in the sponsorship of religious works of art.

[...] 1435 Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), a noted Renaissance writer formalizes perspective as an artistic technique, which was part of a wider trend towards realism in the arts. In 1435, he completes his first major work Painting.” 1440 Lorenzo Valla uses humanist skills to expose Donation of Constantine as forgery. He also exposes other historic hoaxes. 1440 Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi, better known as Donatello completes his masterpiece depicting the Hebrew king in the classical style of a Greek god. [...]

[...] The works of ancient Greek and Hellenistic writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Plotinus and Muslim scientists and philosophers such as Geber, Abulcasis, Alhacen, Avicenna, and Averroes thus became available to Western Europe, providing new intellectual material for European scholars. An added cause for the growth of ancient Greek and Roman thought in Northern Italy was the constant pressure applied on the Byzantine Empire by the Muslim world. Though Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks only in 1453 C.E., the Byzantine Empire continuously lost territory to the Muslim sultanates for more than a century prior to this event, and each time they suffered a setback, many Byzantium scholars fled and took refuge in the Northern Italian city-states, and slowly Western Europe regained much of its lost cultural heritage. [...]

[...] 1530 Francois Rabelais, a major French Renaissance writer and doctor publishes his first edition of grammar of French Language 1532 Rabelais publishes his masterpiece “Pantagruel”. 1533 Titian, the most famous Venetian artist of the Renaissance distinguishes himself with bright colors and new techniques that gave those colors greater subtlety and depth. Between 1518 and 1532 he served as court painter in Ferrara, Mantua, and Urbino, and in 1533 became the official painter to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. 1533 Hans Holbein, the German artist publishes his masterpiece Ambassadors” 1533 Regiomontanus, the Hungarian mathematician publishes Triangles” 1536 Paracelsus (1493-1541), the alchemical genus publishes his “Great Book of Surgery”. [...]