Renaissance, A French word meaning ‘rebirth’, alludes to the humanistic revival of the Classical influence in Western Europe in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Although the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the consequent flight of the intellectuals to the west is often cited as the starting point of the Renaissance, the ‘rebirth of learning’ had begun several generations earlier as Arab arts and crafts filtered through Spain. It was marked u an unprecedented flowering of arts and literature as well as the beginning of modern science. In the fields of the fine arts and architecture, the Renaissance had its greatest impact in Italy. Significantly it was the great mercantile centre of Florence, rather than in the religious centre of Rome, that the movement developed initially, and it was in the liberal world of the merchant prices that the new art flourished most vigorously. Wealthy patrons like the Medici, Sforza and Strozzi families encouraged the art of da Vinci and Michelangelo, among others.
