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Jacobean. | (

430 THE RENAISSANCE MOVEMENT

THE RENAISSANCE

Italy. Fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Spain. Sixteenth century.
France. 1500-1643.
England. 1509-1660.

T * [Henry VIII. 1509-1547.

ludor. |Elizabeth> 1558-1603.

[James I. 1603-1625.

[Charles I. 1625-1649.
Commonwealth. 1649-1660.
United States. 1625-1700.
English Colonial. (Early American.) 1625-1700.
Spanish Colonial. Seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,

The Renaissance was a revival of Classic civilization) after Greek
and Roman art, literature, and science had been neglected during
the thousand years of the Middle Ages. It was one of the world's
outstanding periods in the development of thought, as Man
emerged from a long period of misery and subjugation and under-
stood his right to earthly pleasure. The new interest in humanism
and realism was integrated with art consciousness and was expressed
in the architecture, sculpture, painting, and minor arts of the rime.

There were several reasons for this rebirth, the most immediate
being the flight of the Byzantine Greek scholars to Italy when
Constantinople fell in 1453. Their veneration of Classic art in-
spired others to study the philosophy and government of the
Greeks and Romans so they learned that the ancients had lived
better and happier lives than they. Other important causes of the
Renaissance were the Crusades, the invention of printing, the art
patronage of wealthy Italian families, and the cultural activity of
the Church of Rome under Pope Nicholas V.

The Renaissance was not alone a rebirth of the classicism of
Greece and Rome, for Oriental and Gothic influences were also
factors in its development. The Renaissance began in Italy and
achieved its highest development there, but it spread to all western
Europe, where it had a strong effect on France, Germany, Spain,
and England and prevailed for more than a century. Most of the
period houses and the period furniture that are used today are
descendants of the Renaissance.