The Renaissance

A Renaissance (re--again, naissance--birth) means simply a new birth or revival; but the word is always understood to mean a revival in learning. The period known as the Renaissance, by way of eminence, dates from the taking of Constantinople by the Turks (1453), but long before that epoch the love for classical literature had been reviving. This event, however, gave a decided impulse to the revival of learning in Western Europe; the learned men of the Greek or Eastern Empire sought new homes in the Occident and established schools throughout Europe. The revival of learning, the invention of printing (1450 A. D.), the discovery of the New World (1492), the decline of feudalism, the elevation of the middle classes, all contributed to bring about "The Renaissance;" the Reformation followed soon after (1517 A. D.), ignorance was dissipated and superstition abated. With the revival of classical literature came a taste for classical architecture, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there existed a distinct style known as the Renaissance in architecture, following that of sculpture and painting, and in time the saints of the Middle Ages gave place to the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome. The Renaissance reached its climax about the beginning of the present century; but the people finally rebelled when window light had to be sacrificed to the reproduction of an ancient portico, etc. The result is that cold and servile copyism has been abandoned and a new Renaissance of comfort and utility marks the nineteenth century.