Birth of the Renaissance in Florence

Fifteenth-century Florence witnessed one of the great cultural leaps of Western Civilization, the Renaissance. In this course, you explore the Italian Renaissance through the gradual (at times abrupt) developments in Florentine painting, architecture and sculpture, and link them with the cultural/social ambiance of the Florentine Republic and its substantial class of wealthy families and scholars. Illustrated lectures investigate the rediscovery of antique Greek/Roman art and thought that launched a new view of humanity and the natural world, and the artistic revolution in which Gothic gave way to Renaissance idealism and sparked the evolution of the West’s notion of the individual human being as the paramount identity.