Renaissance is the name given in the nineteenth century to a broad cultural movement that occurred in Western Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was a period of transition between the Middle Ages and the beginnings of the Modern Age. Its main exponents are in the field of arts, although there was also a renewal in science, both natural and human. The city of Florence, in Italy, was the birthplace and development of this movement, which later spread throughout Europe.
The Renaissance was the result of the dissemination of the ideas of humanism, which determined a new conception of man and the world. The term "Renaissance" was used claiming certain elements of classical Greek and Roman culture, and was originally applied as a return to the values of Greco-Roman culture and the free contemplation of nature after centuries of predominance of a more rigid type of mentality and dogmatic established in medieval Europe. In this new stage, a new way of seeing the world and the human being was proposed, with new approaches in the fields of arts, politics, philosophy and sciences, replacing medieval theocentrism with anthropocentrism.
The current concept of Renaissance (from the French Renaissance) was formulated in the mid-nineteenth century by the French historian Jules Michelet, in his work Renaissance et Réforme, published in 1855. For the first time, Michelet used the term in the sense of a historical period , which would range from the discovery of America to Galileo, and considered it more important for its scientific developments than for art or culture
For its part, the sixteenth century would be marked by the great geographical discoveries initiated with the arrival of Columbus to America in 1492 (establishment of the route of the Cape by Vasco da Gama, 1498, return to the world of Magallanes, 1519-1521, disembarkation of Cortes in Mexico, 1519, conquest of Peru by Pizarro, 1530-1533), as well as the breakdown of Christian unity caused by the Protestant Reformation of Martin Luther (1520), the development of science and technology (Nova Scientia de Tartaglia, 1538, De revolutionibus of Copernicus, 1543, Anatomy of Vesalius, 1543) and the expansion of humanism (Erasmus of Rotterdam, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Ludovico Ariosto, Tomás Moro, Juan Luis Vives, François Rabelais).
