1. WESTERN EUROPE ON THE THRESHOLD OF MODERN TIMES
In the 13th – 14th centuries, Western Europe experienced dynamic economic and social changes. The power of the emerging market economy was concentrated in the urban layer which came to the fore. The most impressive was the advance of the cities in Northern & Central Italy.
Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral in Florence
To the fore – to/in a position of importance or influence

2. HUMANISM & INDIVIDUALISM
Humanism – “Humanista” was enabled to discover the significant difference between classical and later cultures. Studies of Plato and Homer made them suggest that humans could determine their own fate.
A new type of personalities laid the foundations of the Italian economic heyday. They were enterprising merchants and bankers who changed the old rules striving for maximum profit. Good education became directly related to a successful career. Scholarly disciplines dealing with humans and their way of life were grouped in the so-called human sciences – history, philosophy, medicine, mathematics, music, philology. The scholars who dealt with human sciences started being called humanists, while their ideology became known as humanism. It was not God, but the human being with its needs and characteristics that was placed in the center of the new ideology.

3. THE BEGINNING OF ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
The economic prosperity in Italy led to unprecedented cultural advance. Humanists sought inspiration from Antiquity. The best traditions of folk and urban culture were revived.
The contemporaries of the 15th century started to thing of it as Modern Times, separated from Antiquity by the Middle Ages (a time of decline of ancient traditions). The humanist period meant Revival or Renaissance of these traditions in Italy, the successor to Eternal Rome. In the second part of the 15th C. and in the 16th C. Italian humanists and artists moved to many European royal courts and created the conditions for the development of the European Renaissance.

4. THE BEGINNING OF ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
In the 15th C. there was no unified Italian state. There were bigger or smaller states, which were semi-democratic republics or ruled by despots or oligarchy.
“The Italian states were free to go their different ways, stimulated by an intense civic pride which prompted them to compete with each other in cultural as well as political rivalry” (D. Maland, Europe in the 16th Century)

5. LITERATURE AND ART OF THE RENAISSANCE
Dante Alighieri – the founder of the Renaissance literature /”Divine Comedy”/
Works of Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio /”Decameron”/ marked the rise of a new literature that broke the chains of medieval canon.

6. LITERATURE AND ART OF THE RENAISSANCE
Giotto Di Bondone,
The Meeting at the Golden Gate
Giotto, Masaccio, etc. introduced Sandro Botticelli revived the ancient
the “divine perspective” and thus mythology plots full of pagan gods
the images they created became and heroes.
Three-dimensional and voluminous.

7. LITERATURE AND ART OF THE RENAISSANCE
Pierro della Francesca, Battista Sforza and Frederico da Montefeltro
The interest in human personality led to the fast development of
the portrait genre which was little known during the Middle Ages.

8. Printing press
In 1450 the German Johann Gutensberg invented the first printing press in the town of Mainz. The text was put into typographical matrix with changeable lead letters. Printed books started to replace manuscripts. The paper invented in China was used for printing and it totally replaced papyrus and parchment.

9. DISCOVERY OF THE NEW WORLD
The Ottoman invasion hampered links in the Middle East, India and China. Portuguese, Spanish and Italian discoverers began the search for a new route to India through the Atlantic Ocean. On 12 October 1492, the fleet of the Genoese Christopher Columbus reached one of the Bahamas islands. The discovery of America marked the beginning of the Great Geographical Discoveries.
Christopher Columbus