The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw the rise several wealthy and powerful Italian city-states. The Republic of Florence became a center of commerce and banking under the powerful Medici family. Milan, once the capital of the Western Roman Empire (when it was called Mediolanum), flourished in northern Italy. The Republic of Venice, floating on an man-made archipelago in the Adriatic Sea, established a trade empire in the Mediterranean Sea, building a powerful navy to protect its merchant ships. And of course Rome itself, under the leadership of the Pope, remained highly influential.
Following the fall of Constantinople, into these city-states came an influx of scholars, historians, and artists fleeing the Ottoman Turks. With them, they brought many ancient Greek and Roman texts and ideas that had been neglected in Western Europe. Combined, these factors contributed to a flourishing of academic and artistic achievement called the "Renaissance," with the implication that Europe's classical Greco-Roman heritage was being "reborn." Despite this nomenclature, it would not be quite right to characterize the Renaissance as a rejection of the artistic and intellectual traditions of the medieval period. Rather, Renaissance artists and thinkers continued to build upon what came before.
Important painters of the Renaissance included such names as Raphael, Sandro Botticelli, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps most famously, Michelangelo (although he considered himself primarily a sculptor.) Architects sought to recapture the classical style of ancient Rome and Greece, prominently bringing back columns and domes.
The ancient Greek ideals of symmetry and proportion were very much in fashion, and painting flourished with improved techniques in perspective. Sculptors studied the human body in great detail, creating still-unrivaled works of three-dimensional art. The Church itself was a great sponsor of Renaissance art, and religious themes remained by far the most ubiquitous in art. Ancient Greek and Roman mythology were also popular. A school of thought known as humanism developed, focused on an elevated view of the human person; some strands of humanism were quite comfortable with the Church, but others began to question Christian attitudes about man's place in the universe.
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