Renaissance art and humanism spread
to the rest of Europe through the sixteenth
century. The French kings Charles VIII and
Francis I brought in artists and writers
from Italy. The German painter and en-
graver Albrecht Dürer spent many years in
Italy, observing the works of Italian paint-
ers and sculptors. The Hungarian king
Matthias Corvinus hired Italian architects
to raise new palaces and civic buildings in
his capital of Buda. The Renaissance sensi-
bility arrived in Spain, Portugal, Poland,
Scandinavia, Bohemia, and northern Ger-
many, having a far-reaching effect on writ-
ers and architects. The English Renaissance
was marked by profound literature, includ-
ing the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben
Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe and the
poetry of Edmund Spenser and John Mil-
ton, still considered among the greatest
works ever written in the English language.
Reformation in the Church
The direct questioning of long-accepted
ideas eventually reached the Christian hi-
erarchy. In the late fourteenth century the
church had been split in two, with rival
popes claiming their title in Rome and in
Avignon, a city of southern France. For a
brief period, three men all claimed to be
the true heirs to the Papacy, and the re-
sulting bitter debate greatly damaged the
church’s reputation as an infallible me-
dium between God and the faithful. Al-
though the schism was resolved, the church
fathers continued living as worldly, and
immensely wealthy, monarchs, decorating
their palaces with extravagant art, librar-
ies, and collections and lusting for money,
territory, and power to rival Europe’s secu-
lar kings.
Repelled by the corruption of the
church, dissidents began a close study of
the New Testament and arrived at a novel
concept of the church and the authority it
should hold over believers. The German
monk Martin Luther was inspired to cre-
ate the doctrine of “justification by faith
alone.” Belief in Christian principles, ac-
cording to Luther, should be left to the in-
dividual, and not made dependent on his
good works or the purchasing of indul-
gences sold by the church. Luther broke
with the Catholic Church and the pope,
its leader, and created a Protestant sect
that offered its believers a rival institu-
tion—one that served religious as well as
political ends. The Protestant Reformation
was taken up in northern Europe and in
England, where King Henry VIII rode the
wave of Protestantism to establish a new
religion the Church of England and to de-
clare independence from the pope and
settle his divorce from his first queen,
Catherine of Aragon. But Protestantism
was resisted with great determination by
Catholic rulers, such as the Habsburg lead-
ers of the Holy Roman Empire. The con-
flict would endure for generations and
bring about the devastating Thirty Years’
War in the seventeenth century.New Art and New Science
Renaissance artists developed a more natu-
ralistic depiction of the world. The Floren-
tine architect Filippo Brunelleschi virtually
invented perspective, the accurate depic-
tion of three-dimensional space on a flat,
two-dimensional surface. Leonardo da
Vinci, an artist of a later generation, gave
his paintings great depth with the use of
areas of varying light and shadow. Da
Vinci also applied his personal study of
human anatomy to figures in his painted
canvases, and placed many of his subjects
in a natural setting of mountains, rocks,
and trees. In northern Europe, artists uti-
lized new painting materials. In thePreface