THE RENAISSANCE

About 50 years before Leonardo's birth in 1452, a great change began in Italian society. It came to be known as the Renaissance or 'rebirth', because of the renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman knowledge.

The Renaissance marked an extraordinary flowering of ideas which affected painting, sculpture, architecture and the earliest stirrings of science.

Artists moved away from the mysticism of the medieval period and returned to realism. Italian painters pioneered a system of perspective that created the illusion of three dimensions on a flat surface while in northern Europe artists refined oil painting, allowing for subtle changes in light and colour.

Just as important was the revival of technological innovation among scientists and engineers. The spread of papermaking and the development of the printing press aided the rapid dispersal of these new ideas throughout Europe, while improvements to maps and the astrolabe, a medieval navigation tool, made travel and trade easier.

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