The rebirth of classical learning in Italy, beginning in 14th-century Florence and reshaping European art across the next two centuries. Renaissance painters — Botticelli, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian — recovered the human figure, linear perspective and classical mythology as serious subjects, and built the workshop and patronage systems (the Medici above all) that funded the work. The shift was as much intellectual as visual: a confidence that the human body, observed carefully and drawn with mathematical clarity, could express the highest spiritual truths.
