Towards the end of the fourteenth century a new spirit was rising. Giotto, a poet, painter, architect and sculptor, and Andrea di Cione, known as Orcagna, were two predecessors of the universal spirits that would combine in Florence in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, and bring about a new art, which started the age of the Renaissance.
In the middle of the fourteenth century a development occurred in Italy (from where it would spread), called Rinascimento, or Renaissance This cultural revolution, which separated the Middle Ages from modernity, was accompanied by humanism and the reformation. This development was a return to and rediscovery of the classic arts of Roman and Greek Antiquity. An intensive study of long forgotten poets followed, as did an enthusiasm for sculpture and architectural remains, which were considerable, but mostly in ruins.
Dante Alighieri with his Divine Comedy, Giovanni Boccaccio and his Decameron and Francesco Petrarca and his poems to Laura undoubtedly began this development, which was triggered by man’s changing self-image. But long before the poets dared to approach the topic of turning away from the Gothic, the Italian architect and sculptor Giovanni Pisano, who worked in Pisa, was one of the first to make the attempt. He created the sculpture cycles on Siena Cathedral and some marble Madonnas in Pisa and Padua.
Of equal importance to this development were the technological progress and the new findings in the natural sciences, which came from today’s Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Germany. This period saw Peter Henlein’s invention of a drum-shaped portable pocket watch (about 1510) and Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type book printing (1448). The natural sciences in particular grew through the discovery of unknown continents by seafarers and adventurers such as Bartolomeu Diaz, Christopher Columbus, Giovanni Caboto, Vasco da Gama and Fernão de Magalhães.