The rebirth of art, humanism, and learning — from the Italian city-states to the print shops and painters of the North.
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The road between the three great Italian centres — Florence, Rome, and Venice — along which artists, scholars, and Medici money flowed to make the peninsula the workshop of the Renaissance.
Florence → Rome → Venice
The path of the universal man himself — from his Florentine apprenticeship to the Sforza court at Milan and the refined circle of Urbino — where art, engineering, and science met in one mind.
Florence → Milan → Urbino
The web of northern trade cities — the Flemish oil painters of Bruges and Antwerp, rising Amsterdam, and Dürer's Nuremberg — where a distinct northern rebirth grew from commerce and craft.
Bruges → Antwerp → Amsterdam → Nuremberg
The movable-type press spread south from the German lands through Basel to Venice's Aldine Press — cheap printed books that carried the new learning faster and further than any generation before.
Nuremberg → Basel → Venice
The network of humanist scholars that bound Europe together in Latin correspondence — Erasmus at Basel, the French court at Paris, and More's London — a shared 'republic of letters' across the North.
Basel → Paris → London
The banking city where the Renaissance was born: Brunelleschi's dome, Botticelli and the young Michelangelo, and the Medici whose fortune paid for it all and whose court read Plato anew.
Where the popes drew the masters south to remake the eternal city: Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling, Raphael's rooms, and Bramante's plan for a new St Peter's at the peak of the High Renaissance.
The maritime republic of Titian's glowing colour and of the Aldine Press, whose cheap portable classics carried humanist learning across Europe from the busiest print centre of the age.
The booming commercial capital of the sixteenth-century North, home of the great Plantin press and a market where new art and new books were traded as briskly as spices and cloth.
The free German city of Albrecht Dürer, who brought Italian theory north and raised the woodcut and engraving to fine art — a crossroads of print, metalwork, and the new science.
The Sforza duchy that kept Leonardo da Vinci for nearly twenty years — painter of the Last Supper, engineer, and anatomist — the fullest embodiment of the 'universal man'.
The southern kingdom whose Aragonese court gathered humanist scholars and where the academy of Pontano revived Latin letters at the meeting-point of Italy and the Mediterranean.
The wealthy Flemish trade city where Jan van Eyck perfected oil painting, its jewel-like detail and mirror-bright surfaces a northern answer to the Italian rebirth of art.
The Rhine city of the great printers where Erasmus settled, editing his Greek New Testament — the humanist scholar whose editions and satires shaped the mind of an age.
The royal capital where Francis I drew Italian masters north — Leonardo died in his France — and where humanism took French form in Rabelais, Ronsard, and later Montaigne.
The small hill-court whose refined circle inspired Castiglione's Book of the Courtier — the manual of Renaissance manners — and where Raphael was born.
The rising Dutch port that would inherit the North's commercial and artistic lead, its merchants soon the patrons of a new bourgeois painting of daily life.
The English capital where humanism arrived with More's Utopia and flowered a century later in the theatres of Marlowe and Shakespeare — the northern edge of the rebirth.