1. New Directions
AP European History
St. Anne’s-Belfield

2. Five key terms summarize the Renaissance as both a movement in art and
a watershed intellectual movement.
• Individualism
• Secularism
• Learning
• Antiquity
• Reform

3. Five key terms summarize the Renaissance as both a movement in art and
a watershed intellectual movement.
• Individualism
• Secularism
• Learning
• Antiquity
• Reform
Which of the above terms are present in the following works of art.
Explain supporting your assertion with evidence from the art.

10. Cimabue, Madonna Enthroned, 1285

11. 1285

12. 1285

13. 1285 Di Vinci, the Last Supper, 1498

23. How did each of the five ideas
represent a departure from the
Middle Ages?
Individualism
Secularism
Learning
Antiquity
Reform

24. How did each of the five ideas of
the Renaissance have roots in the
Middle Ages?
Individualism
Secularism
Learning
Antiquity
Reform

25. The Myth of the Renaissance
Peter Burke
Jacob Burckhardt defined the period in terms of two concepts, “individualism” and
“modernity”…In Renaissance Italy…this “veil first melted into air….man became a spiritual
individual, and recognized himself as such…”
This idea of the Renaissance is a myth…
Burckhardt’s mistake was to accept the scholars and artists of the period at their own
valuation, to take this story of rebirth at its face value and to elaborate it into a book. The old
formulae of the restoration of the arts and the revival of classical antiquity, he added new ones
such as individualism, realism, and modernity…
…Professional historians have become dissatisfied with this version of the
Renaissance….More exactly, it has been undermined by the research of medievalists in
particular. Their arguments depend on innumerable points of detail, but they are of two kinds.
In the first place...so-called Renaissance men were really rather medieval. They were more
traditional in their behavior, assumptions, and ideals than we tend to think- and also more
traditional than they saw themselves.
In the second place, the medievalists have accumulated arguments to the effect that the
Renaissance was not such a singular event as Buckhardt and his contemporaries once though
and that the term should be used in plural. There were various “renaissances” in the Middle
Ages…there was a combination of literary and artistic achievements with a revival of interest
in classical learning, ....and contemporaries described their age as one of restoration, rebirth, or
renovation.