renaissance information
The Renaissance was a rebirth in a second sense. It was a rebirth of classical learning and a rediscovery of ancient Rome and Greece. Renaissance artists and scholars looked back to this Classical past. They deliberately rejected the scholarship and religious thought of the Middle Ages. For them, the Middle Ages were a Dark Age. Nothing original and creative had happened since the fall of Rome. They sought to imitate the art of Classical Greece with its realistic depiction of the human form. They thought that the classical Latin written by Vergil, Cicero, or Julius Caesar was much superior to the Church Latin spoken during their own time. They wanted to purify Latin of its medieval corruptions. In the process of doing so, ironically, they helped to destroy the living Latin of the Middle Ages and turned it into the dead language which it is today.
The Renaissance was a rebirth of the human spirit, a rebirth of creativity. While taking the classical past as its model, the Renaissance was one of the most creative periods in human history, comparable only to the Golden Age of Hellenic Athens in the fifth century before Christ. Florence has often been called the Athens of the Renaissance because so many great artists were born or worked there.