| A | B |
|---|
| Benvenuto Cennini | Florentine sculptor and engraver, who became one of the foremost goldsmiths of the Italian Renaissance, executing exquisitely crafted coins, jewelry, vases, and ornaments. |
| Pope Nicholas V | A distinguished scholar, he planned the Vatican Library to house his collection of over nine thousand manuscripts. |
| Humanism | An intellectual movement that began in Italy in the 14th century. Based on the rediscovery of the classical world, it replaced the medieval view of humanity as fundamentally sinful and weak with a new and confident emphasis on humanity's innate moral dignity and intellectual and creative potential. |
| Secularism | the idea of having a basic concern with the material world rather than the eternal world of spirit. |
| Pico de Mirandola: On the Decency of Man | stressed that man possesses great dignity because he was made as Adam in the image of God before the Fall and as Christ after the Resurrection; man falls somewhere in between the beasts and the angels, but because of the divine image planted in him, there are no limits to what he can accomplish. |
| Lorenzo Valla: On the False Donation of Constantine(1444) | Demonstrates by careful textual examination that an anonymous eighth-century document supposedly giving the papacy jurisdiction over vast territories of western Europe was a forgery. |
| Giovanni Boccaccio: The Decameron | tales that describe ambitious merchants, lecherous friars, and cuckolded husbands and portray a frankly acquisitive, sensual, and worldly society |
| Pope Julius II | (1503-1513) he tore down the old St. Peter's Basicilla and began work on the present strucuture in 1506; he hired Michelangelo to create the dome |
| quattrocento and cinquecento | The 15th century in Italian art. The term is often used of the new style of art that was characteristic of the Early Renaissance, in particular works by Masaccio, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli, Fra Angelico and others. It was preceded by the Trecento and followed by the Cinquecento, which delimits a period of intense and violent changes in the whole fabric of Italian culture. It refers to the century of the Protestant Reformation, of Spanish and Habsburg political domination, and of the uneasy transition to Mannerism in the visual arts. . |
| Leonardo da Vinci | Renaissance artist who contributed such masterpieces as The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa |
| Raphael | master painter and architect of the Italian High Renaissance;best known for his Madonnas and for his large figure compositions in the Vatican in Rome. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. |
| Michelangelo | master artist of the Italian Renaissance whose most famous works include the Sistine Chapel and the dome of St. Peter's Basillica |
