The cultural and intellectual movement that transformed European art, literature, philosophy, and science between roughly 1300 and 1600 -- centered in Italian city-states, organized through patronage, and driven by the recovery and celebration of ancient Greek and Roman learning.
The Renaissance named itself. The scholars and artists of 15th-century Italy decided they were living through a rebirth -- a recovery of ancient greatness after centuries of decline. This act of self-naming was itself a historical innovation: a civilization consciously breaking with its recent past and identifying a more distant past as the model for its future. Whether the Renaissance actually was what it claimed to be is one of the most productive debates in intellectual history. What is not in doubt is that it produced some of the most enduring art, architecture, and thought in Western history.