The recovery of long-lost Greek literature and science manuscripts and their translation into Latin led not only to an admiration of the achievements of past masters, but also before long a desire to emulate and surpass them. Starting first in Florence, where the “Florentine Renaissance” began in the mid-fourteenth century with the enthusiasm of Petrarch in his search for ancient manuscripts, the restoration of learning spread elsewhere in Italy and then to all of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Renaissance gave rise to the remarkable literary and artistic achievements of such men as Botticelli, Donatello, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Erasmus, among others. The enthusiasm for learning and the expression of individualism characterized those of the Renaissance, differentiating them from the conformity to church doctrine of the preceding centuries that came to be called the “Middle Ages” or the “Dark Ages.”

A contrast developed between the universities, with their need to provide training for clerics and where church matters took precedence, and the new humanistic circles in which laymen and clerics mingled freely under the protection of princes, popes, and such powerful families as the Medici, who gave support to the arts and sciences. Through them, “the modern age began with the acceptance of the autonomy of intellectual methods and problems” to fulfill the desire of knowledge for its own sake, as well as for worldly gain. New findings were investigated, and new things brought to light.