In this unit we looked at the Renaissance and the ideas, discoveries and things that happen that changed our worldviews and our world.

One of the first thing we looked at was the Italian city states:

This area had the correct combination of geography, climate, and history which allowed ideas and commerce to flourish. Also it had lots of people who had become wealthy from trade had the time and money to patronize the arts.

Then we looked at how the economy was rebounding quickly from years of the plague at the end of the Middle Ages. New systems of banking, increased trade, and laws that helped strengthen divisions in society all increased wealth for the middle and upper classes. We also looked at the how people started to think of business as a way to get rich but before they paid everyone the way the church told them to and according to their social status. They just saw their business as a way of making a living.

We also looked at how one of the only reasons most Renaissance artists were able to express their talents was because wealthy individuals called patrons paid them for their artwork. One of the most important of these patrons were the members of the Medici family:

The Medici family was the richest, most famous, and most powerful family in Italy at this time and gave the arts the money that it needed in order to flourish.

Then we looked at some of the main ideas and discoveries that people had that changed what we know and how we think. There were lot of ideas and discoveries in different areas like mathematics and science. A lot of these discoveries where used by artists to create more realistic artworks.

After that we looked at some of the thinkers, artists, mathematicians and scientists of the Renaissance. For this we each chose a thinker, science/mathematicians and an artist (which included artists, architects and authors). I chose Niccolò de Niccoli as my thinker, Filippo Brunelleschi as my architect and Gottdried Wilhelm Leibniz as my mathematician and philosopher.

Here is some of the research I did on them:

Some of those discoveries did not align with what the church said. The church had to defend what the bible said but but there was proof behind those scientific discoveries. This lead to the idea of Humanism: Humanism is more focused on humans and less on God. They still believed in god but they thought humans could do things themselves instead of relying completely on God.

All these discoveries were making people take a closer look at the Catholic Church. Then people started to notice that the Catholic Church was corrupt. It was corrupt because you could basically buy your way out of sin and the people high up in the Church were very wealthy and greedy. Also now that more and more people were learning to read they could read the bible and they saw that a lot of the priests and bishops where not actually following God’s word. Some people started to take action and one of them was Martin Luther. In 1517 Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door in Wittenberg. A wile after this the Catholic Church had a Reformation to fix some problems but it was too late as a new branch of Christianity had begun called the Protestant Church.

Then we learned about all the problems that the Church of England was having. How it kept switching between Catholic and Protestant. It kept switching because of the all the different kings and queens they had as each were of a different religion. That was until Elizabeth I managed to make a church that made neither the Catholics or the Protestants happy, but balanced between the two.

After that we had our main project which was to create a triptych. A triptych is a three panel piece of art and usually the two side panels can fold into the middle. For our triptych the two side panels were supposed to represent the change of ideas and the spread of ideas, and the middle panel was supposed the represent the impact of ideas.

Here is my rough draft of my triptych:

Here is my final draft of the triptych: