The Renaissance: Researching and Remebering

Our humanities classes have moved through time, finally reaching one of my favourite topics; The Renaissance. From the best artists and brilliant minds to the ever growing businesses, this unit promised to be interesting. Beginning right after the past unit, my class jumped right into economics and ended with a visual project. Throughout the whole thing, each lesson had a question at the end that I worked on, as well as individual assignments.

The Beginning

To get an introduction, the first posts were about defining the time period and the type of businesses that existed at the time. The way I put it “The Renaissance is a time period that happened in Europe when culture was all about art and new discoveries. It was a new time because people wanted more luxury and better lives in this part of medieval society rather than being in small towns with narrow worldviews.” In the first section we also covered how the period started in Italian City-states, along with how people made money through trade and patronage.

 

Changing Ideas

The next section focused on the types of revolutionary people who lived in the era. Each person in the class studied one particular thinker, artist, and scientist/mathematician (mine were Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, and Andreas Vesalius). To culminate all that I’d researched on how they changed ideas in the Renaissance, I put each of their accomplishments in a triple Venn diagram. What they had in common was in the centre. 

Spreading Ideas

For a revolution to take flight, it must spread, and spread the Renaissance worldview did. The invention of the printing press was integral to this, the ability to mass produce the words and knowledge of the Italians helped people in different countries take on the same beliefs. Royals and nobility also contributed to this, by gathering great minds in their courts, or sponsoring artists. There was an assignment to culminate these ideas, where I gave a way idea spread and chose an image to represent this. Religious change was also a huge part of this time period. We learned about the religion at the time, the reformation, and the counter-reformation.

Impact of Ideas

Moving on with the religious aspect, lessons focused on how England and other nations adopted Protestantism. We also read some things about the different monarchs and government structure, and how power shifted around over time. Our groups also completed some activities on the kings and did a couple more readings. The assignment at the end, like the Venn diagram and “blossom”, was an organizer where I broke down the topic into main ideas, important details, and summarizing sentences.

The Big Project

The final part, and most important of this unit was to make a visual representation of everything we had learned in the three sections of the Renaissance and how they impacted Western worldviews. The visual is a triptych, and three panelled image that has one central image, and two in the sides. Each of them could stand alone, but together they had to tell the story of what we learned. The left side was the changing ideas, the right the spreading, and the middle was the impact. After looking at some examples, I realized this was going to be hard. Words weren’t allowed, and we had to make the whole thing on our iPads. My first draft was completely horrible. I tired to photoshop images together, but it ended up looking like a weird collage that didn’t make sense a a single picture.

So over spring break, I kept thinking about this one Star Wars example Ms. Willemse had showed us. It was very minimal and the image spread onto the different panels. This gave me the idea to take four people, one on the left painting a person in the new style, someone on the left printing university plans on a printing press, and then a Renaissance man in the middle that morphed into a 21st century person. After the failed attempt at images, I thought it would be better if a could sketch out my ideas in paper, take a photo, and then trace it on my iPad. This also ended up being very difficult. I’m no great artist, and drawing on the iPad is challenging for me. While it’s not what I want it to look like, I feel as though the end product does communicate what I learned, just maybe not in the most refined style.

This unit was super interesting for me. I love the Renaissance, the art, the scientific advances, everything. We also got to cover a bit of English politics which I love to learn about as well. The hard part came when making the triptych, trying to get it to meet the already-formulated thing I had in my head. The assignments I completed after each section of the unit helped greatly though. I kept referring back to them and was glad that I had put effort into them. This unit stretched out for awhile, because of all the refining on the triptych, but when we finished, I was content with what I’d done and glad I knew much more about the Renaissance.