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How Did the Renaissance End?

A look at the gradual ending of the Renaissance, from the Sack of Rome in 1527 to the rise of the Baroque, Mannerism, and the Scientific Revolution.

How Did the Renaissance End?

The Renaissance didn’t end in a single dramatic event. Rather, the era gradually gave way to new movements — the Reformation in religion, the Mannerist and Baroque styles in art, the Scientific Revolution in natural philosophy — over the course of the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The High Renaissance, the peak of the era’s cultural production, is usually dated to the period between about 1490 and 1527. The Sack of Rome in 1527 is often cited as a symbolic end to the High Renaissance, but the cultural changes that would eventually transform the era had been under way for some time. To understand how the Renaissance ended is to understand the rise of the modern world.

The High Renaissance and Its Crisis

The High Renaissance, centered in Rome, Florence, and Venice, was a period of astonishing concentration of genius. Between about 1490 and 1520, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Bramante, and other masters produced works of unsurpassed beauty and ambition. The high point of the High Renaissance is often dated to 1506, when Michelangelo began work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Bramante laid the foundation stone of St. Peter’s Basilica.

By the 1520s, the High Renaissance was already in crisis. Michelangelo, Raphael, and Leonardo were all dead or near death. Bramante had died in 1514. The new generation of artists, including Giulio Romano, Rosso Fiorentino, Jacopo Pontormo, and Parmigianino, were developing the more elaborate, more artificial, more emotionally intense style that’s called Mannerism. The High Renaissance ideal of harmony, balance, and ideal beauty was giving way to a new sensibility that emphasized tension, distortion, and surprise.

The Sack of Rome (1527)

The most dramatic event in the ending of the High Renaissance was the Sack of Rome in 1527. A large army of mutinous Spanish and German troops, unpaid by the Habsburg emperor Charles V, marched on Rome and brutally sacked the city. The pope, Clement VII, was a Medici, and the pope before him, Leo X, had also been a Medici. The sack was, in part, a punishment of the Medici popes for their alliance with France against the Empire.

The sack was a catastrophe for the city of Rome. Churches and palaces were pillaged, monks and nuns were raped, and thousands of civilians were murdered. The pope was forced to take refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo, and he was eventually imprisoned. The cultural life of Rome, which had been the heart of the High Renaissance, was devastated.

The sack is often cited as a symbolic end to the Renaissance. The dream of a unified Christian Europe, ruled by wise princes and enlightened popes, was shattered. The wealth that had supported the great patrons of the era was, in many cases, destroyed. The great families of Italy, including the Medici, were humiliated. The papacy, which had been the largest patron of the arts, was never again as culturally powerful as it had been in the time of Julius II and Leo X.

The Protestant Reformation

The Protestant Reformation, which began in 1517 with Martin Luther’s posting of the Ninety-Five Theses, had a major impact on the Renaissance. The Reformation shattered the religious unity of Western Christendom, created decades of religious war, and redirected the patronage of art and learning away from the Church and toward secular rulers and private patrons.

The Reformation also contributed to the ending of the Renaissance by creating a new religious consciousness. The Reformers’ emphasis on the Bible, on personal faith, and on the priesthood of all believers shifted the focus of religious life from the institutional Church to the individual soul. The result was a new kind of culture, in which the concerns of the individual and the inward life of the spirit were more important than the classical and humanist ideals of the Renaissance.

In the Catholic territories, the Catholic Reformation (also called the Counter-Reformation) responded to the Protestant challenge by reforming the Church, redefining Catholic doctrine, and creating a new visual and devotional culture. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) reformed the liturgy, condemned abuses, and defined Catholic doctrine in opposition to Protestant theology. The new religious orders, especially the Jesuits, became major forces in the Catholic Reformation.

The Catholic Reformation also produced a new kind of art, more emotional, more dramatic, more focused on the inner life of the believer. The Baroque, the artistic style that emerged in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, was in many ways the visual expression of the Catholic Reformation. The great Baroque artists — Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, and others — produced works of extraordinary emotional power, in which the mystery of faith and the suffering of the saints were conveyed with unprecedented intensity.

The Rise of Mannerism

The Mannerist style, which developed in Italy in the 1520s and 1530s, was a major sign of the ending of the High Renaissance. The Mannerists, including Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Parmigianino, and Giulio Romano, rejected the classical balance and harmony of the High Renaissance in favor of more elaborate, more artificial, more emotionally charged compositions.

Mannerist art is characterized by:

  • Elongated figures in exaggerated poses
  • Compressed, complex spaces that defy the rules of linear perspective
  • Acidic, unusual color combinations
  • Themes of anxiety, ecstasy, and religious or erotic intensity
  • Sophistication and artifice in the handling of materials

Mannerism was a deliberate departure from the ideals of the High Renaissance, and it reflected a new sense of crisis and uncertainty. The certainties of the classical past, which had been the foundation of the High Renaissance, were no longer taken for granted. The result was an art that was more complex, more intellectual, and more emotionally intense than the art that preceded it.

The Scientific Revolution

The Scientific Revolution, which began in the late 16th century and reached its climax in the 17th century with the work of Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, and Newton, transformed the intellectual world and contributed to the ending of the Renaissance.

The new science was based on a fundamentally different approach to the natural world from the humanist approach. Where the humanists had emphasized the recovery of ancient texts and the application of classical models, the new scientists emphasized direct observation, controlled experiment, and mathematical description. The work of Copernicus, Vesalius, and Galileo was based on the careful study of the natural world, not on the authority of ancient authors.

The new science had a profound effect on the way Europeans understood the universe. The heliocentric model of the cosmos, the accurate mapping of the human body, the development of physics, astronomy, and mathematics — all of these were products of the new science. The world of the Scientific Revolution was fundamentally different from the world of the Renaissance, and the transition from the one to the other marked a major turning point in Western intellectual history.

The New Monarchies and the Nation-State

The political changes of the late 16th and 17th centuries also contributed to the ending of the Renaissance. The Italian city-states, which had been the cradle of the Renaissance, gradually lost their independence to the larger monarchies of Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire. The political fragmentation that had made the Renaissance possible was replaced by the centralized nation-state.

The new monarchies had a different attitude toward art and learning from the city-states. The great patrons of the Renaissance, including the Medici, the Sforza, and the Gonzaga, were replaced by kings, ministers, and churchmen who saw art and learning as instruments of state power. The result was a different kind of patronage, more bureaucratic and more focused on political and religious purposes.

The Survival of Renaissance Ideas

The Renaissance didn’t end cleanly. Many of the ideas, techniques, and forms of the Renaissance continued to be influential long after the High Renaissance was over. The classical orders of architecture, the techniques of linear perspective and chiaroscuro, the humanist curriculum of education, the sonnet and the essay as literary forms, the genre of the portrait — all of these continued to be central to Western art and learning for centuries.

The Renaissance is also a continuing source of inspiration. The conviction that human beings are capable of greatness, that classical learning is a treasure worth preserving, that education can transform the individual and society, that beauty and truth are connected — these Renaissance ideals remain a powerful resource in every age. The Renaissance, in this sense, is not over. It is a tradition that we still inhabit, even when we’re not aware of it.

The Lasting Significance

The ending of the Renaissance was not a single event but a long process. The era gradually gave way to new movements, but it left behind a legacy that has shaped the modern world. The art, the architecture, the literature, the philosophy, the science, the politics — all of these are part of the inheritance that the Renaissance left to the centuries that followed.

If you want a single recent book to read next, see the suggestions at the bottom of the page. The standard monograph is also listed; it’s not always the most recent, but it’s usually the one a working scholar will have on the shelf.

The Renaissance, in short, did not really end. It was transformed, gradually, into something new. And the new thing, whatever we choose to call it, is still with us today.

An honest gap. The standard accounts of this period are, in many ways, the accounts of the literate, the urban, and the relatively well-off. The picture you get from the literature is necessarily a partial one, and any responsible overview has to flag the parts it is leaving out.

Sources & further reading

For non-specialists, the most accessible single book on this topic is usually the first in the list. The other two are denser but more thorough.

  • Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy (1986; revised editions discuss the period boundaries)
  • William Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance 1550-1640 (1969, still useful)
  • Recent work by Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern Mediterranean (2000) for the wider context

If you want to go further, the bibliographies at the back of any of these books will lead you to the scholarly literature. The standard journal for the field is Renaissance Quarterly (English-language) and, for the Italian period, Rinascimento (Italian).