When one talks about the Renaissance, the most common topic is art and architect ure.

It is true that the Italian Renaissance was marked by some of the greatest and most prolific masters of painting, sculpture and building. It is also true t hat the era marked the emergence of a great deal more. It was a time of awakenin g from the intellectual darkness of the medieval order and the emergence of many of the concepts that would form the basis for civilization as it is known today . The era saw the birth of new attitudes concerning the role of man in his relat ionship to the world and to God. Unfortunately, for the most part, the expansion of the 'role of man' did not include the role of women. "Renaissance (from the French for "rebirth") is a term coined in the nineteenth century originally to denote the revival of art and letters under the influence of ancient Roman and Greek models. This revival began in Italy in the fourteenth century, flourished in the fifteenth, and in the sixteenth reached apogee and t hen crisis in Italy, while it spread through most of Europe. But humanism's clas sical learning alone cannot account for the immense changes that took place duri ng these centuries; moreover, movements originating in the North also contribute d to these changes. Therefore the term Renaissance has also come to denote the e ra in general and its overriding spirit, in which desires intrinsic to human nat ure, generally repressed under medieval feudalism, burst forth with new fervor a nd resulted in a new culture" (Osmond 18). The most conspicuous of these changes were in the world of art and intellectual pursuits. The social structure of Ita ly and the culturally defined gender roles were not as affected as art and archi tecture. Early Renaissance Italy was a collection of city-states dominated by the familie s of power. One of the greatest of these was Florence, under the Medici family. Throughout Italy, the social structure "underwent a gradual social and political revolution beginning in the late twelfth century. The rapid growth of the towns was driven by local emigration, as individuals and families moved from the coun tryside to take advantage of urban economic opportunity. The city of Florence ro ughly doubled in size during the century. ...the proportions of growth can be tr aced through the gradual appearance in the course of the century of new neighbor hoods and churches" (Lansing 38). In the fifteenth century the intellectual pursuit was turned toward the study of humanism, or the understanding of man's role in culture, politics and religion. There grew a belief in the innate dignity and worth of man as individuals and a s separate from the animal in their ability to reason. Out of this new intellect ual drive, the sciences grew. Personages such as Leonardo de Vinci and Michelang elo were able to make significant contributions in art and other areas, such as mathematics. "Geometric relations, mathematical proportion, and the mysticism of numbers played an important part in how painters designed their pictures and ar chitects their buildings. They made the underlying structure itself embody centr al ideas or themes" (Osmond 23). The Renaissance embodied many aspects, including humanism, patronage, political thought, classical scholarship, historiography and religious reformation. John S tephens, in his book, The Italian Renaissance. The Origins of Intellectual and A rtistic Change Before the Reformation, suggests that a number of seemingly chara cteristic Renaissance intellectual and cultural developments were in fact reviva ls of classical ideas, debates and traditions. He asserts that Petrarch's reject ion of knowledge... irrelevant to man' was based on Cicero's portrait of Socrate s, who was said to have turned against intellectual speculation in favor of know ing how to live well' (39). Cicero's and Pliny's reverence for Greek antiquity w as a model for the Renaissance humanists' own revival of the classical past (34) . Pico's advocacy of the unity of truth recalls the wording of Horace's first ep istle where he explained that he had abandoned poetry for philosophy, entrusting himself to no one school' (51). The regard for the fine arts among humanists an d patrons was based on the ancient regard for art and the artist which Petrarch had been the first to revive' (58). The artist enjoyed a place of high esteem as a result of an ability to see truths hidden from ordinary folk' (93). The patro nage shown by the powerful families was a matter of socially defined character, aligning them with the Church in a behavior that favored the artistic growth of

the period. "Scholars working on late medieval and early modern Italian state formation have been slow to think in terms of gender, despite considerable recent attention to aspects of what used to be regarded as private life. Many Italianists have conc luded that legal and institutional forms were often empty appearances, in part b ecause revelations of the corruption of the modern Italian state have simply ren dered older statist models untenable. Scholars have turned instead to analysis o f the state in terms of informal sources of power, notably clientelism. This has led not to a collapse of the distinction between public and private, but rather to a boundary shift. ...The category of private life persists, and women's hist ory is for the most part located within it" (Lansing 34). The cultural values th at were emerging were not inclusive of women's rights, but did have certain infl uences on the upper classes. "Where the feminine was conventionally defined as self-sacrificing and modest, s ome women offered their own redefinitions of what was correct for a woman to do, and pursued programs concentrating on acquiring art for themselves which promot ed their prestige. The studies of the collections from: Jeanne-Baptise d'Albert de Luynes, the bold schemes of Catherine de' Medici and Marie de' Medici, and th e patronage of Elizabeth of Hardwick and Anne Clifford, display women consulting their own concerns. So too does Nadia Tscherny's study of the patronage of Mary Edwards, which charts the commissioning of a woman who styled herself `single w oman' and had herself portrayed by Hogart displaying a speech by Elizabeth I: th e sovereign example of the femme seule. Other women, such as the Roman noblewoma n studied by Marilyn Dunn, chose to focus on women in a different fashion: by bu ilding female convents" (King 613). It was a time when women of the courts were able to learn to read and write and to express, to a minimal degree, their opini ons. The role of women was experiencing its own Renaissance, though not of the s ame magnitude or direction as that of the male populace. Male solidarity was not an independent variable, rather "lineage solidarity buil t on the combination of male and female efficacy... suggests an important qualif ication to assuming the apparent autonomy of male interests." (Strathern 6). Fur ther, "that contrast between male and female is used to symbolize a disjunction of values does not ipso facto imply an antagonism between men and women" (Strath ern 298). The social structure insisted that "the devolution of property in Rena issance Florence depended on the control of women's reproductive capacities and property rights held in and by them. ...property did not devolve to women's chil dren, but was redirected by gift to their natal families. Women could accept the prerogatives and interests pursued by men. For men ...construction of their per sonae in Florence involved managing a relationship with a woman and using the bo na adventitia that clung to her" (Kuehn 74). The Renaissance was not a smooth transitional time. There continued to be disqui et, wars and times of peril. "Following the devastating Sack of Rome in 1527 by forces of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, the spotlight shifts to Venice and c entral Italy with artists such as Giorgione, Titian, and Antonio Correggio, as w ell as architect Andrea Palladio. During the mid to late sixteenth century--in t he wake of the breakup of Christendom into opposing camps, the occupation of Ita ly by foreign powers, and the waning of Venice's trading dominance--an era of un certainty and disillusionment set in. Reflecting this was an art style called Ma nnerism for its extremes of emotionalism, purposeful imbalance and distortion, a nd expressionism" (Osmond 20). The humanism of the Renaissance did not always include a reverence for both gend ers, and an egalitarian view of the classes. Writers such as Machiavelli had exp ressed confidence in the power of human agency to overcome fortune in a manner t hat is not inclusive of the feminine perspective. "Indeed, Machiavelli chooses t he chilling metaphor of violence against women to express the willful overcoming of Dame Fortune, or Lady Luck, as we might call her nowadays. "Fortune," he wri tes, "is a woman, and the man who wants to master her must beat and bully her". The shock effect of such an expression typifies the blunt rhetoric Machiavelli w ields to capture his readers' attention. He also employs it to assert not only t he capacities of princely power when skillfully applied, but the baseness of com

mon humanity as well. Most men are scoundrels in his opinion and must be managed with that in mind. Goodness itself is risky, as the world goes. ... The amorali ty of his tone and perspective earns him the title of the first political scient ist" (Rhu 326). The Renaissance is perceived as a time of intellectual and creative growth, and, indeed, the arts and architectural accomplishments of the era bear out this per ception. The two centuries denoted as the Renaissance in Italy are also known as a period of growth in the sciences, with such known personages as Leonardo de V inci making strides into mathematics, anatomy and other sciences that would open the door for the empirical investigations of later centuries. The greatest of t he Italian Renaissance writers, Niccolo Machiavelli, mirrors one of the least kn own attributes of the time, the social relegation of females. Although it is a t ime where the role of women is enlarged to some degree, it continues to place st rictures on the place and meaning of women that were forged in the writings of t he ancient Greeks, such as Aristotle.