Assessment
It’s very easy for people to overlook the power of ideas, and the Renaissance is one of the clearer examples of this. For more than a hundred years, history teachers have taught students that the Renaissance began with humanism, with the shift toward a celebration of human potential rather than a focus on human limitations. But if you ask most adults what the Renaissance was, they will answer with something along the lines of, “That was when Europeans started making pretty art again.” You can see a beautiful painting. You can’t see the change in perspective that inspired the person to be an artist in the first place. To help make this connection, your assignment is to identify four specific achievements from the Renaissance and then to consider how humanism would have helped inspire each of them. The metaphor of the assignment is a tree, with the achievements as the branches and humanism as the roots.
Directions
Choose four achievements from the Renaissance period (1300-1600). They can be from the lesson or you can research to find them—just make sure they are from the Renaissance!
One in the visual arts (painting and sculpture)
One in literature or poetry
One in science or technology
One additional achievement of your choice in any area (can be a second achievement in one of the areas above)
Describe each achievement and what was new and interesting about it—how it was different from earlier medieval art or science?
Your descriptions and explanations need to be only a few complete sentences, but they should use key terms or specialized vocabulary from the lesson and thoroughly explain what the achievement was, what made it new, and one interesting fact about it. You can paste images of your achievements into the assignment, but the descriptions are what your teacher will be grading. For each achievement, write a brief explanation of how Renaissance humanism might have inspired the person who made it. Explain how humanism could have been the root of the branch you described above.