title: Kate Bush

text: Bush set up her own publishing company, Kate Bush Music, and her own management company, Novercia, to maintain control of her work. Members of her family, along with Bush herself, composed the board of directors. Following the release of "Lionheart", she was required by EMI to undertake heavy promotional work and an exhausting tour. The Tour of Life began in April 1979 and lasted six weeks. It was described by "The Guardian" as "an extraordinary, hydra-headed beast, combining music, dance, poetry, mime, burlesque, magic and theatre". The show was co-devised and performed on stage with magician Simon Drake. Bush was involved in every aspect of the production, choreography, set design, costume design and hiring. The shows were noted for her dancing, complex lighting and her 17 costume changes per show. Because of her need to dance as she sang, sound engineers used a wire coat hanger and a radio microphone to fashion a headset microphone; it was the first use by a rock performer since the Spotnicks used a rudimentary version in the early 1960s.


title: Kate Bush

text: Released in September 1980, "Never for Ever" saw Bush's second foray into production, co-producing with Jon Kelly. Her first experience as a producer was on her "Live on Stage" EP, released after her tour the previous year. The first two albums had resulted in a definitive sound evident in every track, with orchestral arrangements supporting the live band sound. The range of styles on "Never for Ever" is much more diverse, veering from the straightforward rocker "Violin" to the wistful waltz of hit single "Army Dreamers".


title: Kate Bush

text: "Never for Ever" was her first album to feature synthesisers and drum machines, in particular the Fairlight CMI, to which she was introduced when providing backing vocals on Peter Gabriel's eponymous third album in early 1980. It was her first record to reach the top position in the UK album charts, also making her the first female British artist to achieve that status, and the first female artist ever to enter the album chart at the top. The top-selling single from the album was "Babooshka", which reached No. 5 in the UK Singles Chart. In November 1980, she released the standalone Christmas single "December Will Be Magic Again", which reached No. 29 in the UK charts.


title: Kate Bush

text: September 1982 saw the release of "The Dreaming", the first album Bush produced by herself. With her new-found freedom, she experimented with production techniques, creating an album that features a diverse blend of musical styles and is known for its near-exhaustive use of the Fairlight CMI. "The Dreaming" received a mixed reception in the UK, and critics were baffled by the dense soundscapes Bush had created to become "less accessible". In a 1993 interview with "Q" magazine, Bush stated: "That was my 'She's gone mad' album." However, the album became her first to enter the US "Billboard" 200 chart, albeit only reaching No. 157. The album entered the UK album chart at No. 3, but is to date her lowest-selling album, garnering "only" a silver disc.


title: Kate Bush

text: "Sat in Your Lap" was the first single from the album to be released. It preceded the album by over a year and peaked at No. 11 in the UK. The title track, featuring Rolf Harris and Percy Edwards, stalled at No. 48, while the third single, "There Goes a Tenner", stalled at No. 93, despite promotion from EMI and Bush. The track "Suspended in Gaffa" was released as a single in Europe, but not in the UK.


title: Kate Bush

text: Continuing in her storytelling tradition, Bush looked far outside her own personal experience for sources of inspiration. She drew on old crime films for "There Goes a Tenner", a documentary about the Vietnam War for "Pull Out the Pin", and the plight of Indigenous Australians for "The Dreaming". "Houdini" is about the magician's death, and "Get Out of My House" was inspired by Stephen King's novel "The Shining".


title: Kate Bush

text: "Hounds of Love" was released in 1985. Because of the high cost of hiring studio space for her previous album, she built a private studio near her home, where she could work at her own pace. "Hounds of Love" ultimately topped the charts in the UK, knocking Madonna's "Like a Virgin" from the number-one position.


title: Kate Bush

text: The album takes advantage of the vinyl and cassette formats with two very different sides. The first side, "Hounds of Love", contains five "accessible" pop songs, including the four singles "Running Up That Hill", "Cloudbusting", "Hounds of Love", and "The Big Sky". "Running Up That Hill" reached No. 3 in the UK charts and re-introduced Bush to American listeners, climbing to No. 30 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 in November 1985. Bush has stated that she initially wanted to name the song "A Deal With God", but the record company was reluctant because some people might think it was "a sensitive title", but that "... for me, this is still called A Deal With God". The second side of the album, "The Ninth Wave", takes its name from Tennyson's poem, "Idylls of the King", about the legendary King Arthur's reign, and is seven interconnecting songs joined in one continuous piece of music.


title: Kate Bush

text: The album earned Bush nominations for Best Female Solo Artist, Best Album, Best Single, and Best Producer at the 1986 Brit Awards. In the same year, Bush and Peter Gabriel had a UK Top 10 hit with the duet "Don't Give Up" (Dolly Parton, Gabriel's original choice to sing the female vocal, turned his offer down), and EMI released her "greatest hits" album, "The Whole Story". Bush provided a new lead vocal and refreshed backing track on "Wuthering Heights", and recorded a new single, "Experiment IV", for inclusion on the compilation. Dawn French and Hugh Laurie were among those featured in the video for Experiment IV. At the 1987 Brit Awards, Bush won the award for Best British Female Solo Artist.


title: Kate Bush

text: Released in 1989, "The Sensual World" was described by Bush herself as "her most honest, personal album". One of the tracks, "Heads We're Dancing", inspired by her own black humour, is about a woman who dances all night with a charming stranger only to discover in the morning that he is Adolf Hitler. The title track drew its inspiration from James Joyce's novel "Ulysses". "The Sensual World" went on to become her biggest-selling album in the US, receiving an RIAA Gold certification four years after its release for 500,000 copies sold. In the United Kingdom album charts, it reached the number-two position. Another single from the album, "This Woman's Work", was featured in the John Hughes film "She's Having a Baby", and a slightly remixed version appeared on Bush's album "The Sensual World". The song reached number-eight in 2005 on the UK download chart after featuring in a British television advertisement for the charity NSPCC.


title: Kate Bush

text: In 1990, the boxed set "" was released; it included all of her albums with their original cover art, as well as two discs featuring the majority of her singles' B-sides recorded from 1978 to 1990. In 1991, Bush released a cover of Elton John's "Rocket Man", which reached number 12 in the UK singles chart, and reached number two in Australia. In 2007, it was voted the greatest cover ever by readers of "The Observer" newspaper. Another John cover, "Candle in the Wind", was the B-side. In the same year, she starred in the black comedy film "Les Dogs", produced by "The Comic Strip" for BBC television. Bush plays the bride Angela at a wedding set in a post-apocalyptic Britain.


title: Kate Bush

text: Bush's seventh studio album, "The Red Shoes", was released in November 1993. The album gave Bush her highest chart position in the US, reaching number 28, although the only song from the album to make the US singles chart was "Rubberband Girl", which peaked at number 88 in January 1994. In the UK, the album reached number-two, and the singles "Rubberband Girl", "The Red Shoes", "Moments of Pleasure", and "And So Is Love" (featuring Eric Clapton on guitar) all reached the top 30. Bush directed and starred in the short film "The Line, the Cross and the Curve", which featured music from her album "The Red Shoes", itself inspired by the 1948 film of that name. It was released on VHS in the UK in 1994 and also received a small number of cinema screenings around the world.


title: Kate Bush

text: The initial plan had been to tour with "The Red Shoes" release, but did not reach fruition. Thus, Bush deliberately produced her tracks live, with less studio production that had typified her last three albums and which would have been too difficult to re-create on stage. The result polarised her fan base, who had enjoyed the intricacy of her earlier compositions, with other fans claiming they had found new complexities in the lyrics and the emotions they expressed.


title: Kate Bush

text: During this period, Bush had suffered a series of bereavements, including the loss of guitarist Alan Murphy, who had started working with her on The Tour of Life in 1979, and her mother Hannah, to whom she was exceptionally close. The people she lost were honoured in the ballad "Moments of Pleasure." However, Bush's mother was still alive when "Moments of Pleasure" was written and recorded. Bush describes playing the song to her mother, who thought the line where she is quoted by Bush as saying, "Every old sock meets an old shoe", was hilarious and "couldn't stop laughing."


title: Kate Bush

text: After the release of "The Red Shoes", Kate Bush dropped out of the public eye. She had originally intended to take one year off, but despite working on material, twelve years passed before her next album release. Her name occasionally cropped up in the media with rumours of a new album release. The press often viewed her as an eccentric recluse, sometimes drawing a comparison with Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations". In 1998, Bush gave birth to Albert, known as "Bertie", fathered by guitarist Dan McIntosh, whom she met in 1992. In 2001, Bush was awarded a Q Award as Classic Songwriter. In 2002, she was awarded an Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music, and performed "Comfortably Numb" at David Gilmour's concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London.


title: Kate Bush

text: Kate Bush's eighth studio album, "Aerial", was released on double CD and vinyl in November 2005. The album single "King of the Mountain", had its premiere on BBC Radio 2 two months prior. The single entered the UK Downloads Chart at number six, and would become Bush's third-highest-charting single ever in the UK, peaking at number four on the full chart. "Aerial" entered the UK albums chart at number three, and the US chart at number 48.


title: Kate Bush

text: "Aerial," like "Hounds of Love" (1985), is divided into two sections, each with its own theme and mood. The first disc, subtitled "A Sea of Honey", features a set of unrelated themed songs, including "King of the Mountain"; "Bertie", a Renaissance-style ode to her son; and "Joanni", based on the story of Joan of Arc. In the song "formula_1", Bush sings 117 digits of the number pi. The second disc, subtitled "A Sky of Honey", features one continuous piece of music describing the experience of 24 hours passing by. "Aerial" earned Bush two nominations at the 2006 Brit Awards, for Best British Female Solo Artist and Best British Album.


title: Kate Bush

text: In 2007, Bush was asked to write a song for "The Golden Compass" soundtrack which made reference to the lead character, Lyra Belacqua. The song, "Lyra", was used in the closing credits of the film, reached number 187 in the UK Singles Chart and was nominated for the International Press Academy's Satellite Award for original song in a motion picture. According to Del Palmer, Bush was asked to compose the song on short notice and the project was completed in 10 days.


title: Kate Bush

text: In May 2011, Bush released the album "Director's Cut," comprising 11 reworked tracks from "The Sensual World" and "The Red Shoes", recorded using analogue rather than digital equipment. All the tracks have new lead vocals, drums, and instrumentation. Some were transposed to a lower key to accommodate her lowering voice. Three of the songs, including "This Woman's Work", have been completely rerecorded, with lyrics often changed in places. Bush described the album as a new project rather than a collection of remixes. It was the first album on her new label, "Fish People", a division of EMI Records. In addition to "Director's Cut" in its single CD form, the album was released with a box-set that contains the albums "The Sensual World" and the analogue re-mastered "The Red Shoes". It debuted at number two on the United Kingdom chart.


title: Kate Bush

text: Bush's next studio album, "50 Words for Snow", was released on 21 November 2011. It features high-profile cameo appearance of Elton John on the duet "Snowed in at Wheeler Street". The album contains seven new songs "set against a backdrop of falling snow", with a total running time of 65 minutes. The album's songs are built around Bush's quietly jazzy piano and Steve Gadd's drums, and use both sung and spoken word vocals in what "Classic Rock" critic Stephen Dalton calls "a ... supple and experimental affair, with a contemporary chamber pop sound grounded in crisp piano, minimal percussion and light-touch electronics ... billowing jazz-rock soundscapes, interwoven with fragmentary narratives delivered in a range of voices from shrill to Laurie Anderson-style cooing". Bassist Danny Thompson appears on the album, while the sixth track on the album, "50 Words for Snow", features the voice of Stephen Fry reciting a list of surreal words to describe snow.


title: Kate Bush

text: "50 Words for Snow" received general acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 88, based on 26 reviews, which indicates "universal acclaim". At the 2012 Brit Awards she was nominated in the Best Female Artist category, and the album won the 2012 Best Album at the South Bank Arts Awards, and was also nominated for Best Album at the Ivor Novello Awards.


title: Kate Bush

text: Bush turned down an invitation to perform at the 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony in London. Instead, a new vocal remix of her 1985 single "Running Up That Hill" was played. In 2013, Bush became the only female artist to have top five albums in the UK charts in five successive decades.


title: Kate Bush

text: In March 2014, Bush announced her first live concerts in decades: Before the Dawn, a 22-night residency in London running from 26 August to 1 October 2014 at the Hammersmith Apollo. Tickets sold out in 15 minutes. The concerts received universal acclaim. An album of recordings from the concerts, "Before the Dawn", was released on 25 November 2016. Bolstered by publicity around "Before the Dawn", Bush became the first female performer to have eight albums in the UK Top 40 Albums Chart simultaneously, putting her at number three for simultaneous UK Top 40 albums. The only artists ahead of Bush were Elvis Presley, who had 12 entries in the top 40 after his death in 1977 and the Beatles who had 11 in 2009. She had 11 albums in the top 50.


title: Kate Bush

text: On 6 December 2018, Bush published her first book, "How to Be Invisible," a compilation of lyrics. In November 2018, Bush released two box sets of remasters of her studio albums. Vocals from Rolf Harris, who was convicted of multiple sexual assault charges in 2014, were replaced by versions by Bush's son Bertie. A compilation of rare tracks, cover versions and remixes from the boxsets, "The Other Sides", was released on 8 March 2019. It includes the previously unreleased track "Humming," recorded in 1975. In September 2019, Bush released "" / "" on vinyl, in France, as a limited-edition promotional single.


title: Kate Bush

text: In September 2020, Bush became a Fellow of The Ivors Academy, the UK's independent professional association for songwriters, composers and music authors. Following Bush's award, another Fellow, Annie Lennox, commented, "She is visionary and iconic and has made her own magical stamp upon the zeitgeist of the British cultural landscape."


title: Kate Bush

text: Bush's 1985 single "Running Up That Hill" gained newfound popularity in May 2022 after it was incorporated into the plot of the fourth season of the Netflix series "Stranger Things." It became the most streamed song on Spotify in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and globally. Winona Ryder, who plays the character Joyce Byers on "Stranger Things," said she had pushed for the song to be on the show: "I've been obsessed with her since I was a little girl. I've also for the last seven years been dropping hints on set wearing my Kate Bush T-shirts." According to "The Guardian", "Running Up That Hill" has become particularly popular with members of Generation Z, who were not born when the song was first released, and it has appeared in numerous videos on the social media platform TikTok. Bush released a statement praising "Stranger Things" and saying the resurgence was "really exciting".


title: Kate Bush

text: On 10 June 2022, "Running Up That Hill" reached number two on the UK Singles Chart, surpassing its peak of number three from 1985. It was the most popular track of the week in the UK, ahead of "As It Was" by Harry Styles, but a pre-existing chart rule penalised older songs that are streamed. The Chart Supervisory Committee responded by giving the record an exemption from the "accelerated chart ratio" rule due to its ongoing sales resurgence. On 17 June, the song reached number one in the UK, making it Bush's second UK number one. It broke three UK chart records in the process. With 44 years since her last number one, "Wuthering Heights" in 1978, Bush surpassed Tom Jones's 42-year gap between number ones and replaced Cher as the oldest female solo chart-topping artist at 63 years and 11 months. Bush also achieved the record for a single with the longest period taken to reach number one, beating the previous record, held by "Last Christmas" by Wham!, by a year.


title: Kate Bush

text: On the US "Billboard" Hot 100 issue dated 11 June 2022, "Running Up That Hill" re-entered the chart at number eight, surpassing its original peak of number 30 in November 1985 to become Bush's first US top-ten hit. A week later, it climbed to number four in the US, before reaching number three on 25 July. The parent album, "Hounds of Love", also reached a new peak in the US, charting at number 12. The song topped the Australian ARIA Charts to become her second number one single in the country. In France, "Running Up That Hill" beat its original chart peak of 24, placing at number three. "Hounds of Love" also rose in popularity on various album charts, with it reaching number 1 on "Billboard"'s Top Alternative Albums chart, making it Bush's first US chart-topping album in her career. On 10 June, "The Whole Story" rose from number 76 to number 19 on the UK Albums Chart, peaking a week later at number 17. A limited edition CD single was released in September 2022, in this format for the first time ever, through Rhino.


title: Kate Bush

text: Bush's musical aesthetic is eclectic, and is known to employ varied influences and meld disparate styles, often within a single song or over the course of an album. Her music has primarily been described as art pop, art rock, progressive pop, pop rock, avant-pop and experimental pop. Even in her earliest works, with piano the primary instrument, she wove together diverse influences, drawing on classical music, glam rock, and a wide range of ethnic and folk sources. This has continued throughout her career. By the time of "Never for Ever", Bush had begun to make prominent use of the Fairlight CMI synthesiser, which allowed her to sample and manipulate sounds, expanding her sonic palette. She has been compared with other "'arty' 1970s and '80s British pop rock artists" such as Roxy Music and Peter Gabriel. Critic Simon Reynolds of "The Guardian" called Bush "the queen of art-pop".


title: Kate Bush

text: Bush has a dramatic soprano vocal range. Her vocals contain elements of British, Anglo-Irish and most prominently (southern) English accents and, in its use of musical instruments from various periods and cultures, her music has differed from American pop norms. Reviewers have used the term "surreal" to describe her music. Her songs explore melodramatic emotional and musical surrealism that defies easy categorisation. It has been observed that even her more joyous pieces are often tinged with traces of melancholy and vice versa.


title: Kate Bush

text: Elements of Bush's lyrics employ historical or literary references, as embodied in her first single "Wuthering Heights", which is based on Emily Brontë's novel of the same name. She has described herself as a storyteller who embodies the character singing the song and has dismissed efforts by others to conceive of her work as autobiographical. Bush's lyrics have been known to touch on obscure or esoteric subject matter, and "New Musical Express" noted that Bush was not afraid to tackle sensitive and taboo subjects in her work. "The Kick Inside" is based on a traditional English folk song ("The Ballad of Lucy Wan") about an incestuous pregnancy and a resulting suicide. "Kashka from Baghdad" is a song about a gay couple; "Out" magazine listed two of her albums in their "Top 100 Greatest Gayest Albums" list. She has referenced G. I. Gurdjieff in the song "Them Heavy People", while "Cloudbusting" was inspired by Peter Reich's autobiography, "A Book of Dreams", about his relationship with his father, Wilhelm Reich. "Breathing" explores the results of nuclear fallout from the perspective of a fœtus.


title: Kate Bush

text: Other non-musical sources of inspiration for Bush include horror films, which have influenced the gothic nature of her songs, such as "Hounds of Love", which samples the 1957 horror movie "Night of the Demon". "The Infant Kiss" is a song about a haunted, unstable woman's infatuation with a young boy in her care (inspired by Jack Clayton's film "The Innocents" (1961), which had been based on Henry James's novella "The Turn of the Screw");. The title of the song "Hammer Horror" is from Hammer Film Productions' horror movies, and the song's story was inspired by the film "Man of a Thousand Faces" (1957). Her songs have occasionally combined comedy and horror to form dark humour, such as murder by poisoning in "Coffee Homeground", an alcoholic mother in "Ran Tan Waltz" and the upbeat "The Wedding List", a song inspired by François Truffaut's 1967 film of Cornell Woolrich's "The Bride Wore Black" about the murder of a groom and the bride's subsequent revenge against the killer. Bush has also cited comedy as a significant influence. She has cited Woody Allen, Monty Python, "Fawlty Towers", and "The Young Ones" as particular favourites.


title: Kate Bush

text: Bush is regarded as the first artist to have had a headset with a wireless microphone built for use in music. For her "Tour of Life" in 1979 she had a compact microphone combined with a self-made construction of wire clothes hangers, so that she did not have to use a hand microphone and had her hands free and could dance her rehearsed choreography of expressionist dance on the concert stage and sing with a microphone at the same time. Later, her idea was adopted by other artists such as Janet Jackson, Madonna and Peter Gabriel.


title: Kate Bush

text: Musicians who have stated their admiration for Bush's work include Cher, Elton John, Tori Amos, Annie Lennox, Björk, Alanis Morissette, Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, Sinead O'Connor, Dido, Anohni of Antony and the Johnsons, Big Boi of OutKast, Nigel Godrich, Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac, Suzanne Vega, Joanna Newsom, Beth Orton, Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor, Imogen Heap, Sharon Van Etten, Katie Melua, KT Tunstall, Ellie Goulding, Sarah McLachlan, k.d. lang, Erasure, Alison Goldfrapp of Goldfrapp, Tupac Shakur, St. Vincent, Darren Hayes, Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine, Lily Allen, Paula Cole, Charli XCX, Little Boots, Kate Nash, Bat for Lashes, Tegan and Sara, Steve Rothery of Marillion, Sky Ferreira, Rosalía, Beverley Craven, Tim Bowness of No-Man, Chris Braide, Anna Calvi, Kyros, Aisles, Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy, Grimes, Solange Knowles, Julia Holter, Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree, Robyn and Andre Matos.


title: Kate Bush

text: Coldplay took inspiration from "Running Up That Hill" to compose their single "Speed of Sound". In 2015, Adele stated that the release of her third studio album "25" was inspired by Bush's 2014 comeback to the stage. Nerina Pallot was inspired to become a songwriter after seeing Bush play "This Woman's Work" on "Wogan".


title: Kate Bush

text: According to an unauthorised biography, Courtney Love of Hole listened to Bush among other artists as a teenager. Tricky wrote an article about "The Kick Inside", saying: "Her music has always sounded like dreamland to me... I don't believe in God, but if I did, her music would be my bible". Suede front-man Brett Anderson stated about "Hounds of Love": "I love the way it's a record of two halves, and the second half is a concept record about fear of drowning. It's an amazing record to listen to really late at night, unsettling and really jarring". John Lydon, better known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, declared her work to be "beauty beyond belief". Rotten once wrote a song for her, titled "Bird in Hand" (about exploitation of parrots) that Bush rejected. Bush was one of the singers whom Prince thanked in the liner notes of 1991's "Diamonds and Pearls". In December 1989, Robert Smith of the Cure chose "The Sensual World" as his favourite single of the year, "The Sensual World" as his favourite album of the year, and included "all of Kate Bush" in his list of "the best things about the eighties".


title: Kate Bush

text: Marianne Faithfull mentioned Bush's four-octave range should be regarded as a "national treasure". "My favourite instrument in the whole world is the human female voice, and Kate Bush is one of the reasons why. It is, by far, a Stradivarius," Faithfull says. "Which is why she rarely deals with the press or isn't in a rush to record. She's one of the few who can be above all that." Kele Okereke of Bloc Party said about "Hounds of Love": "The first time I heard it I was sitting in a reclining sofa. As the beat started I was transported somewhere else. Her voice, the imagery, the huge drum sound: it seemed to capture everything for me. As a songwriter you're constantly chasing that feeling". Elton John cited Bush's duet with Gabriel, "Don't Give Up", for helping him to become sober, particularly Bush's lyric, "Rest your head. You worry too much. It's going to be all right. When times get rough you can fall back on us. Don't give up." He states, "she [Bush] played a big part in my rebirth." Rufus Wainwright named Bush one of his top ten gay icons. Outside music, Bush has been an inspiration to several fashion designers, including Hussein Chalayan. In 2020, "Harry Potter" author J. K. Rowling chose Bush's 1985 song "Cloudbusting" as the first of ten songs on Ken Bruce's BBC Radio 2 show "Tracks Of My Years" as it reminded her of her student years. In 1998 an asteroid was named after Bush.


title: Kate Bush

text: In 2019, Pone, ex Fonky Family member, released "Kate and me", an entire album created from samples of Kate Bush's work. According to "The Guardian", it's the "first album in history to be entirely produced through an eye-tracking device". Pone declares that Bush is the greatest artist of the past 40 years. A few months later, after hearing about the album and listening to it, the English star wrote a message to the French producer, expressing her emotion, admiration and approval. With this encouragement, Pone reiterates the experience in June 2021 by publishing " Listen And Donate ". An EP composed of four tracks including two originals by Pone, still based on samples of Kate Bush's work, and two remixes produced by SCH and Para One. JR signs the visual part of the project. The goal is to raise funds for the Trakadom association, created by Pone and two doctors in collaboration with the intensive care unit of the hospital of Nîmes.


title: Kate Bush

text: In 2020, "Grazia" magazine conducted an interview with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson. When asked about the five most influential women in his life, Johnson placed Kate Bush at the fifth spot after deliberating between nominating Queen Elizabeth II, Margaret Thatcher, and Bush.


title: Kate Bush

text: In addition to her music, her dancing has been critically acclaimed and proven influential, as well as enduring in the popular consciousness. Critics have noted her "pioneering synthesis of music and movement" and called her work "modern dance at its most powerful". Prix Benois de la Danse winner Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui credits her dancing as a formative influence. For the recurring The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever event, thousands of people gather worldwide to recreate her dance routine from the "Wuthering Heights" music video—the outside version where Bush is seen dancing 'out in the wily, windy moors', adorned with flowers and a flowy red dress.


title: Kate Bush

text: Bush's only tour, the Tour of Life, ran for six weeks in April and May 1979, covering Britain and mainland Europe. The BBC suggested that she may have quit touring due to a fear of flying, or because of the death of a lighting engineer, Bill Duffield, who was killed in an accident after a warmup concert. Mercer, who signed Bush to EMI, said touring was "just too hard ... I think [Bush] liked it but the equation didn't work ... I could see at the end of the show that she was completely wiped out." Bush described the tour as "enormously enjoyable" but "absolutely exhausting".


title: Kate Bush

text: During the same period as the Tour of Life, Bush performed on television programs including "Top of the Pops" in the UK, "Bio's Bahnhof" in Germany, and "Saturday Night Live" in the United States (performing "The Man with the Child in His Eyes" with Paul Shaffer on piano, and later in the programme, "Them Heavy People"), which remains her only American television appearance. On 28 December 1979, BBC TV aired the "Kate Bush Christmas Special". Bush participated in the first benefit concert in aid of The Prince's Trust in July 1982, at which she sang "The Wedding List" with a backing band composed of Pete Townshend, Phil Collins, Midge Ure, Mick Karn, Gary Brooker, Dave Formula and Peter Hope Evans. The performance was later released on VHS video, Laserdisc and CED disc. She performed live for British charity event Comic Relief in 1986, singing "Do Bears... ?", a humorous duet with Rowan Atkinson, and a rendition of "Breathing". In March 1987, Bush sang "Running Up That Hill" at The Secret Policeman's Third Ball accompanied by David Gilmour. She appeared with Gilmour again in 2002, singing the Pink Floyd song "Comfortably Numb" at the Royal Festival Hall in London.


title: Kate Bush

text: Bush returned to headline performance with a 22-night residency, Before the Dawn, which ran from 26 August to 1 October 2014 at the London Hammersmith Apollo. The set list encompassed most of "Hounds of Love" featuring the entire Ninth Wave suite, most of "Aerial", two songs from "The Red Shoes", and one song from "50 Words for Snow".


title: Kate Bush

text: Bush provided vocals on two of Peter Gabriel's albums, including the hits "Games Without Frontiers" and "Don't Give Up", as well as "No Self-Control". Gabriel appeared on Bush's 1979 television special, where they sang a duet of Roy Harper's "Another Day". She has sung on two Roy Harper tracks, "You", on his 1979 album, "The Unknown Soldier"; and "Once", the title track of his 1990 album. She has also sung on the title song of the 1986 Big Country album "The Seer;" the Midge Ure song "Sister and Brother" from his 1988 album "Answers to Nothing"; Go West's 1987 single "The King Is Dead"; and two songs with Prince – "Why Should I Love You?", from her 1993 album "The Red Shoes", and "My Computer" from Prince's 1996 album "Emancipation". In 1987, she sang a verse on the Beatles cover charity single "Let It Be" by Ferry Aid.


title: Kate Bush

text: In 1990 Bush produced a song for another artist, Alan Stivell's "Kimiad" for his album "Again"; this is the only time she has done this to date. Stivell had appeared on "The Sensual World". In 1991, Bush was invited to perform a cover of Elton John's 1972 song "Rocket Man" for the tribute album "". In 2007 Bush's cover won "The Observer" readers' award for Greatest Cover of all time. In 2011, Elton John collaborated with Bush once again in "Snowed in at Wheeler Street" for her most recent album "50 Words for Snow". In 1994, Bush covered George Gershwin's "The Man I Love" for the tribute album "The Glory of Gershwin". In 1996, Bush contributed a version of ""Mná na hÉireann"" (Irish for "Women of Ireland") for the Anglo-Irish folk-rock compilation project "Common Ground: The Voices of Modern Irish Music". Bush had to sing the song in Irish, which she learned to do phonetically.


title: Kate Bush

text: Artists who have contributed to Bush's own albums include Elton John, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, David Gilmour, Nigel Kennedy, Gary Brooker, Danny Thompson, and Prince. Bush provided backing vocals for a song that was recorded during the 1990s titled "Wouldn't Change a Thing" by Lionel Azulay, the drummer with the original band that was later to become the KT Bush Band. The song, which was engineered and produced by Del Palmer, was released on Azulay's album "Out of the Ashes". Bush declined a request by Erasure to produce one of their albums because, according to Vince Clarke, "she didn't feel that that was her area".


title: Kate Bush

text: Bush is married to guitarist Danny McIntosh. They have a son, Albert McIntosh, known as Bertie, born in 1998. From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Bush was in a relationship with the bassist and sound engineer Del Palmer.


title: Kate Bush

text: Bush is a former resident of Eltham, southeast London. In the 1990s she moved to a canalside residence in Sulhamstead, Berkshire, and bought a second home in Devon in 2004. Bush is a vegetarian. Raised a Roman Catholic, she said in 1999:


title: Kate Bush

text: The length of time between albums has led to rumours concerning Bush's health or appearance. In 2011, she told BBC Radio 4 that the amount of time between albums was stressful: "It's very frustrating the albums take as long as they do ... I wish there weren't such big gaps between them". In the same interview, she denied that she was a perfectionist, saying: "I think it's important that things are flawed ... That's what makes a piece of art interesting sometimes – the bit that's wrong or the mistake you've made that's led onto an idea you wouldn't have had otherwise." She reiterated her prioritisation of her family life.


title: Kate Bush

text: Bush's son Bertie featured prominently in the 2014 concert Before the Dawn. Her nephew Raven Bush is a violinist in the English indie band Syd Arthur.


title: Kate Bush

text: Some of Bush's songs contain references to political and social themes, such as "Breathing" which addresses the fear of nuclear warfare and "Army Dreamers" which examines the grief felt by mothers who lose children serving in the military during war. The tracks "Wow" and "Kashka from Baghdad" contain references to gay and LGBT themes. In a 1985 interview with "The NewMusic," Bush stated "I've never felt I've written from a political point of view, it's always been an emotional point of view that just happens to perhaps be a political situation."


title: Kate Bush

text: During the 1979 United Kingdom general election campaign, Bush, who at the time was on a live concert tour of the UK, posed for a photograph alongside the Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan. When asked about her political beliefs in a 1985 interview with "Hot Press", Bush replied that she preferred not to discuss how she voted and added "I don't feel I am a political thinker at all. I don't really understand politics."


title: Kate Bush

text: In the "Comic Strip Presents" episode "", she produced and sang on the theme song "Ken". The song was a satirical take on how Hollywood glamourises and fictionalises political figures, in this particular case Ken Livingstone, the former leader of the Greater London Council, and the lyrics parodied the theme from "Shaft".


title: Kate Bush

text: In 2016, Canadian news magazine "Maclean's" published an interview in which Bush was asked about people being afraid of women holding political power. Bush pointed out that the UK, unlike the US, did have a female premier, Theresa May, who a few months earlier had become the Conservative Prime Minister. The interview quoted Bush as saying: "I actually really like her and think she's wonderful. I think it's the best thing that's happened to us in a long time ... It is great to have a woman in charge of the country. She's very sensible and I think that's a good thing at this point in time." In 2019, Bush published a clarifying statement on her website saying that she was not a Conservative Party supporter and did not endorse any political parties. She wrote: "Over the years, I have avoided making political comments in interviews. My response to the interviewer was not meant to be political but rather was in the defence of women in power."


title: Kate Bush

text: In April 2021, Bush was one of 156 signatories of an open letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson calling for a change in the wording of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to make royalty payments for streaming closer to the amounts paid for radio broadcast.


title: Renaissance

text: The Renaissance ( , ) is a period in European history marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity and covering the 15th and 16th centuries, characterized by an effort to revive and surpass ideas and achievements of classical antiquity. It occurred after the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages and was associated with great social change. In addition to the standard periodization, proponents of a "long Renaissance" may put its beginning in the 14th century and its end in the 17th century.


title: Renaissance

text: The traditional view focuses more on the early modern aspects of the Renaissance and argues that it was a break from the past, but many historians today focus more on its medieval aspects and argue that it was an extension of the Middle Ages. However, the beginnings of the period – the early Renaissance of the 15th century and the Italian Proto-Renaissance from around 1250 or 1300 – overlap considerably with the Late Middle Ages, conventionally dated to , and the Middle Ages themselves were a long period filled with gradual changes, like the modern age; and as a transitional period between both, the Renaissance has close similarities to both, especially the late and early sub-periods of either.


title: Renaissance

text: The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman "humanitas" and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that "man is the measure of all things". This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science and literature. Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the revived knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform across Europe: the first traces appear in Italy as early as the late 13th century, in particular with the writings of Dante and the paintings of Giotto.


title: Renaissance

text: As a cultural movement, the Renaissance encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch; the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting; and gradual but widespread educational reform. In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, and in science to an increased reliance on observation and inductive reasoning. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual and social scientific pursuits, as well as the introduction of modern banking and the field of accounting, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man".


title: Renaissance

text: The Renaissance began in the Republic of Florence, one of the many states of Italy. Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time: its political structure, the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici, and the migration of Greek scholars and their texts to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. Other major centers were northern Italian city-states such as Venice, Genoa, Milan, Bologna, Rome during the Renaissance Papacy and Naples. From Italy, the Renaissance spread throughout Europe in Flanders, France, Britain, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Hungary (with Beatrice of Naples) and elsewhere.


title: Renaissance

text: The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and, in line with general scepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual cultural heroes as "Renaissance men", questioning the usefulness of "Renaissance" as a term and as a historical delineation. Some observers have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity, while social and economic historians, especially of the "longue durée", have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a thousand ties".


title: Renaissance

text: The term "rinascita" ('rebirth') first appeared in Giorgio Vasari's "Lives of the Artists" (c. 1550), anglicized as the "Renaissance" in the 1830s. The word has also been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance (8th and 9th centuries), Ottonian Renaissance (10th and 11th century), and the Renaissance of the 12th century.


title: Renaissance

text: The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period. Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, its influence was felt in art, architecture, philosophy, literature, music, science, technology, politics, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, and searched for realism and human emotion in art.


title: Renaissance

text: Renaissance humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini sought out in Europe's monastic libraries the Latin literary, historical, and oratorical texts of antiquity, while the Fall of Constantinople (1453) generated a wave of émigré Greek scholars bringing precious manuscripts in ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity in the West. It is in their new focus on literary and historical texts that Renaissance scholars differed so markedly from the medieval scholars of the Renaissance of the 12th century, who had focused on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural sciences, philosophy, and mathematics, rather than on such cultural texts.


title: Renaissance

text: In the revival of neoplatonism Renaissance humanists did not reject Christianity; quite the contrary, many of the greatest works of the Renaissance were devoted to it, and the Church patronized many works of Renaissance art. However, a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached religion that was reflected in many other areas of cultural life. In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, were brought back from Byzantium to Western Europe and engaged Western scholars for the first time since late antiquity. This new engagement with Greek Christian works, and particularly the return to the original Greek of the New Testament promoted by humanists Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, would help pave the way for the Reformation.


title: Renaissance

text: Well after the first artistic return to classicism had been exemplified in the sculpture of Nicola Pisano, Florentine painters led by Masaccio strove to portray the human form realistically, developing techniques to render perspective and light more naturally. Political philosophers, most famously Niccolò Machiavelli, sought to describe political life as it really was, that is to understand it rationally. A critical contribution to Italian Renaissance humanism, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote the famous text "De hominis dignitate" ("Oration on the Dignity of Man", 1486), which consists of a series of theses on philosophy, natural thought, faith, and magic defended against any opponent on the grounds of reason. In addition to studying classical Latin and Greek, Renaissance authors also began increasingly to use vernacular languages; combined with the introduction of the printing press, this would allow many more people access to books, especially the Bible.


title: Renaissance

text: In all, the Renaissance could be viewed as an attempt by intellectuals to study and improve the secular and worldly, both through the revival of ideas from antiquity, and through novel approaches to thought. Some scholars, such as Rodney Stark, play down the Renaissance in favor of the earlier innovations of the Italian city-states in the High Middle Ages, which married responsive government, Christianity and the birth of capitalism. This analysis argues that, whereas the great European states (France and Spain) were absolute monarchies, and others were under direct Church control, the independent city-republics of Italy took over the principles of capitalism invented on monastic estates and set off a vast unprecedented Commercial Revolution that preceded and financed the Renaissance.


title: Renaissance

text: Many argue that the ideas characterizing the Renaissance had their origin in Florence at the turn of the 13th and 14th centuries, in particular with the writings of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and Petrarch (1304–1374), as well as the paintings of Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337). Some writers date the Renaissance quite precisely; one proposed starting point is 1401, when the rival geniuses Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi competed for the contract to build the bronze doors for the Baptistery of the Florence Cathedral (Ghiberti then won). Others see more general competition between artists and polymaths such as Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Masaccio for artistic commissions as sparking the creativity of the Renaissance. Yet it remains much debated why the Renaissance began in Italy, and why it began when it did. Accordingly, several theories have been put forward to explain its origins.


title: Renaissance

text: During the Renaissance, money and art went hand in hand. Artists depended entirely on patrons while the patrons needed money to foster artistic talent. Wealth was brought to Italy in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries by expanding trade into Asia and Europe. Silver mining in Tyrol increased the flow of money. Luxuries from the Muslim world, brought home during the Crusades, increased the prosperity of Genoa and Venice.


title: Renaissance

text: Jules Michelet defined the 16th-century Renaissance in France as a period in Europe's cultural history that represented a break from the Middle Ages, creating a modern understanding of humanity and its place in the world.


title: Renaissance

text: In stark contrast to the High Middle Ages, when Latin scholars focused almost entirely on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural science, philosophy and mathematics, Renaissance scholars were most interested in recovering and studying Latin and Greek literary, historical, and oratorical texts. Broadly speaking, this began in the 14th century with a Latin phase, when Renaissance scholars such as Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), Niccolò de' Niccoli (1364–1437), and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) scoured the libraries of Europe in search of works by such Latin authors as Cicero, Lucretius, Livy, and Seneca. By the early 15th century, the bulk of the surviving such Latin literature had been recovered; the Greek phase of Renaissance humanism was under way, as Western European scholars turned to recovering ancient Greek literary, historical, oratorical and theological texts.


title: Renaissance

text: Unlike with Latin texts, which had been preserved and studied in Western Europe since late antiquity, the study of ancient Greek texts was very limited in medieval Western Europe. Ancient Greek works on science, mathematics, and philosophy had been studied since the High Middle Ages in Western Europe and in the Islamic Golden Age (normally in translation), but Greek literary, oratorical and historical works (such as Homer, the Greek dramatists, Demosthenes and Thucydides) were not studied in either the Latin or medieval Islamic worlds; in the Middle Ages these sorts of texts were only studied by Byzantine scholars. Some argue that the Timurid Renaissance in Samarkand and Herat, whose magnificence toned with Florence as the center of a cultural rebirth, were linked to the Ottoman Empire, whose conquests led to the migration of Greek scholars to Italian cities. One of the greatest achievements of Renaissance scholars was to bring this entire class of Greek cultural works back into Western Europe for the first time since late antiquity.


title: Renaissance

text: Muslim logicians, most notably Avicenna and Averroes, had inherited Greek ideas after they had invaded and conquered Egypt and the Levant. Their translations and commentaries on these ideas worked their way through the Arab West into Iberia and Sicily, which became important centers for this transmission of ideas. From the 11th to the 13th century, many schools dedicated to the translation of philosophical and scientific works from Classical Arabic to Medieval Latin were established in Iberia, most notably the Toledo School of Translators. This work of translation from Islamic culture, though largely unplanned and disorganized, constituted one of the greatest transmissions of ideas in history.


title: Renaissance

text: The movement to reintegrate the regular study of Greek literary, historical, oratorical and theological texts back into the Western European curriculum is usually dated to the 1396 invitation from Coluccio Salutati to the Byzantine diplomat and scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1355–1415) to teach Greek in Florence. This legacy was continued by a number of expatriate Greek scholars, from Basilios Bessarion to Leo Allatius.


title: Renaissance

text: The unique political structures of Late Middle Ages Italy have led some to theorize that its unusual social climate allowed the emergence of a rare cultural efflorescence. Italy did not exist as a political entity in the early modern period. Instead, it was divided into smaller city-states and territories: the Kingdom of Naples controlled the south, the Republic of Florence and the Papal States at the center, the Milanese and the Genoese to the north and west respectively, and the Venetians to the east. Fifteenth-century Italy was one of the most urbanized areas in Europe. Many of its cities stood among the ruins of ancient Roman buildings; it seems likely that the classical nature of the Renaissance was linked to its origin in the Roman Empire's heartland.


title: Renaissance

text: Historian and political philosopher Quentin Skinner points out that Otto of Freising (c. 1114–1158), a German bishop visiting north Italy during the 12th century, noticed a widespread new form of political and social organization, observing that Italy appeared to have exited from feudalism so that its society was based on merchants and commerce. Linked to this was anti-monarchical thinking, represented in the famous early Renaissance fresco cycle "The Allegory of Good and Bad Government" by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (painted 1338–1340), whose strong message is about the virtues of fairness, justice, republicanism and good administration. Holding both Church and Empire at bay, these city republics were devoted to notions of liberty. Skinner reports that there were many defences of liberty such as the Matteo Palmieri (1406–1475) celebration of Florentine genius not only in art, sculpture and architecture, but "the remarkable efflorescence of moral, social and political philosophy that occurred in Florence at the same time".


title: Renaissance

text: Even cities and states beyond central Italy, such as the Republic of Florence at this time, were also notable for their merchant republics, especially the Republic of Venice. Although in practice these were oligarchical, and bore little resemblance to a modern democracy, they did have democratic features and were responsive states, with forms of participation in governance and belief in liberty. The relative political freedom they afforded was conducive to academic and artistic advancement. Likewise, the position of Italian cities such as Venice as great trading centres made them intellectual crossroads. Merchants brought with them ideas from far corners of the globe, particularly the Levant. Venice was Europe's gateway to trade with the East, and a producer of fine glass, while Florence was a capital of textiles. The wealth such business brought to Italy meant large public and private artistic projects could be commissioned and individuals had more leisure time for study.


title: Renaissance

text: One theory that has been advanced is that the devastation in Florence caused by the Black Death, which hit Europe between 1348 and 1350, resulted in a shift in the world view of people in 14th century Italy. Italy was particularly badly hit by the plague, and it has been speculated that the resulting familiarity with death caused thinkers to dwell more on their lives on Earth, rather than on spirituality and the afterlife. It has also been argued that the Black Death prompted a new wave of piety, manifested in the sponsorship of religious works of art. However, this does not fully explain why the Renaissance occurred specifically in Italy in the 14th century. The Black Death was a pandemic that affected all of Europe in the ways described, not only Italy. The Renaissance's emergence in Italy was most likely the result of the complex interaction of the above factors.


title: Renaissance

text: The plague was carried by fleas on sailing vessels returning from the ports of Asia, spreading quickly due to lack of proper sanitation: the population of England, then about 4.2 million, lost 1.4 million people to the bubonic plague. Florence's population was nearly halved in the year 1347. As a result of the decimation in the populace the value of the working class increased, and commoners came to enjoy more freedom. To answer the increased need for labor, workers traveled in search of the most favorable position economically.


title: Renaissance

text: The demographic decline due to the plague had economic consequences: the prices of food dropped and land values declined by 30–40% in most parts of Europe between 1350 and 1400. Landholders faced a great loss, but for ordinary men and women it was a windfall. The survivors of the plague found not only that the prices of food were cheaper but also that lands were more abundant, and many of them inherited property from their dead relatives.


title: Renaissance

text: The spread of disease was significantly more rampant in areas of poverty. Epidemics ravaged cities, particularly children. Plagues were easily spread by lice, unsanitary drinking water, armies, or by poor sanitation. Children were hit the hardest because many diseases, such as typhus and congenital syphilis, target the immune system, leaving young children without a fighting chance. Children in city dwellings were more affected by the spread of disease than the children of the wealthy.


title: Renaissance

text: The Black Death caused greater upheaval to Florence's social and political structure than later epidemics. Despite a significant number of deaths among members of the ruling classes, the government of Florence continued to function during this period. Formal meetings of elected representatives were suspended during the height of the epidemic due to the chaotic conditions in the city, but a small group of officials was appointed to conduct the affairs of the city, which ensured continuity of government.


title: Renaissance

text: It has long been a matter of debate why the Renaissance began in Florence, and not elsewhere in Italy. Scholars have noted several features unique to Florentine cultural life that may have caused such a cultural movement. Many have emphasized the role played by the Medici, a banking family and later ducal ruling house, in patronizing and stimulating the arts. Lorenzo de' Medici (1449–1492) was the catalyst for an enormous amount of arts patronage, encouraging his countrymen to commission works from the leading artists of Florence, including Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, and Michelangelo Buonarroti. Works by Neri di Bicci, Botticelli, da Vinci, and Filippino Lippi had been commissioned additionally by the Convent of San Donato in Scopeto in Florence.


title: Renaissance

text: The Renaissance was certainly underway before Lorenzo de' Medici came to power – indeed, before the Medici family itself achieved hegemony in Florentine society. Some historians have postulated that Florence was the birthplace of the Renaissance as a result of luck, i.e., because "Great Men" were born there by chance: Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli and Michelangelo were all born in Tuscany. Arguing that such chance seems improbable, other historians have contended that these "Great Men" were only able to rise to prominence because of the prevailing cultural conditions at the time.


title: Renaissance

text: In some ways, Renaissance humanism was not a philosophy but a method of learning. In contrast to the medieval scholastic mode, which focused on resolving contradictions between authors, Renaissance humanists would study ancient texts in the original and appraise them through a combination of reasoning and empirical evidence. Humanist education was based on the programme of "Studia Humanitatis", the study of five humanities: poetry, grammar, history, moral philosophy, and rhetoric. Although historians have sometimes struggled to define humanism precisely, most have settled on "a middle of the road definition... the movement to recover, interpret, and assimilate the language, literature, learning and values of ancient Greece and Rome". Above all, humanists asserted "the genius of man ... the unique and extraordinary ability of the human mind".


title: Renaissance

text: Humanist scholars shaped the intellectual landscape throughout the early modern period. Political philosophers such as Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas More revived the ideas of Greek and Roman thinkers and applied them in critiques of contemporary government, following the Islamic steps of Ibn Khaldun. Pico della Mirandola wrote the "manifesto" of the Renaissance, the "Oration on the Dignity of Man", a vibrant defence of thinking. Matteo Palmieri (1406–1475), another humanist, is most known for his work "Della vita civile" ("On Civic Life"; printed 1528), which advocated civic humanism, and for his influence in refining the Tuscan vernacular to the same level as Latin. Palmieri drew on Roman philosophers and theorists, especially Cicero, who, like Palmieri, lived an active public life as a citizen and official, as well as a theorist and philosopher and also Quintilian. Perhaps the most succinct expression of his perspective on humanism is in a 1465 poetic work "La città di vita", but an earlier work, "Della vita civile", is more wide-ranging. Composed as a series of dialogues set in a country house in the Mugello countryside outside Florence during the plague of 1430, Palmieri expounds on the qualities of the ideal citizen. The dialogues include ideas about how children develop mentally and physically, how citizens can conduct themselves morally, how citizens and states can ensure probity in public life, and an important debate on the difference between that which is pragmatically useful and that which is honest.


title: Renaissance

text: The humanists believed that it is important to transcend to the afterlife with a perfect mind and body, which could be attained with education. The purpose of humanism was to create a universal man whose person combined intellectual and physical excellence and who was capable of functioning honorably in virtually any situation. This ideology was referred to as the "uomo universale", an ancient Greco-Roman ideal. Education during the Renaissance was mainly composed of ancient literature and history as it was thought that the classics provided moral instruction and an intensive understanding of human behavior.


title: Renaissance

text: A unique characteristic of some Renaissance libraries is that they were open to the public. These libraries were places where ideas were exchanged and where scholarship and reading were considered both pleasurable and beneficial to the mind and soul. As freethinking was a hallmark of the age, many libraries contained a wide range of writers. Classical texts could be found alongside humanist writings. These informal associations of intellectuals profoundly influenced Renaissance culture. Some of the richest "bibliophiles" built libraries as temples to books and knowledge. A number of libraries appeared as manifestations of immense wealth joined with a love of books. In some cases, cultivated library builders were also committed to offering others the opportunity to use their collections. Prominent aristocrats and princes of the Church created great libraries for the use of their courts, called "court libraries", and were housed in lavishly designed monumental buildings decorated with ornate woodwork, and the walls adorned with frescoes (Murray, Stuart A.P.).


title: Renaissance

text: Renaissance art marks a cultural rebirth at the close of the Middle Ages and rise of the Modern world. One of the distinguishing features of Renaissance art was its development of highly realistic linear perspective. Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337) is credited with first treating a painting as a window into space, but it was not until the demonstrations of architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) and the subsequent writings of Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) that perspective was formalized as an artistic technique.


title: Renaissance

text: The development of perspective was part of a wider trend towards realism in the arts. Painters developed other techniques, studying light, shadow, and, famously in the case of Leonardo da Vinci, human anatomy. Underlying these changes in artistic method was a renewed desire to depict the beauty of nature and to unravel the axioms of aesthetics, with the works of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael representing artistic pinnacles that were much imitated by other artists. Other notable artists include Sandro Botticelli, working for the Medici in Florence, Donatello, another Florentine, and Titian in Venice, among others.


title: Renaissance

text: In the Netherlands, a particularly vibrant artistic culture developed. The work of Hugo van der Goes and Jan van Eyck was particularly influential on the development of painting in Italy, both technically with the introduction of oil paint and canvas, and stylistically in terms of naturalism in representation. Later, the work of Pieter Brueghel the Elder would inspire artists to depict themes of everyday life.


title: Renaissance

text: In architecture, Filippo Brunelleschi was foremost in studying the remains of ancient classical buildings. With rediscovered knowledge from the 1st-century writer Vitruvius and the flourishing discipline of mathematics, Brunelleschi formulated the Renaissance style that emulated and improved on classical forms. His major feat of engineering was building the dome of the Florence Cathedral. Another building demonstrating this style is the church of St. Andrew in Mantua, built by Alberti. The outstanding architectural work of the High Renaissance was the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica, combining the skills of Bramante, Michelangelo, Raphael, Sangallo and Maderno.


title: Renaissance

text: During the Renaissance, architects aimed to use columns, pilasters, and entablatures as an integrated system. The Roman orders types of columns are used: Tuscan and Composite. These can either be structural, supporting an arcade or architrave, or purely decorative, set against a wall in the form of pilasters. One of the first buildings to use pilasters as an integrated system was in the Old Sacristy (1421–1440) by Brunelleschi. Arches, semi-circular or (in the Mannerist style) segmental, are often used in arcades, supported on piers or columns with capitals. There may be a section of entablature between the capital and the springing of the arch. Alberti was one of the first to use the arch on a monumental. Renaissance vaults do not have ribs; they are semi-circular or segmental and on a square plan, unlike the Gothic vault, which is frequently rectangular.


title: Renaissance

text: Renaissance artists were not pagans, although they admired antiquity and kept some ideas and symbols of the medieval past. Nicola Pisano (c. 1220 – c. 1278) imitated classical forms by portraying scenes from the Bible. His "Annunciation", from the Baptistry at Pisa, demonstrates that classical models influenced Italian art before the Renaissance took root as a literary movement.


title: Renaissance

text: Applied innovation extended to commerce. At the end of the 15th century, Luca Pacioli published the first work on bookkeeping, making him the founder of accounting.


title: Renaissance

text: The rediscovery of ancient texts and the invention of the printing press in about 1440 democratized learning and allowed a faster propagation of more widely distributed ideas. In the first period of the Italian Renaissance, humanists favored the study of humanities over natural philosophy or applied mathematics, and their reverence for classical sources further enshrined the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of the universe. Writing around 1450, Nicholas Cusanus anticipated the heliocentric worldview of Copernicus, but in a philosophical fashion.


title: Renaissance

text: Science and art were intermingled in the early Renaissance, with polymath artists such as Leonardo da Vinci making observational drawings of anatomy and nature. Da Vinci set up controlled experiments in water flow, medical dissection, and systematic study of movement and aerodynamics, and he devised principles of research method that led Fritjof Capra to classify him as the "father of modern science". Other examples of Da Vinci's contribution during this period include machines designed to saw marbles and lift monoliths, and new discoveries in acoustics, botany, geology, anatomy, and mechanics.


title: Renaissance

text: A suitable environment had developed to question classical scientific doctrine. The discovery in 1492 of the New World by Christopher Columbus challenged the classical worldview. The works of Ptolemy (in geography) and Galen (in medicine) were found to not always match everyday observations. As the Reformation and Counter-Reformation clashed, the Northern Renaissance showed a decisive shift in focus from Aristotelean natural philosophy to chemistry and the biological sciences (botany, anatomy, and medicine). The willingness to question previously held truths and search for new answers resulted in a period of major scientific advancements.


title: Renaissance

text: Some view this as a "scientific revolution", heralding the beginning of the modern age, others as an acceleration of a continuous process stretching from the ancient world to the present day. Significant scientific advances were made during this time by Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler. Copernicus, in "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" ("On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres"), posited that the Earth moved around the Sun. "De humani corporis fabrica" ("On the Workings of the Human Body") by Andreas Vesalius, gave a new confidence to the role of dissection, observation, and the mechanistic view of anatomy.


title: Renaissance

text: Another important development was in the "process" for discovery, the scientific method, focusing on empirical evidence and the importance of mathematics, while discarding much of Aristotelian science. Early and influential proponents of these ideas included Copernicus, Galileo, and Francis Bacon. The new scientific method led to great contributions in the fields of astronomy, physics, biology, and anatomy.


title: Renaissance

text: During the Renaissance, extending from 1450 to 1650, every continent was visited and mostly mapped by Europeans, except the south polar continent now known as Antarctica. This development is depicted in the large world map "Nova Totius Terrarum Orbis Tabula" made by the Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu in 1648 to commemorate the Peace of Westphalia.


title: Renaissance

text: In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain seeking a direct route to India of the Delhi Sultanate. He accidentally stumbled upon the Americas, but believed he had reached the East Indies.


title: Renaissance

text: In 1606, the Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon sailed from the East Indies in the VOC ship Duyfken and landed in Australia. He charted about 300 km of the west coast of Cape York Peninsula in Queensland. More than thirty Dutch expeditions followed, mapping sections of the north, west, and south coasts. In 1642–1643, Abel Tasman circumnavigated the continent, proving that it was not joined to the imagined south polar continent.


title: Renaissance

text: By 1650, Dutch cartographers had mapped most of the coastline of the continent, which they named New Holland, except the east coast which was charted in 1770 by James Cook.


title: Renaissance

text: The long-imagined south polar continent was eventually sighted in 1820. Throughout the Renaissance it had been known as Terra Australis, or 'Australia' for short. However, after that name was transferred to New Holland in the nineteenth century, the new name of 'Antarctica' was bestowed on the south polar continent.


title: Renaissance

text: From this changing society emerged a common, unifying musical language, in particular the polyphonic style of the Franco-Flemish school. The development of printing made distribution of music possible on a wide scale. Demand for music as entertainment and as an activity for educated amateurs increased with the emergence of a bourgeois class. Dissemination of chansons, motets, and masses throughout Europe coincided with the unification of polyphonic practice into the fluid style that culminated in the second half of the sixteenth century in the work of composers such as Palestrina, Lassus, Victoria, and William Byrd.


title: Renaissance

text: The new ideals of humanism, although more secular in some aspects, developed against a Christian backdrop, especially in the Northern Renaissance. Much, if not most, of the new art was commissioned by or in dedication to the Church. However, the Renaissance had a profound effect on contemporary theology, particularly in the way people perceived the relationship between man and God. Many of the period's foremost theologians were followers of the humanist method, including Erasmus, Zwingli, Thomas More, Martin Luther, and John Calvin.


title: Renaissance

text: The Renaissance began in times of religious turmoil. The late Middle Ages was a period of political intrigue surrounding the Papacy, culminating in the Western Schism, in which three men simultaneously claimed to be true Bishop of Rome. While the schism was resolved by the Council of Constance (1414), a resulting reform movement known as Conciliarism sought to limit the power of the pope. Although the papacy eventually emerged supreme in ecclesiastical matters by the Fifth Council of the Lateran (1511), it was dogged by continued accusations of corruption, most famously in the person of Pope Alexander VI, who was accused variously of simony, nepotism, and fathering children (most of whom were married off, presumably for the consolidation of power) while a cardinal.


title: Renaissance

text: Churchmen such as Erasmus and Luther proposed reform to the Church, often based on humanist textual criticism of the New Testament. In October 1517 Luther published the "Ninety-five Theses", challenging papal authority and criticizing its perceived corruption, particularly with regard to instances of sold indulgences. The 95 Theses led to the Reformation, a break with the Roman Catholic Church that previously claimed hegemony in Western Europe. Humanism and the Renaissance therefore played a direct role in sparking the Reformation, as well as in many other contemporaneous religious debates and conflicts.


title: Renaissance

text: Pope Paul III came to the papal throne (1534–1549) after the sack of Rome in 1527, with uncertainties prevalent in the Catholic Church following the Protestant Reformation. Nicolaus Copernicus dedicated "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) to Paul III, who became the grandfather of Alessandro Farnese, who had paintings by Titian, Michelangelo, and Raphael, as well as an important collection of drawings, and who commissioned the masterpiece of Giulio Clovio, arguably the last major illuminated manuscript, the "Farnese Hours".


title: Renaissance

text: By the 15th century, writers, artists, and architects in Italy were well aware of the transformations that were taking place and were using phrases such as "modi antichi" (in the antique manner) or "alle romana et alla antica" (in the manner of the Romans and the ancients) to describe their work. In the 1330s Petrarch referred to pre-Christian times as "antiqua" (ancient) and to the Christian period as "nova" (new). From Petrarch's Italian perspective, this new period (which included his own time) was an age of national eclipse.


title: Renaissance

text: Leonardo Bruni was the first to use tripartite periodization in his "History of the Florentine People" (1442). Bruni's first two periods were based on those of Petrarch, but he added a third period because he believed that Italy was no longer in a state of decline. Flavio Biondo used a similar framework in "Decades of History from the Deterioration of the Roman Empire" (1439–1453).


title: Renaissance

text: Humanist historians argued that contemporary scholarship restored direct links to the classical period, thus bypassing the Medieval period, which they then named for the first time the "Middle Ages". The term first appears in Latin in 1469 as "media tempestas" (middle times). The term "rinascita" (rebirth) first appeared, however, in its broad sense in Giorgio Vasari's "Lives of the Artists", 1550, revised 1568. Vasari divides the age into three phases: the first phase contains Cimabue, Giotto, and Arnolfo di Cambio; the second phase contains Masaccio, Brunelleschi, and Donatello; the third centers on Leonardo da Vinci and culminates with Michelangelo. It was not just the growing awareness of classical antiquity that drove this development, according to Vasari, but also the growing desire to study and imitate nature.


title: Renaissance

text: In the 15th century, the Renaissance spread rapidly from its birthplace in Florence to the rest of Italy and soon to the rest of Europe. The invention of the printing press by German printer Johannes Gutenberg allowed the rapid transmission of these new ideas. As it spread, its ideas diversified and changed, being adapted to local culture. In the 20th century, scholars began to break the Renaissance into regional and national movements.


title: Renaissance

text: In England, the sixteenth century marked the beginning of the English Renaissance with the work of writers William Shakespeare (1564 –1616), Christopher Marlowe (1564 – 1593), Edmund Spenser (1552/1553 – 1599), Sir Thomas More (1478 – 1535), Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), Sir Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586), architects (such as Inigo Jones (1573 – 1652), who introduced Italianate architecture to England), and composers such as Thomas Tallis (1505 – 1585), John Taverner (c. 1490 – 1545), and William Byrd (c.1539/40 or 1543 – 1623).


title: Renaissance

text: The word "Renaissance" is borrowed from the French language, where it means "re-birth". It was first used in the eighteenth century and was later popularized by French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) in his 1855 work, "Histoire de France" (History of France).


title: Renaissance

text: In 1495 the Italian Renaissance arrived in France, imported by King Charles VIII after his invasion of Italy. A factor that promoted the spread of secularism was the inability of the Church to offer assistance against the Black Death. Francis I imported Italian art and artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, and built ornate palaces at great expense. Writers such as François Rabelais, Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, and Michel de Montaigne, painters such as Jean Clouet, and musicians such as Jean Mouton also borrowed from the spirit of the Renaissance.


title: Renaissance

text: In 1533, a fourteen-year-old Caterina de' Medici (1519–1589), born in Florence to Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino and Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne, married Henry II of France, second son of King Francis I and Queen Claude. Though she became famous and infamous for her role in France's religious wars, she made a direct contribution in bringing arts, sciences, and music (including the origins of ballet) to the French court from her native Florence.


title: Renaissance

text: In the second half of the 15th century, the Renaissance spirit spread to Germany and the Low Countries, where the development of the printing press (ca. 1450) and Renaissance artists such as Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) predated the influence from Italy. In the early Protestant areas of the country humanism became closely linked to the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation, and the art and writing of the German Renaissance frequently reflected this dispute. However, the Gothic style and medieval scholastic philosophy remained exclusively until the turn of the 16th century. Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg (ruling 1493–1519) was the first truly Renaissance monarch of the Holy Roman Empire.


title: Renaissance

text: After Italy, Hungary was the first European country where the Renaissance appeared. The Renaissance style came directly from Italy during the Quattrocento to Hungary first in the Central European region, thanks to the development of early Hungarian-Italian relationships—not only in dynastic connections, but also in cultural, humanistic and commercial relations—growing in strength from the 14th century. The relationship between Hungarian and Italian Gothic styles was a second reason—exaggerated breakthrough of walls is avoided, preferring clean and light structures. Large-scale building schemes provided ample and long term work for the artists, for example, the building of the Friss (New) Castle in Buda, the castles of Visegrád, Tata, and Várpalota. In Sigismund's court there were patrons such as Pipo Spano, a descendant of the Scolari family of Florence, who invited Manetto Ammanatini and Masolino da Pannicale to Hungary.


title: Renaissance

text: The new Italian trend combined with existing national traditions to create a particular local Renaissance art. Acceptance of Renaissance art was furthered by the continuous arrival of humanist thought in the country. Many young Hungarians studying at Italian universities came closer to the Florentine humanist center, so a direct connection with Florence evolved. The growing number of Italian traders moving to Hungary, specially to Buda, helped this process. New thoughts were carried by the humanist prelates, among them Vitéz János, archbishop of Esztergom, one of the founders of Hungarian humanism. During the long reign of emperor Sigismund of Luxemburg the Royal Castle of Buda became probably the largest Gothic palace of the late Middle Ages. King Matthias Corvinus (r. 1458–1490) rebuilt the palace in early Renaissance style and further expanded it.


title: Renaissance

text: After the marriage in 1476 of King Matthias to Beatrice of Naples, Buda became one of the most important artistic centers of the Renaissance north of the Alps. The most important humanists living in Matthias' court were Antonio Bonfini and the famous Hungarian poet Janus Pannonius. András Hess set up a printing press in Buda in 1472. Matthias Corvinus's library, the Bibliotheca Corviniana, was Europe's greatest collections of secular books: historical chronicles, philosophic and scientific works in the 15th century. His library was second only in size to the Vatican Library. (However, the Vatican Library mainly contained Bibles and religious materials.) In 1489, Bartolomeo della Fonte of Florence wrote that Lorenzo de' Medici founded his own Greek-Latin library encouraged by the example of the Hungarian king. Corvinus's library is part of UNESCO World Heritage.


title: Renaissance

text: Matthias started at least two major building projects. The works in Buda and Visegrád began in about 1479. Two new wings and a hanging garden were built at the royal castle of Buda, and the palace at Visegrád was rebuilt in Renaissance style. Matthias appointed the Italian Chimenti Camicia and the Dalmatian Giovanni Dalmata to direct these projects. Matthias commissioned the leading Italian artists of his age to embellish his palaces: for instance, the sculptor Benedetto da Majano and the painters Filippino Lippi and Andrea Mantegna worked for him. A copy of Mantegna's portrait of Matthias survived. Matthias also hired the Italian military engineer Aristotele Fioravanti to direct the rebuilding of the forts along the southern frontier. He had new monasteries built in Late Gothic style for the Franciscans in Kolozsvár, Szeged and Hunyad, and for the Paulines in Fejéregyháza. In the spring of 1485, Leonardo da Vinci travelled to Hungary on behalf of Sforza to meet king Matthias Corvinus, and was commissioned by him to paint a Madonna.


title: Renaissance

text: Matthias enjoyed the company of Humanists and had lively discussions on various topics with them. The fame of his magnanimity encouraged many scholarsmostly Italianto settle in Buda. Antonio Bonfini, Pietro Ranzano, Bartolomeo Fonzio, and Francesco Bandini spent many years in Matthias's court. This circle of educated men introduced the ideas of Neoplatonism to Hungary. Like all intellectuals of his age, Matthias was convinced that the movements and combinations of the stars and planets exercised influence on individuals' life and on the history of nations. Galeotto Marzio described him as "king and astrologer", and Antonio Bonfini said Matthias "never did anything without consulting the stars". Upon his request, the famous astronomers of the age, Johannes Regiomontanus and Marcin Bylica, set up an observatory in Buda and installed it with astrolabes and celestial globes. Regiomontanus dedicated his book on navigation that was used by Christopher Columbus to Matthias.


title: Renaissance

text: Other important figures of Hungarian Renaissance include Bálint Balassi (poet), Sebestyén Tinódi Lantos (poet), Bálint Bakfark (composer and lutenist), and Master MS (fresco painter).


title: Renaissance

text: Culture in the Netherlands at the end of the 15th century was influenced by the Italian Renaissance through trade via Bruges, which made Flanders wealthy. Its nobles commissioned artists who became known across Europe. In science, the anatomist Andreas Vesalius led the way; in cartography, Gerardus Mercator's map assisted explorers and navigators. In art, Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting ranged from the strange work of Hieronymus Bosch to the everyday life depictions of Pieter Brueghel the Elder.


title: Renaissance

text: The Renaissance in Northern Europe has been termed the "Northern Renaissance". While Renaissance ideas were moving north from Italy, there was a simultaneous southward spread of some areas of innovation, particularly in music. The music of the 15th-century Burgundian School defined the beginning of the Renaissance in music, and the polyphony of the Netherlanders, as it moved with the musicians themselves into Italy, formed the core of the first true international style in music since the standardization of Gregorian Chant in the 9th century. The culmination of the Netherlandish school was in the music of the Italian composer Palestrina. At the end of the 16th century Italy again became a center of musical innovation, with the development of the polychoral style of the Venetian School, which spread northward into Germany around 1600.


title: Renaissance

text: The paintings of the Italian Renaissance differed from those of the Northern Renaissance. Italian Renaissance artists were among the first to paint secular scenes, breaking away from the purely religious art of medieval painters. Northern Renaissance artists initially remained focused on religious subjects, such as the contemporary religious upheaval portrayed by Albrecht Dürer. Later, the works of Pieter Bruegel influenced artists to paint scenes of daily life rather than religious or classical themes. It was also during the Northern Renaissance that Flemish brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck perfected the oil painting technique, which enabled artists to produce strong colors on a hard surface that could survive for centuries. A feature of the Northern Renaissance was its use of the vernacular in place of Latin or Greek, which allowed greater freedom of expression. This movement had started in Italy with the decisive influence of Dante Alighieri on the development of vernacular languages; in fact the focus on writing in Italian has neglected a major source of Florentine ideas expressed in Latin. The spread of the printing press technology boosted the Renaissance in Northern Europe as elsewhere, with Venice becoming a world center of printing.


title: Renaissance

text: An early Italian humanist who came to Poland in the mid-15th century was Filippo Buonaccorsi. Many Italian artists came to Poland with Bona Sforza of Milan, when she married King Sigismund I in 1518. This was supported by temporarily strengthened monarchies in both areas, as well as by newly established universities. The Polish Renaissance lasted from the late 15th to the late 16th century and was the Golden Age of Polish culture. Ruled by the Jagiellonian dynasty, the Kingdom of Poland (from 1569 known as the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth) actively participated in the broad European Renaissance. The multi-national Polish state experienced a substantial period of cultural growth thanks in part to a century without major wars – aside from conflicts in the sparsely populated eastern and southern borderlands. The Reformation spread peacefully throughout the country (giving rise to the Polish Brethren), while living conditions improved, cities grew, and exports of agricultural products enriched the population, especially the nobility ("szlachta") who gained dominance in the new political system of Golden Liberty. The Polish Renaissance architecture has three periods of development.


title: Renaissance

text: The greatest monument of this style in the territory of the former Duchy of Pomerania is the Ducal Castle in Szczecin.


title: Renaissance

text: Although Italian Renaissance had a modest impact in Portuguese arts, Portugal was influential in broadening the European worldview, stimulating humanist inquiry. Renaissance arrived through the influence of wealthy Italian and Flemish merchants who invested in the profitable commerce overseas. As the pioneer headquarters of European exploration, Lisbon flourished in the late 15th century, attracting experts who made several breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy and naval technology, including Pedro Nunes, João de Castro, Abraham Zacuto and Martin Behaim. Cartographers Pedro Reinel, Lopo Homem, Estêvão Gomes and Diogo Ribeiro made crucial advances in mapping the world. Apothecary Tomé Pires and physicians Garcia de Orta and Cristóvão da Costa collected and published works on plants and medicines, soon translated by Flemish pioneer botanist Carolus Clusius.


title: Renaissance

text: In architecture, the huge profits of the spice trade financed a sumptuous composite style in the first decades of the 16th century, the Manueline, incorporating maritime elements. The primary painters were Nuno Gonçalves, Gregório Lopes and Vasco Fernandes. In music, Pedro de Escobar and Duarte Lobo produced four songbooks, including the Cancioneiro de Elvas. In literature, Sá de Miranda introduced Italian forms of verse. Bernardim Ribeiro developed pastoral romance, plays by Gil Vicente fused it with popular culture, reporting the changing times, and Luís de Camões inscribed the Portuguese feats overseas in the epic poem "Os Lusíadas". Travel literature especially flourished: João de Barros, Castanheda, António Galvão, Gaspar Correia, Duarte Barbosa, and Fernão Mendes Pinto, among others, described new lands and were translated and spread with the new printing press. After joining the Portuguese exploration of Brazil in 1500, Amerigo Vespucci coined the term New World, in his letters to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici.


title: Renaissance

text: The intense international exchange produced several cosmopolitan humanist scholars, including Francisco de Holanda, André de Resende and Damião de Góis, a friend of Erasmus who wrote with rare independence on the reign of King Manuel I. Diogo and André de Gouveia made relevant teaching reforms via France. Foreign news and products in the Portuguese factory in Antwerp attracted the interest of Thomas More and Albrecht Dürer to the wider world. There, profits and know-how helped nurture the Dutch Renaissance and Golden Age, especially after the arrival of the wealthy cultured Jewish community expelled from Portugal.


title: Renaissance

text: Renaissance trends from Italy and Central Europe influenced Russia in many ways. Their influence was rather limited, however, due to the large distances between Russia and the main European cultural centers and the strong adherence of Russians to their Orthodox traditions and Byzantine legacy.


title: Renaissance

text: Prince Ivan III introduced Renaissance architecture to Russia by inviting a number of architects from Italy, who brought new construction techniques and some Renaissance style elements with them, while in general following the traditional designs of Russian architecture. In 1475 the Bolognese architect Aristotele Fioravanti came to rebuild the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin, which had been damaged in an earthquake. Fioravanti was given the 12th-century Vladimir Cathedral as a model, and he produced a design combining traditional Russian style with a Renaissance sense of spaciousness, proportion and symmetry.


title: Renaissance

text: In 1485 Ivan III commissioned the building of the royal residence, Terem Palace, within the Kremlin, with Aloisio da Milano as the architect of the first three floors. He and other Italian architects also contributed to the construction of the Kremlin walls and towers. The small banquet hall of the Russian Tsars, called the Palace of Facets because of its facetted upper story, is the work of two Italians, Marco Ruffo and Pietro Solario, and shows a more Italian style. In 1505, an Italian known in Russia as Aleviz Novyi or Aleviz Fryazin arrived in Moscow. He may have been the Venetian sculptor, Alevisio Lamberti da Montagne. He built twelve churches for Ivan III, including the Cathedral of the Archangel, a building remarkable for the successful blending of Russian tradition, Orthodox requirements and Renaissance style. It is believed that the Cathedral of the Metropolitan Peter in Vysokopetrovsky Monastery, another work of Aleviz Novyi, later served as an inspiration for the so-called "octagon-on-tetragon" architectural form in the Moscow Baroque of the late 17th century.


title: Renaissance

text: Between the early 16th and the late 17th centuries, an original tradition of stone tented roof architecture developed in Russia. It was quite unique and different from the contemporary Renaissance architecture elsewhere in Europe, though some research terms the style 'Russian Gothic' and compares it with the European Gothic architecture of the earlier period. The Italians, with their advanced technology, may have influenced the invention of the stone tented roof (the wooden tents were known in Russia and Europe long before). According to one hypothesis, an Italian architect called Petrok Maly may have been an author of the Ascension Church in Kolomenskoye, one of the earliest and most prominent tented roof churches.


title: Renaissance

text: By the 17th century the influence of Renaissance painting resulted in Russian icons becoming slightly more realistic, while still following most of the old icon painting canons, as seen in the works of Bogdan Saltanov, Simon Ushakov, Gury Nikitin, Karp Zolotaryov, and other Russian artists of the era. Gradually the new type of secular portrait painting appeared, called "parsúna" (from "persona" – person), which was transitional style between abstract iconographics and real paintings.


title: Renaissance

text: In the mid 16th-century Russians adopted printing from Central Europe, with Ivan Fyodorov being the first known Russian printer. In the 17th century printing became widespread, and woodcuts became especially popular. That led to the development of a special form of folk art known as lubok printing, which persisted in Russia well into the 19th century.


title: Renaissance

text: A number of technologies from the European Renaissance period were adopted by Russia rather early and subsequently perfected to become a part of a strong domestic tradition. Mostly these were military technologies, such as cannon casting adopted by at least the 15th century. The Tsar Cannon, which is the world's largest bombard by caliber, is a masterpiece of Russian cannon making. It was cast in 1586 by Andrey Chokhov and is notable for its rich, decorative relief. Another technology, that according to one hypothesis originally was brought from Europe by the Italians, resulted in the development of vodka, the national beverage of Russia. As early as 1386 Genoese ambassadors brought the first aqua vitae ("water of life") to Moscow and presented it to Grand Duke Dmitry Donskoy. The Genoese likely developed this beverage with the help of the alchemists of Provence, who used an Arab-invented distillation apparatus to convert grape must into alcohol. A Moscovite monk called Isidore used this technology to produce the first original Russian vodka c. 1430.


title: Renaissance

text: The Renaissance arrived in the Iberian peninsula through the Mediterranean possessions of the Aragonese Crown and the city of Valencia. Many early Spanish Renaissance writers come from the Kingdom of Aragon, including Ausiàs March and Joanot Martorell. In the Kingdom of Castile, the early Renaissance was heavily influenced by the Italian humanism, starting with writers and poets such as the Marquis of Santillana, who introduced the new Italian poetry to Spain in the early 15th century. Other writers, such as Jorge Manrique, Fernando de Rojas, Juan del Encina, Juan Boscán Almogáver, and Garcilaso de la Vega, kept a close resemblance to the Italian canon. Miguel de Cervantes's masterpiece "Don Quixote" is credited as the first Western novel. Renaissance humanism flourished in the early 16th century, with influential writers such as philosopher Juan Luis Vives, grammarian Antonio de Nebrija and natural historian Pedro de Mexía.


title: Renaissance

text: Later Spanish Renaissance tended towards religious themes and mysticism, with poets such as Luis de León, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross, and treated issues related to the exploration of the New World, with chroniclers and writers such as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Bartolomé de las Casas, giving rise to a body of work, now known as Spanish Renaissance literature. The late Renaissance in Spain produced artists such as El Greco and composers such as Tomás Luis de Victoria and Antonio de Cabezón.


title: Renaissance

text: The Italian artist and critic Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) first used the term "rinascita" in his book "The Lives of the Artists" (published 1550). In the book Vasari attempted to define what he described as a break with the barbarities of Gothic art: the arts (he held) had fallen into decay with the collapse of the Roman Empire and only the Tuscan artists, beginning with Cimabue (1240–1301) and Giotto (1267–1337) began to reverse this decline in the arts. Vasari saw ancient art as central to the rebirth of Italian art.


title: Renaissance

text: However, only in the 19th century did the French word "renaissance" achieve popularity in describing the self-conscious cultural movement based on revival of Roman models that began in the late 13th century. French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) defined "The Renaissance" in his 1855 work "Histoire de France" as an entire historical period, whereas previously it had been used in a more limited sense. For Michelet, the Renaissance was more a development in science than in art and culture. He asserted that it spanned the period from Columbus to Copernicus to Galileo; that is, from the end of the 15th century to the middle of the 17th century. Moreover, Michelet distinguished between what he called, "the bizarre and monstrous" quality of the Middle Ages and the democratic values that he, as a vocal Republican, chose to see in its character. A French nationalist, Michelet also sought to claim the Renaissance as a French movement.