This is not accidental as it was the capital of Tuscany where the Renaissance originated and flourished and, in many respects, formulated the ideas and principles underlying our familiar world. We owe the emergence of a rational and then a scientific approach to the cognition and creation of the actual reality to the European Renaissance which placed Man and his Reason at the center of the world. The Renaissance geniuses were the first who began looking for the keys to the secrets of Nature and the Universe that previously seemed sacred and magical for humankind for a long time. The names of the three main “stars” of the Renaissance – Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo – are known to any child, and the world artistic culture has reached its peak and a reference point for subsequent generations in the works of these geniuses. But the heritage of the Renaissance includes not only the masterpieces of the “Divine trinity”, it was established by the collective efforts of several generations including many thousands of artists, sculptors and architects, philosophers, poets and writers, scientists, historians, engineers, archaeologists, and antiquarians; and no less by their patrons and philanthropists: bankers, monarchs, aristocrats, popes, and cardinals; as well as pioneer travelers, merchants, artisans, jewellers, winemakers, military leaders, mercenaries, adventurers, astrologers, and many others.

The real “dark Middle Ages” came in Italy only after 1348 when an epidemic of the Black Plague swept across the country killing almost a half of its inhabitants. Even before the plague catastrophe, Florence experienced its own “pre-revival” illuminated by the geniuses of Giotto and Dante who translated local painting from “Greek into Latin” and literature from Latin into Italian and, fortunately, did not live to see the nightmare of the Plague. After the plague, Italy was sunk into a kind of shared psychosis for several decades and many of its inhabitants began to perceive the surrounding reality only as a sinful wraith and a host of temptations. It made the arrival of the new century – Quattrocento (“the 15th century” in Italian) much brighter. That time can be compared with awakening after a serious illness when a person rediscovers the colors, smells and sounds of the beautiful world around him and breathes deeply the air of the coming spring. The very term Renaissance is associated, however, not with that “physiological” rebirth after a disease but with the regeneration of culture, the revival of the antique art which still literally lay under Italians’ feet in the 15th century. It should be noted that Ancient Rome as an antique model was the basis and the reference point for all medieval Italian art, starting from its first heyday in the 11th – 12th centuries. This temptation of Antiquity was always very strong. Just remember the Pisa Cathedral and Tower of the 11th – 13th centuries, the grandiose column symphonies of snow-white marble, or an amusing incident of the Florentine Baptistery originally built in the 11th century but considered by the Florentines as an “ancient Roman temple of Mars” until the 20th century. Those medieval “proto–Renaissances“, however, had rather an imitative and fragmentary character. The masters of that period borrowed their favorite techniques from the ancient art but they did not perceive them as a system and did not study the treatises of ancient authors, etc.

Workshop
Florence, the cradle and the capital of the Renaissance appears before a stranger as a completely medieval harsh and stone city with its narrow dark streets in the gaps of which the colossal masses of the cathedrals of Santa Maria del Fiore, Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, the Signoria palace, or private palazzo: residences of Medici Riccardi, Strozzi, Antinori, etc., suddenly burst into the city tightness. This city does not look like European Grand capitals of the modern era such as Paris, Petersburg or Vienna, there are no green boulevards and wide avenues, and the appearance of Florence is typical for all other medieval cities of Tuscany. There is no contradiction here because Florence is a workshop where the culture of the New Age was created but the “walls and roof” of that “workshop” had already existed then, they were erected back in the “dark Middle Ages”. All the other European capitals would never have become themselves without “semi-medieval” Florence because all their future architecture had been invented and first taken a tangible form there, in the scattered in the body of the medieval city masterpieces of the revived correct style “all’antica” which finally came to replace “barbarian Gothic” (after all, it was the Goths who destroyed Rome in their time). A gigantic dome over the Gothic Basilica of Santa Maria del Fiore built by the first “revivalist” of Florence Filippo Brunelleschi hovers over the whole Europe of the New Age.