16th century  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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The Winter (1563) by Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Mona Lisa, detail

Fool's Cap World Map (c. 1590s) by anonymous

The Dead Christ (1582) by Annibale Carracci

Born two years before Leonardo da Vinci, Hieronymus Bosch's work is radically different from his better known contemporary, the first exemplifies Italian Renaissance, the second Northern Renaissance.

The Image Breakers, c.1566 –1568 by Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder  The etching is also known as Allegory of Iconoclasm. Although not particularly sympathetic to the Calvinist image breakers, it is mainly critical of the Church. Thus the etching might have been the main reason why Gheeraerts had to flee to England in 1568. (British Museum, Dept. of Print and Drawings, 1933.1.1..3)

Iconologia (1593) by Cesare Ripa was an emblem book highly influential on Baroque imagery

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Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

The 16th century (or XVIth century) is regarded by historians as the century in which the rise of Western civilization and the Age of the Islamic Gunpowders occurred. The Renaissance in Italy and Europe saw the emergence of important artists, authors and scientists, and led to the foundation of important subjects which include accounting and political science. Copernicus proposed the heliocentric universe, which was met with strong resistance, and Tycho Brahe refuted the theory of celestial spheres through observational measurement of the 1572 appearance of a Milky Way supernova. These events directly challenged the long-held notion of an immutable universe supported by Ptolemy and Aristotle, and led to major revolutions in astronomy and science. Galileo Galilei became a champion of the new sciences, invented the first thermometer and made substantial contributions in the fields of physics and astronomy, becoming a major figure in the Scientific Revolution.

Spain and Portugal colonized large parts of Central and South America, followed by France and England in northern America and the lesser Antilles. The Portuguese became the masters of trade between Brazil, the coasts of Africa, their possessions in the Indies and the Moluccas in Oceania, whereas the Spanish came to dominate the greater Antilles, Mexico, Peru, and opened trade across the Pacific Ocean, linking the Americas with the Indies. English and French corsaires began to practice persistent theft of Spanish and Portuguese treasures. This era of colonialism established mercantilism as the leading school of economic thought, where the economic system was viewed as a zero-sum game in which any gain by one party required a loss by another. The mercantilist doctrine encouraged the many intra-European wars of the period and arguably fueled European expansion and imperialism throughout the world until the 19th century or early 20th century.

The Protestant Reformation in central and northern Europe gave a major blow to the authority of the papacy and the Catholic Church. In England, the British-Italian Alberico Gentili wrote the first book on public international law and divided secularism from canon law and Catholic theology. European politics became dominated by religious conflicts, with the groundwork for the epochal Thirty Years' War being laid towards the end of the century.

In the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire continued to expand, with the Sultan taking the title of Caliph, while dealing with a resurgent Persia. Iran and Iraq were caught by a major popularity of the Shiite sect of Islam under the rule of the Safavid dynasty of warrior-mystics, providing grounds for a Persia independent of the majority-Sunni Muslim world.

General culture

• The Renaissance, which started in Italy in the previous two century spreads all over Europe.
• General effects of the inventing of the printing press in the previous century.
• Anti-clericalism is one of the major popular forces underlying the reformation
• The Huguenot, members of the Protestant Reformed Church of France were a counterculture avant la lettre.
• During the century, in the visual arts the High Renaissance gave way to Mannerism
• Rise of the Puritans in the United Kingdom and Huguenots in France
• French Wars of Religion
• Gargantua and Pantagruel is published. Written by François Rabelais. There is much crudity and scatological humor as well as a large amount of violence.
• Leonardo da Vinci paints Mona Lisa, one of the most famous paintings in the world.
• The Reformation sought to reform the Catholic Church in Western Europe. Many western Christians were troubled by what they saw as corruption within the Church, particularly involving the teaching and sale of indulgences.
• Medieval theatre gives way to Renaissance theatre with Morality plays and Everyman plays
• Towards the end of the century the Geocentric modelis gradually replaced by the heliocentric model of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler.
• Amadis de Gaula, a landmark work among the knight-errantry Romances formed the earliest reading of many Renaissance and Baroque writers.
• The Portuguese, in the 16th century, were the first to buy slaves from West African slavers and transport them across the Atlantic. In 1526, they completed the first transatlantic slave voyage to Brazil, and other Europeans soon followed.
• Buggery Act 1533, UK's first civil sodomy law.
• Medieval heretics of Anabaptism and Thomas Müntzer and John of Leiden
• A pair of epidemics struck the Mexican highlands in 1545 and 1576, causing an estimated 7 to 17 million deaths.
• Fugger family

Literature

Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, illustrated by Gustave Doré

Literature in the 16th century was still the province of a happy few, the movable type printing press was only a recent invention. Important books include Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais, In Praise of Folly by Erasmus, the anonymously published Lazarillo de Tormes and Heptameron by the Marguerite de Navarre.

Medieval romances were reduced to cheap and abrupt plots resembling modern comic books. Neither were the first collections of novels necessarily prestigious projects. They appeared with an enormous variety from folk tales over jests to stories told by Boccaccio and Chaucer, now venerable authors.

A more prestigious market of romances developed in the 16th century, with multi-volume works aiming at an audience which would subscribe to this production. The criticism levelled against romances by Chaucer's pilgrims grew in response both to the trivialisations and to the extended multi-volume "romances". Romances like the Amadis de Gaula led their readers into dream worlds of knighthood and fed them with ideals of a past no one could revitalise, or so the critics complained.

Italian authors like Machiavelli were among those who brought the novel into a new format: while it remained a story of intrigue, ending in a surprising point, the observations were now much finer: how did the protagonists manage their intrigue? How did they keep their secrets, what did they do when others threatened to discover them?

Curiosities included Book of Kisses, Portrait of Lozana: The Lusty Andalusian Woman and The Book of the Prick.

List of writers

• Baldassare Castiglione, Italian author (1478 – 1529)
• Miguel de Cervantes, Spanish author (1547 – 1616).
• John Donne, English metaphysical poet (1572 – 1631)
• John Ford, English dramatist (1586 – c. 1640).
• Thomas Heywood, English dramatist (c, early 1570s – 1641)
• Ben Jonson, English dramatist c.1572 – 1637)
• Thomas Kyd, English dramatist (1558 – 1594)
• Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian author (1469 – 1527)
• Christopher Marlowe, English poet and dramatist (1564 – 1593).
• Michel de Montaigne, French essayist (1533 – 1592).
• Thomas More, English politician and author (1478 – 1535).
• François Rabelais, French author (c. 1493 – 1553).
• Pierre de Ronsard, French poet. Called the 'Prince of poets' of his generation. (1524 – 1585).
• William Shakespeare, English playwright (1564 – 1616).
• Edmund Spenser, English poet (c. 1552 – 1599)
• Lope de Vega, Spanish dramatist (1562 – 1635).

List of titles

• The Unfortunate Traveller - Thomas Nashe
• Foxe's Book of Martyrs - John Foxe
• Books of secrets by various
• I Modi by Pietro Aretino
• The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione
• Blazon of the Ugly Tit (1535) by Clément Marot
• Utopia by Thomas More
• Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais
• In Praise of Folly by Erasmus
• Heptameron by Queen of Navarre
• De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (On the Fabric of the Human body in Seven Books) – Andreas Vesalius
• De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres) – Nicolaus Copernicus
• Ninety-five Theses

See also

• New literature published in the 16th century
• Births and deaths in 16th century literature
• 16th century in poetry
• Early Modern literature
• Renaissance literature
• 17th century literature
• Emblem books

Visual art

artists of the Tudor court, Renaissance painting, Italian Renaissance painting, High Renaissance, Mannerism

In European art, Renaissance Classicism spawned Mannerism, a reaction against the idealist perfection of Classicism, employed distortion of light and spatial frameworks in order to emphasize the emotional content of a painting and the emotions of the painter. The work of El Greco is a particularly clear example of Mannerism in painting during the late 16th, early 17th centuries. Northern Mannerism took longer to develop, and was largely a movement of the last half of the 16th century.

List of artists

• Michelangelo Buonarroti, Italian painter and sculptor (1475 – 1564).
• Caravaggio, Italian artist (1571 – 1610).
• Albrecht Dürer, German artist, (1471 – 1528)
• Hans Holbein the Younger, German artist, (1497 – 1543)
• Raphael, Italian painter, (1483 – 1520)
• Donato Bramante (1444 – March 11, 1514)
• Titian, Italian painter, (c. 1485 – 1576)
• Paolo Veronese, Italian painter, (1528 – April 19 1588)
• Leonardo da Vinci famous artist and inventor and scientist (1452 – 1519).
• Pieter Bruegel the Elder, (c. 1525 – September 9, 1569)
• Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568 – January 13, 1625)
• Tintoretto (real name Jacopo Comin; September 29, 1518 – May 31, 1594)
• Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472–1553)
• Lucas Cranach the Younger (1515–1586)
• El Greco (1541 – April 7, 1614) was a painter, sculptor, and architect of the Spanish Renaissance
• Domenico Fontana (1543 – June 28, 1607) was an architect
• Bosch

List of works

• Mona Lisa (ca. 1503-1507) - Leonardo da Vinci
• The Seven Ages of Woman - Hans Baldung Grien (1484-1545)
• Venus of Urbino 1538 - Titian, (Oil on canvas, 119 x 165 cm, Uffizi, Florence)
• Venus Standing in a Landscape (1529) - Lucas Cranach the Elder
• Lucrezia Borgia (1505-1508) - Bartolomeo Veneziano
• The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Detail from Panel from Isenheim Altarpiece), 1515 Matthies Grunewald,
• Triumph of Death, 1562, Pieter Brueghel the Elder
• School of Fontainebleau
• Gabrielle d'Estrées and one of her Sisters c. 1595
• The Death of Lucretia by Joos van Cleve

Significant people

• Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (sometimes known as Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam) (October 27, 1466/1469, Rotterdam– July 12, 1536 Basel was a Dutch Renaissance humanist and Catholic Christian theologian.
• Paracelsus (11 November or 17 December 1493 in Einsiedeln, Switzerland – 24 September 1541 in Salzburg, Austria)
• Henry VII of England, founder of the Tudor dynasty. Introduced ruthlessly efficient mechanisms of taxation which restored the kingdom after a state of virtual bankruptcy due to the effects of the Wars of the Roses (1457 – 1509).
• György Dózsa, leader of the peasants' revolt in Hungary (1470 – 1514)
• Martin Luther, German religious reformer (1483 – 1546).
• King Henry VIII of England, founder of Anglicanism (1491 – 1547).
• Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus (1491 – 1556).
• King Francis I of France, considered the first Renaissance monarch of his Kingdom (1494 – 1547).
• Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Conqueror and legal reformer (1494 – 1566).
• King Gustav I of Sweden, restored Swedish sovereignty and introduced Protestantism in Sweden (1496-1560).
• Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and the first to reign as King of Spain. Involved in almost constant conflict with France and the Ottoman Empire while promoting the Spanish colonization of the Americas (1500 – 1558).
• Michel Nostradamus, French astrologer and doctor, author of Les Propheties, a book of world prophecies (1503 – 1566).
• John Calvin, theologian, and reformer. Founder of Calvinism (1509 – 1564).
• Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564)
• Mary I of England. Attempted to counter the Protestant Reformation in her domains. Nick-named Bloody Mary for her Religious persecution (1516 – 1558).
• John Knox (c. 1510 – 1572) was a Scottish clergyman and leader of the Protestant Reformation who is considered the founder of the Presbyterian denomination.
• King Philip II of Spain, self-proclaimed leader of Counter-Reformation (1527 – 1598).
• Ivan IV of Russia, first Russian tsar (1533-1584).
• William the Silent, William I of Orange-Nassau, main leader of the Dutch revolt against the Spanish (1533-1584).
• Elizabeth I of England, central figure of the Elizabethan era (1533 – 1603). She was the granddaughter of the aforementioned Henry VII, daughter of Henry VIII and paternal half-sister of Mary I. Though some within her court thought of her merely as a bastard, due to the fact that her father executed her supposedly criminal mother Anne Boleyn, her reign is still considered one of the greatest ever in England's history.
• Edward VI of England, notable for further differentiating Anglicanism from the practices of the Roman Catholic Church (1537 – 1553).
• Lady Jane Grey, Queen regnant of England and Ireland. Notably deposed by popular revolt (1537 – 1554).
• Mary I of Scotland, First female head of the House of Stuart (1542 – 1587).
• Michelangelo Buonarroti, Italian painter and sculptor (1475 – 1564).
• Leonardo da Vinci famous artist and inventor and scientist (1452 – 1519).
• Raphael, Italian painter, (1483 – 1520)
• King Henry IV of France and Navarre, ended the French Wars of Religion and reunited the kingdom under his command (1553 – 1610).
• Giovanni Battista Ramusio, diplomat and secretary of council of Ten of Venice Italy, author of Delle Navigationi et Viaggi. Third volume (terzo volume) containing plan La Terra de Hochelaga showing village of Hochelaga (1585 – 1657). See [1]
• Matteo Ricci, Italian Jesuit who traveled to Macau, China in 1582, and died in Beijing, (1552 – 1610)
• Andrea Palladio (November 30, 1508 – August 19, 1580), one of the most influential architect of the Western architecture
• John of the Cross

Exploration

• Vasco Núñez de Balboa (c. 1475 – 1519) – Spanish explorer. The first European to cross the Isthmus of Panama and view the Pacific ocean from American shores.
• Jacques Cartier (1491 – 1557) – French explorer. Discovered Canada.
• Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (c. 1510 – 1554) – Spanish explorer. Searched for the Seven Cities of Gold and discovered the Grand Canyon in the process
• Hernán Cortés, Spanish Conquistador (1485 – 1547).
• Sir Francis Drake (c. 1540 – 1596) – English explorer. The first English captain to sail around the world and survive.
• Juan Ponce de León (c. 1460 – 1521) – Spanish explorer. He explored Florida while attempting to locate a Fountain of Youth.
• Ferdinand Magellan, Portuguese navigator who sailed around the world (1480 – 1521).
• Francisco Pizarro (c. 1475 – 1541) – Spanish explorer. Conquered the Inca Empire.
• Hernando de Soto (c. 1496 – 1542) – Spanish explorer. Explored Florida, mainly northwest Florida, and discovered the Mississippi River.
• Giovanni da Verrazzano (c. 1485 – 1528) – Italian explorer for France. Explored the northeast coast of America, from about present day South Carolina to Newfoundland.

Musicians and composers

16th century music

• John Dowland (1563–1626)
• Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, (1525-1594)
• Jacopo Peri (1561–1633)

Science and philosophy

16th century philosophy

• Sir Francis Bacon, (1561 – 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, and essayist. He is also known as a catalyst of the scientific revolution.
• Tycho Brahe, (1546 – 1601), Danish astronomer.
• Giordano Bruno, Italian philosopher and astronomer/astrologer (1548 – 1600).
• Nicolaus Copernicus, (1473 – 1543) astronomer, developed the heliocentric (Sun-centered) theory using scientific methods.
• Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) was a Tuscan (Italian) physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the scientific revolution.
• Konrad Gessner (1516 – 1565) was a Swiss naturalist, bibliographer, Botanist, His three-volume Historiae Animalium (1551-1558) is considered the beginning of modern zoology
• William Gilbert, also known as Gilbard, 1544 – 1603) was an English physician and a natural philosopher.
• Gerardus Mercator (5 March 1512 – 2 December 1594), famous cartographer
• Andreas Vesalius (Brussels, December 31, 1514 – Zakynthos, October 15, 1564) was an anatomist, physician, and author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Workings of the Human Body). Vesalius is often referred to as the founder of modern human anatomy.

See also

• List of Renaissance humanists