The Renaissance is conventionally dated from around the middle of the fourteenth century, when Italian humanists such as Petrarch began deliberately reviving classical Latin literature and rhetoric, to around 1600, by which point its innovations in art, scholarship and science had spread across Europe and given way to the different concerns of the early modern period. It began in the city-states of Italy, particularly Florence under the patronage of the Medici family, before spreading north through France, the Low Countries, the German lands and England over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Humanist scholars searched monastic libraries and, after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 sent Byzantine scholars west with their manuscripts, recovered a far wider range of classical Greek philosophy than medieval Europe had possessed, along with texts that Renaissance readers took to be far older than they actually were. The invention of movable-type printing in the mid-fifteenth century let this recovered literature circulate at a scale no manuscript culture could match, and the period's art, from Florence's Duomo to the workshops of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael, drew consciously on classical models. Jacob Burckhardt's nineteenth-century study The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy remains the foundational, if now much debated, account of the period as a distinct historical age.