ABSTRACT
The Italian Renaissance flourished primarily in an urban environment and incorporated the values of merchants and urban dwellers, which frequently contradicted those of the nobility who had dominated the Middle Ages from their castles and manorial estates. When trade between Europe and the Near East increased during the Crusades, Italian commercial centers, particularly Venice and Genoa, capitalized on their geographical locations. Florence was one of the largest and most important cities in Europe, with a population approaching 100,000. But the failure of Florence's two largest commercial banking families, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, and the onset of the bubonic plague in the mid-fourteenth century had plunged Florence into a major depression. The history of art in Ming China is dominated by the practice of a variety of different arts by members of the literati, demonstrating the value placed on the ideal of a well-rounded, cultured, and creative person that in some ways approximated the Renaissance concept of the ideal courtier.
