The flourishing of the arts, the sophistication of the intellectual life, the renewed conceptions of man and his historical events that characterize the culture of the Renaissance in Europe, offering a different identity that is based on confidence in human reason able to go back to the ancient sources of knowledge and to propose new paths through these philosophical and political contexts in which it affirms the supremacy of the man, as measurement, and history focal point. In the palaces, in the streets and in the squares of the city the Renaissance has left its fingerprints more visible and durable: the multiple urban and architectural interventions reveal the ways of renewal and philosophical at the same time show the connections between the original planning of the artists and the patronage of princes, popes, of urban guilds, able to operate massive investments for the exaltation of the magnificence of their power. For this reason, the European Charter of the spread of Renaissance architecture offers, despite its inevitable schematic, an original view of a reality considered highly representative of Renaissance culture in one of its most significant aspects. The paper, in its articulation European moves from the beginning of the sixteenth century and is centered around the theme of architecture in Rome, from where it radiates the new language based on the recovery of the ancient architectural orders and the search for spatial articulations focus on symmetric axis and on typological models elaborated by Greek and Roman classicism. In its diffusion path of the European Renaissance architecture assumes uneven chronological scans: in some centers, it is stated early Spanish and French (from Granada to Chambord) and appears late in some areas of northern Europe, Flanders and Denmark, where the full manifestations of Renaissance, as in the case of the Copenhagen Stock Exchange, must be dating from the early seventeenth century. It also reaches distant suburbs where delivery extraordinary cultural and political achievements such as the palaces of Buda and Esztergom, wanted by the Prince Matthias Corvinus, or the construction, by Italian architects, of the fortified walls of the Kremlin in Moscow. The Italian situation, joins the European one, and not only because of the dense network of centers that enucleates the renaissance ideas situated in the center-north of the peninsula, but there were also eloquent architectural expressions in the village nearby this latter cities, even if they show isolated buildings.
When we talking about this buildings (religious and civil) and the relatives urban environments, we do not refer only in the factors of monumental architectural ensembles, but also in the construction of fences walls and fortifications, ie structures to incorporate the new military techniques imposed by firearms and by the dominance of infantry at the expense of the secular role of aristocratic cavalry. The same building of new towns often responds to the necessities of modernization of the defense or the identification of the boundaries made up by the nascent European states. Finally, the urban transformation that regards cases in which the construction of new neighborhoods or opening of streets and squares is presented as a work of monumental upgrading of the city.
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