Changes

In Italy, the city-states were the scene of a remarkable artistic and intellectual flowering since the late Medieval Period. The renaissance was an effort to imitate the lost world of ancient Greece and Rome. The Italian, artists, writers and thinkers who all participated in the Renaissance, sought to create works that were the equal of the Greeks and Romans, whom they regarded as the pinnacle of civilisation. The ideas and the works of the Italian Renaissance soon became known north of the Alps. It was only in the late fifteenth century that ideas from Italy only slowly made their way north. In the 1490s Charles the VIII of France invaded Italy to claim the Crown of the Kingdom of Naples.<ref>Holt, Mack P. Renaissance and <i>Reformation France: 1500-1648 </i> (The Short Oxford History of France. 2002), 89</ref>

The invasion and later wars exposed many in the French nobility, who served as officers in the army to the ideas of the Italian Renaissance and in turn, they transmitted Italian culture to the rest of Europe. Then many students from Northern Europe came to study in Italy at the great Universities such as Bologna. Here they were exposed to the ideas of the Renaissance and they returned home and helped to spread them in their native lands.<ref> Holt, p. 113</ref> More and more northerners travelled to Italy, many such as Albert Durer, the great German artists, travelled in order to study the art of the great Italian painters, which greatly influenced his style and was the inspiration between many of his greatest works. All of these contacts helped to make the ideas of the Italian Renaissance better known in the north and they inspired many humanist and artists to take a new approach in their work. They soon had absorbed the new conception of life that they had witnessed in Italy and related it to their own societies and times.<ref>O'Neill, J, ed. (1987). <i>The Renaissance in the North </i> (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art), p. 114</ref>