RENAISSANCE is a period in European history characterized by a renewed interest in the classic past of the Greeks and Romans, especially in its art. It began in Italy in the XIVth century, and spread through the rest of Europe during the XVth and XVIth centuries. During this period, the fragmented feudal society of the Middle Ages, characterized basically by an agricultural economy and the cultural and intellectual life domain by the church, became transformed and progressively under the domain of centralized political institutions with an urban and mercantile economy, in which the patronage of education, arts, and music was developed. The term “renaissance” was used for the first time in 1855 by the French historian Jules Michelet, referring to the “discovery of the world and of man.” The Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt broadened the use of this term in his work The Civilization of Italian Renaissance (1860) and defined this epoch as the birth of humankind and of modern consciousness after a long period of decadence.