The cascade of transformative events, technical progress, ideological and religious upheavals (everything went together), and intellectual and cultural developments that occurred between the late 15th and early 16th centuries, in what is commonly considered the full bloom of the humanist Renaissance and the official birth of the modern world, was unprecedented and prodigious. The aesthetic and intellectual recovery of the updated Greco-Roman classical world, the expansion of knowledge in medicine and astronomy, the broadening of scope in geographical and commercial terms (with the European discovery of the New World), the crucial pictorial invention of perspective, the shattering of Christianity caused by the reformer Martin Luther: all of this, while in many cases not representing a break with the Middle Ages but rather a continuation and culmination of medieval dynamics, ways of doing things, and ideas, makes that era a singularly radiant moment in human history.