As the political, religious turmoil of the Reformation spread, humanist writers and artists began to doubt humanist assumptions about the universe and humanity.  This chapter discusses how these and other concerns shaped the intellectual and artistic developments of the Late Renaissance.

Writers of this period expressed skepticism of human possibility and the idea of absolute truth.  In France, Marguerite de Navarre, Rabelais, and Montaigne used their humanist learning to question human nature and the ability to grasp higher meaning, employing styles ranging from scatological lampoon to the exploratory essay.  In Spain, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, examining a protagonist who steadfastly understands his absurd imaginative world as real.  English literature flourished amidst the competing forces of Protestantism and Catholicism.  Drawing on diverse literary sources to praise Elizabeth I, Spenser's Faerie Queen presents England as an ideal realm uniting the two cities of Augustinian theology.  Marlowe's plays examine characters driven by desire for power, while Shakespeare explored the full range of emotion and motivation.  Best known for tragedies, Shakespeare wrote in several dramatic and poetic genres (including the uniquely English chronicle play), portraying human psychology with unprecedented complexity and insight.  Jonson excelled at lyric and comedy satirizing human folly, and Donne wrote intellectually rigorous poetry and meditative prose exploring varieties of love and religious belief.

Northern artists studied the innovations of the Italian Renaissance and adapted them to their personal visions.  Like their Italian contemporaries, the van Eyck brothers broke with the Middle Ages by accurately representing the visible world, but through attention to minute detail rather than exact mathematical perspective.  Hieronymus Bosch developed an intensely personal vision of human sin defined by phantasmagorical imagery.  More than any of his contemporaries, Dürer achieved humanist breadth, mastering Italian artistic innovations, writing treatises on technique, executing portraits, and developing his religious vision through richly symbolic engravings and woodcuts. As devout as Dürer, Grünewald eschewed classical control, grotesquely distorting the human form and employing intense color to represent his fervent spirituality.  An enthusiastic Lutheran, Cranach the Elder painted revealing portraits of Luther and his family and  illustrated Luther's writings and translation of the Bible.  Initially part of the humanist circle of Basel, Holbein the Younger traveled to England where he became court painter to Henry VIII, gaining fame for his attentive, flattering portraits.  While Holbein represented the aristocracy to itself, Brueghel the Elder depicted the peasantry with sympathetic insight, painting them with flat colors and minimal modeling.

Later Italian artists still cultivated classical values but applied them in ways that embodied their imaginative energy.  While painting the monumental Farnese Palace frescoes, Caracci pioneered the influential techniques of illusionistic ceiling painting.  Cultivating his tenebrist style, Caravaggio painted emotionally intense works with religious themes.  Gentileschi also employed dramatic tenebrism in her often violent depictions of heroic women.

During the Late Renaissance, music broke decisively with the medieval tradition.  Unlike their medieval forebears, later Renaissance musicians enjoyed broad secular, as well as religious, patronage.  These employers demanded a wider range of vocal and instrumental music, encouraging composers to experiment.  Hailed by the treatises of Tinctoris, English composers including Dunstable developed a form of polyphony, the fluid simplicity of which broke with the ars nova.  The Burgundians Dufay and Binchois picked up this simpler polyphony and transformed it into contrapuntal music through their motets, chansons, and innovative cyclic masses.  Later Netherlandish composers—e.g., Ockeghem, des Prez, and Willaert—dominated European music, further developing counterpoint, experimenting with motives, and exploring new ways to express texts through music.  Sixteenth-century advances in printing enabled composers to publish their music widely and increase their incomes.

The Reformation impacted music in a variety of ways.  With the ascent of Protestantism under Edward VI, the Church of England demanded more narrowly focused music and less of it.  English music entered its Golden Age under Elizabeth I, where sacred music by court-supported composers, such as Byrd, united English and continental traditions. Weelkes, Wilbye, and others developed a distinctly English version of the secular madrigal that involved a painterly relationship between music and text.  On the Continent, Protestant reformers debated the place of music in the church.  While Zwingli denied it a place and Calvin afforded it only a limited role, Luther maintained its central importance.  Luther also composed many popular hymns and developed the new sacred genre, the chorale.  After the Council of Trent proclaimed the primacy of text to music, Italian composers displaced their Netherlandish rivals.  Palestrina developed an influential style of balanced counterpoint, while Lasso experimented ways to make music express, and even describe, the text.  Theorists including Vicento and Zarlino revived debates over classical musical practice, encouraging Gabrielli to develop dynamic markings for scores and establish the concerto form.  The most revolutionary of the Italian composers was Monteverdi whose motive-based madrigals worked out subtle relationships between text and music.  Further, Monteverdi and his student, Cavalli, pioneered the new genre of opera, which foregrounded the solo song.

Humanism as a historical phenomenon has come to signify more broadly a collection of ideas concerning individual worth, dignity, and achievement.  Through the early twentieth century, the educational program developed by the Italian humanists survived in Europe and America.  However, since the Enlightenment, the broader philosophy of humanism has become increasingly secular.  Now an integral part of the modern outlook, this secular humanism has recently been attacked by religious thinkers who consider it a threat to religion and morality.