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Renaissance · A New Vision of Architecture

The Renaissance emerged in Italy during the fourteenth century and spread across much of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Artists, architects and scholars rediscovered the literature and artistic principles of ancient Greece and Rome. Humanism, geometric proportion, symmetry and classical decoration influenced how rulers imagined their residences. In castle architecture, defensive requirements increasingly shared space with comfort, prestige and display. Gothic strongholds were expanded with grand residential wings, regular façades, arcades and sculptural programmes celebrating dynastic authority. Many German castles preserve both their medieval walls and later Renaissance palaces, making them particularly revealing places to explore this transition. A Renaissance castle is therefore not simply an old fortress with elaborate decoration, but evidence of a broader change in politics, art and how power was represented.