The Renaissance was a broad cultural movement that began in the Italian city-states in the fourteenth century and spread across Europe by the sixteenth, marked by the revival of classical learning, humanism and a renewed confidence in human reason and creativity. In the arts it produced linear perspective, a rational geometry of representation that carried directly into the design of streets, squares and ideal cities. Patrons and theorists applied classical proportion and symmetry to urban set-pieces, while the recovery of Vitruvius gave architects an ancient authority. The movement reframed the city as a deliberate work of art and order.
It supplied the perspectival and proportional thinking behind the planned square, the straight vista and the ideal city, shaping European urban design for centuries. The Renaissance turned town-building into a self-conscious art governed by geometry and classical precedent.