Changes

[[File: Charles VIII Two.jpg|thumbnail|200px300px|left|French troops arriving in Naples, 1494]]The Renaissance was a movement that sought to imitate the lost world of ancient Greece and Rome. The Renaissance unlike the Middle Ages, stressed the individual, reason, beauty, and secular values. This outlook became known as Humanism and changed European society. The Renaissance not only produced great works of art but also resulted in dramatic change in the outlook of Europeans. The Renaissance was in many ways to lay the groundwork for the rise of the modern world and especially ‘individualism and secularism. There was a widespread optimism especially among the Humanists and artists that men could develop and achieve excellence in the arts, politics, and science. The Renaissance was inherently optimistic about human nature and believed that people were not just inherently sinful and bad, as taught by the Catholic Church. This is evident in the preoccupations of the great artists and authors of the period. The many years of war and the economic and social dislocation it caused had a dramatic impact on the minds of the people in the Renaissance. They became less optimistic and the old beliefs on the ability of the human will and reason were challenged or abandoned <ref> Burkhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Penguin, London, 1993), p. 67, 145</ref>. The years of war led to a much more gloomy and darker world view and this contributed to the end of the Renaissance and arguably laid the foundations for the Counter-Reformation and the Baroque. The invasion of Charles VIII by initiating a series of wars led to a change in the mental outlook of Italians and an increasing ‘cultural pessimism’ that did much to undermine the values of the Humanists<ref> Burkhardt, p. 119</ref>.