The artistic expressions that were developed during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Western Europe were called Renaissance. This new aesthetic covered the field of visual arts, literature and music. Began with research on classical antiquity, which began in Italy by a group of intellectuals known as humanists. Among them were Luca Pacioli, Leon Battista Alberti and Pico della Mirandola. Far from the Gothic tradition, the Renaissance built a world based on the individual as the center of the universe, which was valued the concept of artists as creators of their own projects, respecting the forms and the classical precepts. In the field of plastic highlighted the Italian Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo and the German Albrecht Dürer, among other major figures. In the letters stood the Italians Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, Ronsard French, the English Phillip Sydney, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and the Spanish Juan del Encina, Fernando de Rojas, Garcilaso de la Vega, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and Fray Luis de Leon.
During the fifteenth century came the polyphonic compositions and instrumental works had momentum. It highlighted the English musician John Dunstable, flamingos Johannes Ockeghem and Josquin Despres, and the Franco-Guillaume Dufay and Gilles Binchois. The instruments used were the organ, lute, viols and wind instruments such as horns and sackbuts.