People may have always worked, but until the advent of the corporation in the early Renaissance, most people just worked for themselves.

CNN: Are jobs obsolete?

This divorce of narration from structure in Western architecture was confirmed in the early Renaissance (15th century), when humanists sought to elevate the status of architects, establishing the designer's control of every element of a structure, conferring an auteur dominance.

WSJ: Enlightenment on an Intimate Scale | The Adinatha Temple at Ranakpur | Masterpiece by James S. Ackerman

Inspired by the religious sobriety of the early-19th-century German painters who called themselves "Nazarenes, " by England's Gothic-revival movement and by the straightforward imagery of early-Renaissance painters like Giotto, they looked to the Bible, to the poetry of Keats and Tennyson and to Shakespeare for subject matter, proclaiming their intention to shun vulgar or sentimental subjects and to paint directly from nature.

WSJ: Victorian Avant-Garde | Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design | National Gallery of Art | By Barrymore Laurence Scherer

In fact, the new painting has led experts to speculate that the woman who sat for the Renaissance Masterpiece was in her early 20s - much younger than the Louvre's original appears to show.

BBC: Mona Lisa copy reveals new detail

Attempting to achieve the enamel-like surface of early Renaissance panel painting, they painted on smooth panels or on fine-woven canvas rigidly stretched.

WSJ: Victorian Avant-Garde | Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Art and Design | National Gallery of Art | By Barrymore Laurence Scherer

This exhibition, held in a museum and architectural complex endowed, rebuilt and expanded by a series of Renaissance and Early Modern popes, includes many reminders of the papacy's glorious record of patronage of the arts and learning.

WSJ: Lux in Arcana | Capitoline Museum | The Papacy's Private Papers | By Francis X. Rocca

British folk music had a golden era in the '60s and early '70s, and in certain circles it's experiencing a renaissance.

NPR: British Folk Music, Revived

To the winners go the spoils: Histories of early 20th-century American art and architecture were written by modernist proponents who criticized the achievements of the American Renaissance and City Beautiful designers or ignored them altogether.

WSJ: An American Renaissance Gem