Renaissance Jeopardy

Humanists, patrons, painters, and the printing press on one free Renaissance review board. Copy it, project it, and let students buzz in by phone.

6 categories · 30 clues · Final Jeopardy · everyone buzzes in from their phone

For the classroom

Copies all 30 clues into an editor of your own. Free, no account needed.

Every clue on this board

This page is public, so anyone can read the answers — copy the board and swap a few clues before game day.

Humanism and Big Ideas

$200
The word Renaissance comes from French and means this.
What is rebirth?
$400
Humanists revived the study of the writings of these two ancient civilizations.
What are Greece and Rome?
$600
Often called the Father of Humanism, this Italian poet hunted down classical manuscripts and wrote sonnets to Laura.
Who is Petrarch?
$800
This Florentine diplomat's The Prince argued a ruler is safer being feared than loved if he cannot be both.
Who is Niccolò Machiavelli?
$1,000
Pico della Mirandola's Oration on this subject is often called a manifesto of the Renaissance.
What is the Dignity of Man?

Patrons and City-States

$200
This banking family dominated Florence for much of the 1400s and patronized its greatest artists.
Who are the Medici?
$400
This canal city, governed by an elected doge, was a great Renaissance trading power.
What is Venice?
$600
Florence's leading patron of the arts in the late 1400s, Lorenzo, was known by this nickname.
What is the Magnificent?
$800
Ludovico il Moro, a duke from this ruling family of Milan, commissioned The Last Supper.
Who are the Sforza?
$1,000
This Dominican friar dominated Florence in the 1490s and led the Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497.
Who is Girolamo Savonarola?

Masters of Painting

$200
This artist painted the Mona Lisa.
Who is Leonardo da Vinci?
$400
This artist from Urbino painted The School of Athens in the Vatican.
Who is Raphael?
$600
This Florentine painted The Birth of Venus.
Who is Sandro Botticelli?
$800
This technique of showing depth with lines meeting at a vanishing point was worked out by Renaissance artists.
What is linear perspective?
$1,000
This master famed for his rich color painted the Assumption of the Virgin, still over the high altar of the Frari church.
Who is Titian?

Sculpture and Architecture

$200
Donatello's bronze of this biblical giant-slayer was the first free-standing nude statue since ancient times.
Who is David?
$400
This architect engineered the huge brick dome of Florence Cathedral, finished in the 1430s.
Who is Filippo Brunelleschi?
$600
Lorenzo Ghiberti's gilded bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery are nicknamed the Gates of this.
What is Paradise?
$800
This architect designed the small round Tempietto in Rome and the first plan for the new St. Peter's Basilica.
Who is Donato Bramante?
$1,000
This architect of country villas near Vicenza wrote The Four Books of Architecture, which later inspired Thomas Jefferson.
Who is Andrea Palladio?

The Printing Press

$200
This German goldsmith developed printing with movable metal type in Europe around 1450.
Who is Johannes Gutenberg?
$400
The first major book printed in Europe with movable type was an edition of this.
What is the Bible?
$600
The inventor of movable-type printing in Europe set up his shop in this German city on the Rhine.
What is Mainz?
$800
This printer introduced italic type and small, affordable editions of the ancient classics.
Who is Aldus Manutius?
$1,000
Books printed in Europe before 1501 are called this, from the Latin word for cradle.
What are incunabula?

The Northern Renaissance

$200
This Dutch humanist wrote In Praise of Folly.
Who is Erasmus?
$400
This English statesman wrote Utopia, describing an imaginary island society.
Who is Thomas More?
$600
This German artist from Nuremberg was famous for engravings and woodcuts such as Melencolia I.
Who is Albrecht Dürer?
$800
This Flemish painter of the Arnolfini Portrait was a master of oil painting.
Who is Jan van Eyck?
$1,000
This Flemish painter created The Hunters in the Snow and Netherlandish Proverbs.
Who is Pieter Bruegel the Elder?

Final Jeopardy — Ceiling Work

Between 1508 and 1512, this Florentine artist painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for Pope Julius II.

Who is Michelangelo?

How to run this board

This board follows the rebirth of classical learning out of the Italian city-states and across the Alps: the humanist thinkers, the Medici and other patrons, the great artists and their techniques, the printing press, and the Northern Renaissance that carried the ideas north.

Art-heavy clues land better when students can picture the work, so keep a slideshow of the famous paintings open in another tab and flash the image after each answer is revealed. It takes seconds and makes the names stick.

Teams of three or four sharing one phone work well. If a team buzzes in with an artist's name, ask for the city they worked in for a bonus hundred.

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