At the beginning of the fifteenth century a concatenation of circumstances led to the emergence of a new culture that dominating thinking in Europe for about the next two hundred years. An explosion of learning and scholarship in the arts and sciences, beginning in the northern Italian city of Florence, created what later historians labeled the Renaissance. Drawing inspiration from classical and Hellenistic Greek and Roman sources, these scholars and artists developed new ways of looking at the world—ways that would lead, in time, to the creation of modern science.