and when it was sacked in 1527 by the troops of the Holy Roman Emperor, the focus of the Italian Renaissance shifted to Venice, where Giorgione, Titian and Tintoretto were among the artists to make that city their own. The Renaissance in Europe In The Renaissance in Europe J. R. Hale provides an unrivalled insight into the paradoxes of a continent overtaken by the excitement of the new learning. In some respects these were the most glamorous years of the Renaissance - with thinkers of the calibre of Machiavelli and Erasmus, artists of genius from Leonardo da Vinci to Drer and with the Americas brought enduringly into contact with Europe. In most respects however, the glamour was not apparent to the vast majority of people. Plague was a regular visitor to Northern Europe and was joined by a new scourge, syphilis, which maimed and killed in a particularly repulsive way. Hale describes vividly a population afraid to travel, yet somehow on the move: people venturing abroad in search of work, to sell their wares, to trade artistic talent, and to exchange political and religious ideas in the courts and universities of Europe. The newly invented printing press - seized upon by scholars, educators and religious reformers - allowed the new ideas to spread. Europe from Renaissance to Reformation 'Here stand I. I can do no other. God help me' Martin Luther Few people used printing more effectively than Martin Luther, as Geoffrey Elton makes clear in Europe from Renaissance to