• 48 strips
  • Checked October 2026

Comic Ideas for the Renaissance

One comic strip per press about the Renaissance: a workshop, a discovery, a printed page or a deal.

Comic Ideas for the Renaissance

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  1. Vesalius checks the old book against the real thing1. Medical students read aloud from Galen, a Greek doctor of the second century.2. Vesalius notices that the book and the human body do not always agree.3. 1543: his own book, with over 250 anatomical drawings.Fact: Human dissection was forbidden in Galen's day, so many of his ideas came from the anatomy of other animals.

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Art and workshops 12

  • A cartoon used to be a sheet of heavy paper 1. A workshop floor. An artist draws a wall painting at full size on sheets of heavy paper, called cartone. 2. An assistant pricks holes along every line. 3. The sheet is held to the wall and patted with a bag of soot, which leaves the drawing in dots. Fact: Cartoon comes from cartone. It came to mean a funny drawing only in 1843.
  • A cathedral waits for a dome nobody knows how to build 1. Florence's cathedral, founded in 1296, still has an open hole where its dome should be. 2. 1418: a competition for a way to build it. 3. Filippo Brunelleschi, trained as a goldsmith, builds it ring by ring, with no wooden frame holding it up from below. 4. Hoists of his own invention lift more than four million bricks. 5. 1436: finished. Fact: Work on the dome began around 1420.
  • A painter writes the first book of artists' lives 1. Giorgio Vasari, a painter and architect, collects what is known about other artists. 2. He writes it up, one life after another. 3. The book on a printer's table. Fact: Vasari is often called the first art historian, and he wrote of a rinascita, a rebirth, in painting.
  • A patron who wants to be in the picture 1. A rich client orders a large painting and reads through the contract. 2. One more request: put me in it. 3. The finished painting, with a small kneeling figure at one side who looks very like the client. Fact: A portrait of the person who paid, set inside a larger picture, is called a donor portrait.
  • A sculptor is told to paint a ceiling 1. 1508. The pope wants a chapel ceiling painted. Michelangelo says he is a sculptor, and suggests his young rival Raphael. 2. The pope insists. 3. Michelangelo has the scaffolding rebuilt his own way. 4. Four years of work, standing up, with his head tilted back. Fact: He did not paint lying on his back. That picture comes from a writer who imagined it.
  • An apprentice's first years in a painter's workshop 1. A boy of eleven arrives at a master's workshop. He will get food, a bed and clothes, and sometimes a small wage. 2. First come the plain chores that keep the shop running. 3. Then making brushes from boar's hair and grinding pigments in a marble basin. 4. Only after that, a stick of charcoal and the master's sketches to copy. Fact: The training usually lasted three to five years.
  • An artist signs his prints with two letters 1. Albrecht Dürer finishes an engraving. 2. In a corner he adds his mark, his two initials joined into one sign. 3. A buyer at a stall turns a print to the light, looking for the mark. Fact: Dürer usually signed his prints with a monogram, which worked as a form of self-advertisement.
  • Brunelleschi tests perspective with a mirror 1. The steps of Florence's cathedral, in the mid-1420s. Brunelleschi holds up a small painting with a pinhole in it. 2. A passer-by looks through the hole at a mirror, and sees the painting. 3. The mirror comes down, and the real view lines up with the painted one. Fact: He ran his perspective experiments in public, with mirrors, a pinhole and a canvas.
  • The contract says how much blue 1. Artist and client sign a contract: the price, the deadline and how much costly material goes in. 2. The client holds the contract up beside the half-finished picture. 3. The apprentice is sent to grind more blue. Fact: Contracts set the cost, the timescale and the quantity of precious materials, and some even included a sketch of the work.
  • Sofonisba's drawing is sent to Michelangelo 1. Cremona. A father sends his daughter Sofonisba's sketch of a laughing girl to Michelangelo. 2. The reply is a challenge: a weeping boy would be much harder. 3. She draws a crying boy. 4. 1559: she is called to Madrid to teach the queen of Spain to paint. Fact: Sofonisba Anguissola is counted as the first widely known woman artist.
  • Three kinds of paint, three kinds of job 1. Fresco: a painter on a scaffold, working on a ceiling. 2. Tempera: a small panel on a table. 3. Oils: a large canvas with soft, deep shadows. Fact: As the Renaissance went on, fresco was kept for ceilings, tempera for small panels and oils for wood panels and canvases.
  • Two goldsmiths compete for two bronze doors 1. Florence, 1401. The cloth importers' guild announces a competition to design doors for the Baptistery. 2. Two of the entrants: Lorenzo Ghiberti, aged 21, and Filippo Brunelleschi. 3. Ghiberti wins, narrowly. 4. Brunelleschi turns his mind to buildings. Fact: Michelangelo called Ghiberti's later set of doors the Gates of Paradise.

Science and discovery 12

  • A hole in the dome follows the Sun 1. 1475. The astronomer Toscanelli has a small hole made high in the dome of Florence's cathedral. 2. A spot of sunlight lands on the floor far below. 3. Day by day the spot moves along a line. Fact: The hole is about 91 meters above the floor, and it made a meridian line for tracking the Sun around midsummer.
  • A new star where none should be 1. November 11, 1572. Tycho Brahe looks up at Cassiopeia and sees a star that was not there before. 2. It is brighter than Venus, and for a while it shows in daylight. 3. He studies it for months. Fact: It was a supernova, and Tycho was the first to observe and study it in detail.
  • A university plants a garden to study 1. Padua, June 1545. The Venetian Republic founds a botanical garden. 2. Students walk the beds, learning each plant from the living thing. 3. The same garden today, in the same place. Fact: No older academic botanical garden still stands where it was founded.
  • An astronomer is given an island 1. 1576. The king of Denmark gives the astronomer Tycho Brahe an island of his own, Hven. 2. He sets up his instruments there. 3. Night after night he measures the sky by eye. Fact: Tycho made the greatest contribution to astronomy before the telescope arrived.
  • Copernicus moves the Sun to the middle 1. The old diagram: Earth in the middle, everything else circling it. 2. Copernicus, a Polish astronomer, draws it again. 3. The new diagram: the Sun in the middle, and Earth one of the planets going around. Fact: His book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was published in 1543, the year he died.
  • Galileo points a telescope at Jupiter 1. Galileo builds a telescope better than any before it. 2. The Moon first: it has mountains. 3. Then Jupiter, with small dots beside it. On later nights the dots have moved. 4. His sketch: four moons circling Jupiter. Fact: He also watched spots on the Sun and took them as a sign that the Sun turns.
  • Graphite is found in England, and the pencil follows 1. Borrowdale, in the north of England. A large deposit of a soft black mineral is found: graphite. 2. Someone drags a lump across a page and gets a dark, clean line. 3. Sticks of it are wrapped in string or sheepskin, because graphite is soft. 4. For a long time England is the only place that makes pencils. Fact: The find is usually dated to 1565, though some sources say as early as 1500.
  • Leonardo designs machines nobody can build yet 1. A notebook page: a crane. 2. The next page: a boat with paddle wheels, and gear for breathing under water. 3. The next: a flying machine. Fact: Leonardo kept notebooks all his life, and many of his notes are written in mirror script.
  • The man who got tired of writing is equal to 1. 1557. Robert Recorde, a Welsh mathematician, writes out the words is equal to yet again. 2. He draws a pair of parallel lines instead. 3. His reason, in his own book: to avoid the tedious repetition of those words. Fact: Recorde invented the equals sign, and his first ones were much wider than ours.
  • Nobody agrees who made the first telescope 1. 1608. A Dutch spectacle maker sets two lenses far apart, one behind the other. 2. A distant tower jumps close. 3. Two other spectacle makers say the idea was theirs. Fact: The telescope is usually credited to the Dutchman Hans Lippershey, but the claim was disputed at the time.
  • Ten days vanish from October 1. The calendar has slipped out of step with the Sun, and a reform is ordered. 2. Thursday, October 4, 1582. A family goes to bed. 3. Morning. The calendar says Friday, October 15. 4. A child counts on both hands and asks where the ten days went. Fact: That is how the Gregorian calendar began, in the places that adopted it first.
  • Vesalius checks the old book against the real thing 1. Medical students read aloud from Galen, a Greek doctor of the second century. 2. Vesalius notices that the book and the human body do not always agree. 3. 1543: his own book, with over 250 anatomical drawings. Fact: Human dissection was forbidden in Galen's day, so many of his ideas came from the anatomy of other animals.

Books and print 12

  • A goldsmith's son builds a printing press 1. Mainz, around 1450. Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith's son, casts letters in metal, one small block each. 2. He sets them in rows, reading backward. 3. Ink on the type, paper on top. 4. He pulls the bar of a press like the ones that squeeze grapes and olives. 5. A printed page, and the letters are ready to use again. Fact: Gutenberg seems to have developed his press from the wine and oil presses of the time.
  • A map prints a new name: America 1. April 1507. The German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller publishes a printed world wall map. 2. On the land across the Atlantic he puts a name no map has used before: America. 3. Today: one copy, in the Library of Congress. Fact: Of a thousand copies printed, only one complete copy is known.
  • A scribe's day against a pressman's day 1. A scribe at a desk, copying by hand, slow and expensive. 2. A print shop: ink, paper, pull, lift. 3. Again. And again. 4. Sheets stacked when the day ends. Fact: Around 1600 a European press could make between 1,500 and 3,600 impressions in a working day.
  • A slip of the pen stops being passed on 1. A scribe copies a book by hand and makes one slip. 2. The next scribe copies the slip, and adds another. 3. A printer's editor checks the text against old manuscripts, and then every printed copy is the same. Fact: Handmade books carried copyists' errors down the centuries, and print made it possible to check and fix a text.
  • Aldus prints books small enough to carry around 1. Venice. A scholar staggers along with a volume the size of a paving stone. 2. Aldus Manutius, a printer, brings out small portable books. 3. The scholar reads one while walking beside a canal. Fact: The small books of Aldus are counted as ancestors of the paperback. His mark was a dolphin around an anchor.
  • An artist draws a rhinoceros he has never seen 1. Lisbon, 1515. A live rhinoceros arrives from India, the first seen in Europe since Roman times. 2. A written description and a brief sketch reach Albrecht Dürer in Germany. 3. He makes a woodcut from those alone. 4. Later that year the king of Portugal sends the animal on as a gift to the pope. Fact: Dürer never saw it.
  • The book hunter in the monastery library 1. Poggio Bracciolini asks to see the oldest shelves of a monastery library. 2. Dust, damp, and a Latin poem that had been forgotten. 3. A fresh copy travels to Italy, and scholars pass it on. Fact: Poggio recovered many classical Latin manuscripts from German, Swiss and French monastic libraries, among them the only surviving work of Lucretius.
  • The first big printed book 1. Mainz, the 1450s. Printed sheets hang drying in Gutenberg's shop. 2. A page count: 42 lines to a page, raised from 40, presumably to save paper. 3. The finished edition: about 180 copies of one very large book. Fact: Forty-nine copies of the Gutenberg Bible survive, and 21 of them are complete.
  • One city with a press becomes 270 1. The 1450s: a map of Europe with one dot, Mainz. 2. 1480: dots in 110 places. 3. 1500: about 270 cities, and over 20 million copies printed. 4. 1600: an estimated 150 to 200 million. Fact: Gutenberg's shop in Mainz was at first the only print shop in Europe.
  • One woodcut, several cities 1. Nuremberg. A printer needs pictures of dozens of cities for a history of the world. 2. For some of them no picture can be had. 3. The same woodcut of walls and towers turns up again under another city's name. Fact: The Nuremberg Chronicle, finished in 1493, has 1,809 woodcut illustrations, and some stock images were used up to eleven times.
  • The printer's lender takes him to court 1. 1450. Johann Fust lends Gutenberg 800 guilders to get the press working. 2. 1452: another 800. 3. 1455: Fust goes to court to get his loans back, and wins. 4. Fust carries on in the printing business with a partner, Peter Schöffer. Fact: Some see Fust as the backer who made the invention possible, others as a speculator.
  • Type that leans like handwriting 1. A scholar's quick, slanted handwriting. 2. Aldus Manutius has a typeface made to look like it. 3. 1501: a printed Virgil in the new letters. Fact: Italic type is named for Italy, where it was first designed.

Money and trade 12

  • A bank with branches in other cities 1. Florence, 1397. The Medici family opens a bank. 2. More doors with the same name over them, in Rome and in Venice. 3. A caption in a ledger: Europe's biggest and most respected bank. Fact: The Medici Bank lasted from 1397 to 1494.
  • A banking family pays for a church 1. Florence. The Medici, bankers and rulers of the city, want a church rebuilt. 2. Brunelleschi unrolls his plans for San Lorenzo. 3. Columns and round arches go up, row by row. Fact: San Lorenzo was in effect the private church of the Medici.
  • A gold coin the whole continent trusts 1. Florence, 1252. The mint strikes a gold coin with the city's lily on one side and its patron saint on the other. 2. A merchant far from Florence weighs one. The same gold as ever. 3. Other countries strike florins of their own, with their own badges. Fact: The Florentine florin kept the same design and gold content from 1252 to 1533.
  • A shipyard that works like a production line 1. Venice, the early 1500s. A morning bell calls the workers to the Arsenal. 2. A bare hull is floated from one work shed to the next. 3. Each shed adds its standard parts. 4. A finished galley. Fact: At its peak the Arsenal employed some 16,000 people and could apparently turn out nearly one ship a day.
  • A smashed bench and the word bankrupt 1. A money changer at his bench in an Italian market. 2. He cannot pay what he owes. 3. The story as it is often told: his bench is smashed. Fact: Bankruptcy comes from the Italian banca rotta, broken bank. Whether benches were ever really smashed is doubted.
  • A third of Italy's printers in one city 1. A map of Italy with a dot for every printer known to have worked there by 1600, nearly 3,000 of them. 2. Venice, where the dots crowd together. 3. A barge on a canal, stacked with crates of books. Fact: One third of Italy's printers published in Venice.
  • A wool guild announces a competition for a dome 1. Florence, August 19, 1418. The wool guild announces a competition to raise the cathedral's dome. 2. Models are carried in. 3. Guild officers walk around a model, deciding. Fact: The wool guild was the Arte della Lana. The cloth importers' guild had run the contest for the Baptistery doors in 1401.
  • Art sold off the shelf 1. A workshop with a counter: prints, pennants and playing cards, ready to buy. 2. A customer chooses one. 3. The shop adds the family's coat of arms. Fact: Renaissance workshops sold ready-made pieces that could be personalized with a name or a coat of arms.
  • Every deal written down twice 1. A merchant's account book with two sides to every page. 2. Each deal goes in twice, once on each side. 3. The two sides do not match, so somewhere there is a mistake to find. Fact: Luca Pacioli was the first to publish a work on double-entry bookkeeping, in a book printed in Venice in 1494.
  • Glassmakers are moved to an island 1. Venice, around 1271. The glassmakers' guild writes rules to keep its trade secrets inside the city. 2. 1291: glass factories keep catching fire, so a law gathers them on one island, Murano. 3. A glassworker may not leave Venice without permission. 4. The 1400s: Murano makes cristallo, an almost transparent glass. Fact: Murano was Europe's main center for luxury glass through the Renaissance.
  • The most expensive blue travels from a mine to a paint shop 1. A mine in Afghanistan: blue stone. 2. A ship unloads at Venice, the center of the trade. 3. A painter's shop: a small heap of blue powder, priced like gold. Fact: Ultramarine means beyond the sea, and at times it was valued as highly as gold.
  • Where the gold in a florin came from 1. Gold on its way north from Africa. 2. The mint in Florence weighs out about three and a half grams for each coin. 3. A florin in a merchant's palm. Fact: Until mines in the Americas added to the supply in the 1500s and 1600s, Africa supplied most of Europe's gold.

How it works

These comic ideas for the Renaissance are strips about the period's ideas, not copies of its paintings: an apprentice's first years, a dome nobody knew how to build, a press that outran every scribe. Each strip closes on a checked fact.

Read the full guide

What the Renaissance was

In Italy from the 1300s, and across Europe by the 1400s, scholars hunted for the lost books of ancient Greece and Rome. The art of the period is usually dated 1400 to 1600.

Four sides of it

Art and workshops is apprentices, patrons and how pictures were made. Science and discovery is people who looked for themselves. Books and print follows the press out from one shop in Mainz. Money and trade is the coins, banks and guilds that paid for the rest.

  • Put the year and the city in a caption box. Florence, Venice and Mainz each come up more than once.
  • The strips name real people of the period. Draw each by a tool, a compass, a press or a ledger, instead of a likeness.

Questions and answers

How do you make a comic strip about the Renaissance?

Choose one change and give it three panels: the old way, the new idea and the result. A scribe copying by hand, a press, and a stack of printed sheets is already a strip.

What does Renaissance mean?

Rebirth. The painter Giorgio Vasari wrote of a rinascita, a rebirth, in the art of his country, and a French historian later took up the idea in the French form, Renaissance, as a name for the whole change.

What were the main ideas of the Renaissance?

A revived interest in the ancient Greek and Roman world, the study of what it is to be human, and an education built on classical books. In art that meant perspective, realism and close detail.

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