This opening lecture explores Florence at the moment it becomes a centre for new ways of seeing the world. In a city shaped by banking wealth, civic pride, and intense rivalry between families and guilds, art becomes central to public identity. Figures such as Filippo Brunelleschi, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, and Michelangelo Buonarroti reveal a culture fascinated by proportion, human potential, and the revival of antiquity. We explore how perspective, naturalism, and deep philosophical questions about the human condition emerge from this civic environment. Light musical context from early Renaissance polyphony helps evoke the ordered intellectual world of the Florentine cathedral and its rituals.