European Renaissances

Just what is the European renaissance and when and how did it happen and who decided? Let's look at the renaissances of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Giotto, of Erasmu, and Thomas More and Holbein, of Machiavelli and Castiglione and Raphael. Are these renaissances intellectual, aesthetic, visual, rhetorical? Did they happen in the fourteenth century, the fifteenth, the sixteenth? Or in the nineteenth when they were first clearly described?