This caused a lot of competition throughout the Italian city-states. A little competition can be good though. It's always important to give yourself a challenge. Weakness within the church allowed more room for more worldly power and outlook on things. Again, much like today. The church has become so weak and given up on things that they allow the world to have full control over everything. This weakness forced the new ideas and aspirations to emerge.
The most basic intellectual ideal of the Renaissance was humanism. This was a program of study aimed to replace the scholastic emphasis on logic and metaphysics with the study of language, literature, rhetoric, history, and ethics. I would have much rather learned about history, literature, and language than whatever metaphysics is. However, it is important to be able to think logically, otherwise you're left with unrealistic ideas and your head in the clouds. These humanists had rather read of the classic and ancient literatures rather than the those of recent writers. If it were up to me and put in today's time, I would much rather read today's literature than the classics. They saw the vernacular, or regional, writings as less educated than those who wrote in Latin or Greek. These were seen as praiseworthy. However, the Latin writings could only be the classical Latin of Cicero and Virgil, not the changing Latin of the churches. .
In addition to the literature or ideals of the Renaissance, art had also become very popular. With wealth and the growth of patronage increasing, the desire for a new and different variety of "visual narratives " grew increasingly. Not only were religious paintings wanted, largely due to the fact that they were very important to the people, but so were paintings of classical subjects. Likewise, portraiture became very popular as well due to princes and merchants wanting to glorify themselves. Because why else would someone want a massive painting of themselves hanging up in their home? Within the fifteenth century many of the great painters that flourished were Florentines.
