The first sign of the new order was when, for the first time, a Portuguese ship laden with pepper and cinnamon dropped anchor in the port of Antwerp in 1501.  She had sailed there directly from the Portuguese territories in the East Indies, following the route to the Spice Islands first charted by Vasco da Gama four years previously. The fact that she bypassed her home port of Lisbon, despite being financed by the Portuguese, was significant in confirming the widespread recognition that Antwerp was now the hub of global trade.

In the same year, a thousand miles and more away in Florence, Michelangelo began to fulfil his contract with the city of Florence to carve his massive marble figure of David.  When it was finished the figure was acclaimed by the Forentine Republic as superior to any other work of sculpture, past or present, and was erected in triumph as a public monument to the importance of the individual.  Apart from its name, Michelangelo's David is completely free of religious feeling, a pure embodiment of humanism.  More than any other Florentine artistic accomplishment, the carving of David marked the culmination of the North Italian Rennaissance, highlighting individual thinking as a critical force against the old medieval  view of conforming to spiritual authority.

The sculpture is in fact a highly coercive political object. The Republic of Florence commissioned the work as a symbol of political liberty triumphing over tyranny (many Florentines saw David's defeat over Goliath as an allegory of Florence's victory over similarly tyrannical foes such as Milan and the Medici family). A commission was drawn up in 1504 to decide where the completed statue should be publicly displayed to maximize its political impact. Michelangelo seized the sensitive commission as an opportunity to make a political and artistic name for himself. He also used the statue to confirm his status as a rather risque artist. Previous sculptures of David had depicted the boy fully clothed. Michelangelo maximized the public impact of his towering sculpture by making his David naked, and justifying it through classical precedent. 

Michelangelo had little interest in the politics of the statue. By the time it was erected he had left Florence for more lucrative commissions in Rome. Later in his career he was similarly wooed by the Ottoman sultans to work on the architecture and decoration of the palaces and bazaars of Istanbul.  David is example of the opportunism that motivated even the greatest Renaissance artists whose work was paid for out of the profits from the Florence's textile trade and international banking activities.