In what ways is Sir Francis Bacon a man of the Renaissance?

Sir Francis Bacon can be considered a “man of the
Renaissance” in a number of different ways, including the
following:

• He was a man of diverse interests and
  talents, gifted as a writer, scientific thinker, judge, and politician, to name just a
  few of his roles. Since the term “Renaissance man” refers to a man who deliberately
  cultivated numerous talents, Bacon is a man of the Renaissance in this respect. Thinkers
  in the Renaissance believed that God had gifted humans with great potential and that
  people had a serious obligation to cultivate that potential and use it wisely and
  well.


• As a philosopher and scientific thinker, Bacon
  sought to promote the responsible use of reason, which he considered one of the most
  important gifts God had given to man. Thinkers of the Renaissance almost universally
  prized reason, and Bacon was no exception.


• At the same
  time, Bacon and other Renaissance thinkers believed that reason was fully compatible
  with Christian faith; they considered Christianity an eminently
  reasonable religion.


• Because he
  did believe that Christianity was reasonable, Bacon (like many
  other Renaissance thinkers) sought to show how truths discovered by the ancient Greeks
  and Romans were compatible with Christian truth.


• At the
  same time, Bacon believed that it was possible to carry the reasonable pursuit of truth
  even further than it had been carried already. Humans should not be content to rely
  merely on conventional authority but should seek to discover truths about the world by
  using what might be called the scientific method, which is an especially disciplined use
  of reason.


• Bacon was also a typical Renaissance thinker
  in his emphasis on ethics and morality. Truth should not simply be known but should also
  be practiced, especially in one’s dealings with other persons. It is not surprising,
  then, that his essays deal with topics “Civil and
  Moral.”


• Yet despite his tendency to prize truth and
  reason, Bacon was under no illusions about human nature. For instance, in his essay “Of
  Truth,” he makes clear his belief that humans have natural tendencies to want to be
  willful and to lie.


• Bacon was a typical Renaissance
  thinker in the range of his intellectual ambitions. Not content to specialize in one
  area of thought or practice, he gave serious thought to many different kinds of topics,
  as the mere titles of his various essays suggest. He also fulfilled a wide variety of
  social roles.

In all these ways, then, Bacon
might reasonably be called a “man of the Renaissance.”