Tuesday 3 April 2012

The Renaissance: History of an Idea

'The Renaissance' is one of the most frequently used terms in cultural history, but the idea itself has been subject to much examination and discussion. Here is a summary of some of the key points in the debate.


The Idea of Renaissance

Claims that the fourteenth century witnessed some kind of cultural rebirth in Europe go back to the period itself. The Italian poet Petrarch (1307-74) saw the rinascimento as the revival of the values of the classical world, after the barbarian invasion of Rome and the ensuing chaos of the Dark Ages. Petrarch lived in what has been called ‘the calamitous fourteenth century’ - calamities which included, among other things, the Hundred Years War, the ‘Babylonian captivity’ of the papacy in Avignon, and the horrors of the Black Death. Contrasting the glories of ancient Rome with this miserable present, Petrarch divided history into two periods, historiae antiquae, which ended with the ending of the Roman Republic, and historiae novae, from the Roman Imperial period onwards. This was an unorthodox view, as it placed pagans in the period of light and Christians in the darkness. Petrarch yearned for a return to the spirit and letters of ancient Rome. Addressing his own poem Africa (composed 1338) he says:

For you, if you should long outlive me, as my soul hopes and wishes, there is perhaps a better age in store; this slumber of forgetfulness will not last forever. After the darkness has been dispelled, our grandsons will be able to walk back into the pure radiance of the past. (Africa, IX, 453-7)

The achievement of the Florentines in restoring the light was saluted by the (Florentine) humanist Marsilio Ficino (1433-99):

If we are to call any age golden, it is beyond doubt that age which brings forth golden talents in different places. That such is true of this our age [one] will hardly doubt. For this century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music ...

In his Lives of the Artists (1550), the artist and writer Vasari presented the history of northern Italian art as an upward journey, leading away from the stylized forms of the Middle Ages to the magnificent realistic art of Michelangelo. This journey was led by a series of heroic artists of genius. Through them, as Vasari tells the story, the glories of the ancient world had been reborn.  Such comments are not attempts at objective history. They appear in writings such as letters or manifestos, where poets promote their activities and seek patrons. Vasari’s Lives is also a work of propaganda: it was dedicated to the Grand Duke of Tuscany and thus naturally extols the greatness of that region.

Effusions of enthusiasm such as these are not the same as claims that the age as a whole can be characterised as a rebirth, or re-naissance of ancient thought. The use of the word ‘Renaissance’ as a serious historical term really starts in the nineteenth century. The French historian Michelet famously called the Renaissance a time of ‘the discovery of the world and the discovery of man’. In this period, Michelet points out, man looked outwards at the world around him: he explored in ships, investigated with science, and celebrated natural objects in art. At the same time, people looked inwards at themselves: in the plays of Shakespeare, or the essays of Montaigne, we see an unprecedented representation and examination of individual human consciousness. This thesis was further developed by the Swiss historian Burckhardt in his massively influential The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). For Burckhardt, the Renaissance was the birth of the modern age: medieval certainties about man, the world and God faded away, and the modern individual emerged – equipped to enquire and reason, to trade and to express himself through his behaviour and creative work.

            How convincing are these various claims? They have certainly been influential. Petrarch’s picture of a noble classical age, lost in the ‘Middle Ages’ and revived in the rinascimento has ingrained itself in the Western sense of history. Yet there is much to be said against it. Above all, it discounts the cultural achievements of the so-called ‘Middle Ages’. Latin culture could hardly be reborn in Petrarch’s time, since it had never died: Europe is built on the ruins of Rome, and throughout the Middle Ages we see Roman influence: in language, education, customs and the law. At certain points, such as the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’ of the ninth century and the ‘twelfth century Renaissance’ involving scholars like John of Salisbury, classical writings had been intensively studied: indeed, the manuscripts that Petrarch and others were ‘discovering’ were earlier medieval copies, largely owing to scribal activity under Charlemagne. The image of a brilliant rebirth, so persuasively painted by Petrarch and his followers, may be more self-advertisement than historical fact.

            The theses of Michelet and Burckhardt have also been disputed by later writers. Was the Renaissance really the birth of modernity? Medieval practices and beliefs did not disappear but continued throughout the Renaissance period. As for the examination and celebration of the natural world, we can see these clearly in the work of a medieval scholar like Roger Bacon and the poetry of St Francis. Seen in this light, the Renaissance could be seen as a development of the medieval world rather than a departure from it. Perhaps the single greatest invention of the Renaissance - printing - came from the medieval guild system. Equally, Renaissance characteristics can be found in cultural achievements of the eighteenth century and even into the present. At both ends, the chronology is highly problematic.

            In short, while Michelet and Burckhardt draw our attention to important phenomena of the period, they also select out a great deal. Moreover, their books are based on a theory of history that is also controversial: this is the idea - inspired by the German philosopher Hegel - that an age has a Zeitgeist (Spirit of the Age) - an underlying essence or character which unifies its various parts. Moreover, in the Hegelian view, history is teleological: that is to say, it is moving in a certain meaningful direction. This assumption underlies the nineteenth-century historians’ emphasis on the Renaissance as a progression from past to present. This notion, too, which links with the outlook of Vasari and others, is contentious.


For these reasons, some historians and critics have avoided the term ‘Renaissance’, and preferred to employ the label ‘Early Modern’ for broadly the same period. A book like this one could also be called ‘English Reformation Literature’, since the ideas of Reformation theology had at least as much impact on the English in these centuries as the models of classical culture - and possibly more. Nevertheless, the Renaissance is a convenient term for denoting a certain period, and we can use it without committing ourselves to the thesis elaborated by Burckhardt and other historians. A period term may be used for practical convenience; indeed without them, study becomes next to impossible.

            The foregoing discussion is not intended to imply that the writers discussed may be in any way dismissed. Vasari’s Lives is one of the great books of the West. Burckhardt’s book, the result of five tears’ exhaustive travel, reading and note-taking, is still indispensable for the serious student of the Renaissance, precisely because of the discussion it has provoked. And while it has been seriously revised in the light of later scholarship, it has not been comprehensively demolished. Some contemporary writers on the Renaissance still, with various important qualifications, see the period as representing a profoundly significant shift in Western man’s modes of thinking and living. The debate on what we mean by ‘The Renaissance’ is still ongoing.


Further Reading

A classic defence of the label ‘Renaissance’ as applied to Italian art is: Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (London: Paladin, 1970), ch. 1 ‘Renaissance – Self-Definition or Self-Deception?’, 1-35.

See also the first two essays in A G Dickens and others, Background to the English Renaissance. Introductory Lectures (London: Gray-Mills, 1974): E H Gombrich, ‘The Renaissance – Period or Movement?’, 9-30; J R Hale, ‘The Renaissance Label’, 31-42.

A modern summary of the debate is given by Margaret L King, The Renaissance in Europe (London: Laurence King, 2003), ‘Introduction: The Idea of the Renaissance’, viii-xv.

'The Renaissance' on In Our Time: excellent discussion by Francis Ames-Lewis, Peter Burke and Evelyn Welch.