“ ‘ith minimal ingenuity, \ N any historical period can be made to dissolve into the ones around it. Take the rock rev- ‘olution—that great shift which, emerg- ing in the mid-nineteen-fifties and es- tablished by the mid-sixties, definitively separated the Broadway-and-jazz-based tunes that had previously dominated popular music from the new sound. ‘The break ravaged record companies and derailed careers. In the fifties, the wonderful jazz-and-standards singer Beverly Kenney performed a song shetd written called “I Hate Rock'n’ Roll,” and then—perhaps for other reasons, but surely for that one, too—took her own life. But listen closely and you hear con- tinuities stronger than any rupture. ‘The second song that the Beatles sang to the American public was a Broad- way ballad from “The Music Man.” Chuck Berry, their hero, worshipped ‘Nat King Cole, with Berry's great rock songs of the fifties being variants on Cole's witty hipster jazz songs from a decade before. (Berry also took most of his guitar licks from the sophisti- cated jazz guitarist Carl Hogan, of Louis Jordan's band.) And the elements of Leonard Bernstein's or Richard Rod- gers's music within the best work of a Paul Simon or a Paul McCartney are as obvious as is the intertwining of ‘Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix. It was in the record business's interest to con- vince the teen-agers to whom it was selling music that their music was noth- ing like their parents’ music. But the rock revolution can easily look more artifactual than authentic. 58 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 4, 2025 (LITT) THE CRITICS ALU ACRITIC AT LARGE PERIOD PIECES Was the Renaissance real? By ADAM GOPNIK ‘To anyone who grew up in the pe tiod, this is a bit absurd. Of course the rock revolution was real; of course the rock era was an era, with signatures and styles all its own. The first song, that the Beatles sang was self-composed, in itself a huge change. By 1967, when “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and Bob Dylan's “Visions of Johanna” were wildly popular, the musical world had become completely different from what it had been a few years earlier. Still, at- tempts to dissolve a period, however unpersuasive, can be instructive, be- cause they make you think hard about what a period style és. Your common sense goes to war with your critical the- ory—as it should, since the point of critical theory is to puncture what we call common sense, while the point of ‘common sense is to see past theory to things as they are. ‘As with rock music, so with the Renaissance. Beginning in the mid- nineteenth century, many educated Eu- ropeans and Americans shifted their ‘model of agreat-good-place-back-then from ancient Greece and Rome to Re- naissance Italy. This reévaluation co- incided with nineteenth-century aes theticism—the idea that art could rival faith as a reason for living—and with ‘revived appreciation of material prog- ress. Renaissance people didn’ think things; they made things. And so celebrating the Renaissance became ‘a way to pay respect to prosperity and materialism. When Walter Pater pub- lished “The Renaissance,” in 1873, he was implicitly aligning Botticelli with William Morris and the craft revival. ‘Two decades later, when the art histo- l rian Bernard Berenson praised the “tac- tile values” of Italian painting, he was linking Giotto to the pragmatism of William James. Yet doubts, of the kind that halo the rock revolution, have always hov- ered around the idea of the Renais- sance. Ifit was really a rebirth ofa clas- sical past, why ae its greatest monuments all Catholic affirmations of faith? If it marked a break with medievalism— ‘well, what medievalism? Dante and Pe- trarchis clear vernacular preceded what wwe now call the Renaissance. As the art historian Erwin Panoféky long ago observed, Europe saw many “renais- sances" in classical form long before the fifteenth century—the rounded arches of Romanesque architecture in the twelfth century, for instance. Perhaps the Renaissance appeals to the mod- em imagination because it was an in- vention of the modern imagination. ‘Two new books from university presses take up this debate for the twenty-first century. Bernd Roeck’s “The World at First Light” (Princeton), translated, from the German, by Pat- rick Baker, runs to almost a thousand pages and, despite its title, actually of- fers a kind of macro-dissolution of the Renaissance. Seen from Roeck’s vast aerial perspective, the period vanishes into the whole of history—much as Manhattan shrinks to just another is land in a satellite view. The Renai sance, in his telling, fades into the me~ dieval world that spawned it and the Enlightenment that followed it. ‘Meanwhile, Ada Palmer’ “Inventing the Renaissance” (Chicago), at a mere six hundred and fifty pages, announcesits thesis in its title, Hers is less macro- dissolution than a series of micro- disillusions: she goes deep into the minutiae ofthe lives of Renaissance lu- minaries to show that, far from being idealists reaching for the rebirth of a better world, they were the usual human mixture of self promotion, self-delusion, and fakery. The Renaissance cities, far from being principalities of prosperity and enlightened rule, were desperately ‘poor, violent, and anarchic.’ They turned to antiquity more for consolation than for confident renewal. ‘The Renaissance, in Palmer's view, was a series of idiosyncratic local ar- rangements. It was given a shine later by those who needed something shin- ing, Paters “The Renaissance” has about as much of a relationship to actual fifteenth-century Florence as Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” does to nineteenth-century Japan. Where Roeck sees the Renaissance as a broad spec~ trum of activities (rock is just one ep- isode in the long history of pop music), Palmer argues that, under close scru- ‘tiny, the whole idea collapses into con- tradictions (rock is not an actual thing but a series of retrospective reflections around different things). For Palmer, then, the Renaissance is not so much a golden age as a glittering illusion— assembled, reassembled, and ultimately undone by the longings of those who came after. ‘occk’s Renaissance begins in the stwelfth century—the high Middle ‘Ages, in our usual accounting—and carties the story through the Reforma- tion, the Counter-Reformation, and the Baroque. A professor emeritus of history at the University of Zurich, Roeck has written a book with an al- most comically wide reach, in the spirit more of Jared Diamond's “Guns, Germs, and Steel” than of a conventional cul- tural history. In a Diamond-like man- ner, Roeck even devotes many specu- lative pages to the Little Iee Age as it ‘was experienced in the sixteenth cen- tury; he credits it for the surge in witch hunts as failed harvests set off mass panic. (That's surely overdrawn; after all,“A Midsummer Night's Dream” was written in the chill of it.) The book’ scope is partly academic mission creep. Roeck seems to know of 60 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 4, 2025 every human being and social move- ‘ment in Europe through those six cen- tures, and he wants to write about them all. (He also adds in Asia and Africa throughout.) This dots the book with delightful and animating cameos. We meet the first man since antiquity known to have celebrated his birth- day—as sure a sign of individualism as Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man— and learn that the library in the great ducal court of Urbino took manuscript ‘books off the chains that had tradition- ally held them in place, allowing the reader to move them back and forth within the room. Even a longtime lover of Carpaccio’s 1502 picture of St. Au- gustine in his study—the greatest image of a humanist at work—might not have noticed that, forall the serenity of the study, the expensive books are actually strewn across the floor and under the desk, spines every which way, just as in amodern scholar’s study. It's tiny but telling sign that a new idea of reading and thinking was taking hold. Inevitably, a net this large hauls in a lot of sardines along with tuna. In Roeck, everything comes in for scru- tiny—and “everything” is not really a subject. Many pages go by that seem scarcely pointed toward a point. But a thesis does in time emerge, and it is that the Renaissance was neither the last effusion of the antique past nor a beautiful preliminary to modernity; it was modernity itself The key ideas, s0- cial practices,and convictions that made the scientific revolution began here.’The version of the Renaissance beloved of Pater or John Ruskin—a lyrical over- ture to beauty and communal order, re~ fined by classical aestheticism—is, on this view, sentimental. Instead, the pe- riod marks a permanent alteration in what earlier scholars would have called “European man,” forged through a new union of artisanal craft and intellectual ambition, and shaped by the competi- tive worlds its makers inhabited. tis impossible to imagine Thomas Aquinas actually building a Gothie ca- thedral, but Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo were profound neoclassical (and proto-scientific) souls and also guys who could engineer cannons and bridges and churches. Filippo Brunelle- schi knew how to think buildings and how to build buildings. Galileo ground lenses as much as he theorized the movement of the planets. These pur- suits were necessarily communal—it takes a guild to make a telescope—and helped develop “horizontal social struc- tures that shaped egalitarian, even dem- ccratic, habits, which then helped reshape the world. What marks a “Renaissance ‘man’is not multifariousness of pursuits but, rather, an intensity of purpose so great that it has an appetite forall sides of a single activity. ‘This combination of practical skill and intellectual ambition inspired the scientific revolution. The marriage of the tenaciously artisanal and the wildly speculative eventually produced, among other things, Charles Darwin’ pains- taking pigeon breeding—the ground- ‘work for his theory of evolution. And, though democratic states were still a distant prospect, democratic habits flourished within guilds, faculties, and even monasteries. Renaissance people ‘weren't conscious egalitarians, but they were accustomed to open contests and competitions, one of the hallmarks of modernity. Roeck goes on to address the great question of why Europe became the center of prosperity and innovation on the planet. Colonialism and imperial- ism cantt explain it; they're as old as time. Roeck believes, surprisingly, that the Renaissance, and so the breakaway of Europe, happened not in spite of the cera’s religious warfare but, in part, be- cause of it. By fusing spiritual and tem- poral power, the period's absurd-seeming battles over mystical doctrine—was the blood truly present in the chalice, or merely indicated in it?—were insepa- rable from struggles for worldly author- ity. The result was an enduring insta- bility, which, however brutal, prevented the dead calm of enforced harmony. Roeck contrasts this, in a grand Spen- glerian manner, with the East Asian spiritualities that, he insists, tended to make a neater division between what was owed to the divine and what be- longed to the state. Necessity may be invention's mother, but Chaos is its fa- ther—as he was the begetter of the Olympian gods. In Roeck’s picture, com- petitive, rather than imitative, habits of mind rose from religious warfare, es- tablishing a cutthroat system of cultural and economic innovation which lasts