RENAISSANCE
the term ‘Renaissance’ refers to a profound and enduring upheaval and transformation in culture,
politics, art, and society in Europe between the years 1400 and 1600. The word describes both a
period in history and a more general ideal of cultural renewal. The term comes from the French for
‘rebirth’. Since the 19th century it has been used to describe the period in European history when
the rebirth of intellectual and artistic appreciation of Graeco-Roman culture gave rise to the modern
individual as well as the social and cultural institutions that define so many people in the western
world today. it implies a momentous cultural movement marked by revival of interest in the classical
age o f the Romans and the Greeks. It aimed at rediscovering the cultural accomplishments of the
classical period. It was not the discovery of the ancient past but, more significantly, the application
of that classical knowledge of arts, literature, social values and political life in accordance with their
own concept of social order that constituted Renaissance. h Renaissance that they sought to
transform all aspects of life - intellectual, social, cultural and political. The intellectuals spoke of the
art of the Middle Ages as Gothic, implying a barbaric character.
The Renaissance is usually associated with the Italian city states like Florence, but Italy’s undoubted
importance has too often overshadowed the development of new ideas in northern Europe, the
Iberian peninsula, the Islamic world, south-east Asia, and Africa. In offering a more global
perspective on the nature of the Renaissance, it would be more accurate to refer to a series of
‘Renaissances’ throughout these regions, each with their own highly specific and separate
characteristics. Renaissance was a remarkably international, fluid, and mobile phenomenon.
The Italian word rinascita (‘rebirth’) was used in the 16th century to refer to the revival of classical
culture. But the specific French word ‘Renaissance’ was not used as a descriptive historical phrase
until the middle of the 19th century. The first person to use the term was the French historian Jules
Michelet. h. In 1855 he published his seventh volume of the History, entitled La Renaissance. For him
in the Renaissance, The scientific discoveries of explorers and thinkers like Columbus, Copernicus,
and Galileo went hand in hand with more philosophical definitions of individuality. To him the
Renaissance represented a progressive, democratic condition that celebrated the great virtues he
valued – Reason, Truth, Art, and Beauty. According to Michelet, the Renaissance ‘recognized itself as
identical at heart with the modern age’. Michelet was the first thinker to define the Renaissance as a
decisive historical period in European culture that represented a crucial break with the Middle Ages,
and which created a modern understanding of humanity and its place in the world. (calls it a French
phenomenon). Renaissance identical at heart with modern age.
Jacob Burckhardt defined it as an Italian 15th-century phenomenon. In 1860 Burckhardt published
The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. He argued that the peculiarities of political life in late
15th-century Italy led to the creation of a recognizably modern individuality. The revival of classical
antiquity, the discovery of the wider world, and the growing unease with organized religion meant
‘man became a spiritual individual’. Burckhardt deliberately contrasted this new development with
the lack of individual awareness that for him defined the Middle Ages.
Walter Pater’s study The Renaissance, first published in 1873. . He found traces of this ‘love of the
things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake’. Michelet, Burckhardt, and Pater
created a 19th-century idea of the Renaissance as more of a spirit than a historical period. this way
of defining the Renaissance was that, rather than offering an accurate historical account of what
took place from the 15th century onwards, it looked more like an ideal of 19th-century European
society. people like Pater were creating a vision of the Renaissance that seemed to offer both an
origin and a justification for European dominance over the rest of the globe.
Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages. Huizinga looked at how northern European culture
and society had been neglected in previous definitions of the Renaissance. He challenged
Burckhardt’s period division between ‘Middle Ages’ and ‘Renaissance’, arguing that the style and
attitude that Burckhardt identified as ‘Renaissance’ was in fact the waning or declining spirit of the
Middle Ages.
Hans Holbeins
With Italian renaissance. The Renaissance as a movement was the product o f an urban
environment. It grew and prospered in the regions which had important cities or towns. As
mentioned in the last chapter, Italian city states were the most urbanized centres o f Europe. The
concentration of wealth in the Italian cities and their very' active civil life created a more worldly
view of life. plishments. Econom ic growth laid the material basis for the Italian Renaissance.
Renaissance was a cultural movement that was confined to the upper classes o f society and was by
no means democratic or popular. Its social base remained limited to the ruling elite. For the vast
majority o f the poor, illiterate and marginalized rural Italians, there was no Renaissance. At the
same time, the urban environment was an essential condition for the emergence o f the Renaissance
and it could not have achieved the scale and magnitude it did in a rural or a feudal society.
Scholars like Greenblatt and Natalie Zemon Davis in her book Society and Culture in Early Modern
France (1975) explored the social roles of peasants, artisans, transvestites, and ‘unruly’ women. As
intellectual disciplines such as anthropology, literature, and history learnt from each other’s
theoretical insights, the focus on excluded groups and marginalized objects increased. Categories
such as ‘witch’, ‘Jew’, and ‘black’ were subjected to renewed scrutiny, as critics sought to recover
neglected or lost voices from the Renaissance.
Instead of focusing on painting, sculpture, and architecture, scholars from various disciplines began
to investigate how the material significance of furniture, food, clothing, ceramics, and other
apparently mundane objects shaped the Renaissance world. Instead of seeing similarities, these
approaches suggested the gulf between the Renaissance and the modern world. Objects and
personal identities were not fixed and unchangeable, as Burckhardt had implied in his celebration of
‘modern’ man: they were fluid and contingent.
It argues that trade, finance, commodities, patronage, imperial conflict, and the exchange with
different cultures were all key elements of the Renaissance. Focusing on these issues offers a
different understanding of what shaped the Renaissance. It also leads us to think of the creativity of
the Renaissance as not confined to painting, writing, sculpture, and architecture. Other artefacts
such as ceramics, textiles, metalwork, and furniture also shaped people’s beliefs and attitudes, even
though many of these objects have since been neglected, destroyed, or lost.
Gentile and Giovanni Bellini’s painting Saint Mark Preaching in Alexandria.
Humanism as a cultural movement came to be involved with the rediscover)' and study of ancient
Greek and Roman te.xts, their restoration and interpretation and the collection and assimilation of
ideas derived from those texts. . T
studia humanitatis. , Renaissance humanism, and its close relationship to one of the most important
technological developments of the pre-modern world, the invention of the printing press.
This was a time when a whole generation of intellectuals developed a new method of learning
derived from classical Greek and Roman authors, called studia humanitatis. These scholars fashioned
themselves ‘humanists’ and engaged in an immense undertaking to understand, translate, publish,
and teach the texts of the past as a means of understanding and transforming their own present.
Renaissance humanism gradually replaced the medieval scholastic tradition from which it emerged.
It systematically promoted the study of classical works as the key to the creation of the successful,
cultivated, civilized individual who used these skills to succeed within the everyday world of politics,
trade, and religion.
Humanism’s success lay in its claim to offer two things to its followers. First, it fostered a belief that
the mastery of the classics made you a better, more ‘humane’ person, able to reflect on the moral
and ethical problems that the individual faced in relation to his/her social world. Secondly, it
convinced students and employers that the study of classical texts provided the practical skills
necessary for a future career as an ambassador, lawyer, priest, or secretary within the layers of
bureaucratic administration that began to emerge throughout 15th-century Europe. Humanist
training in translation, letter-writing, and public speaking was viewed as a highly marketable
education for those who wanted to enter the ranks of the social elite.
It relies on the assumption that a non-vocational study of the liberal arts makes you a more civilized
person, and gives you the linguistic and rhetorical skills required to succeed in the workplace.
The story of Renaissance humanism begins with the 14th-century Italian writer and scholar Petrarch.
He began piecing together textslike Livy’s History of Rome, collating different manuscript fragments,
correcting corruptions in the language, and imitating its style in writing a more linguistically fluent
and rhetorically persuasive form of Latin.. Petrarch also scoured libraries and monasteries for
classical texts, and in 1333 discovered a manuscript of a speech by the Roman statesman and orator
Cicero, the Oration for Archias. Petrarch took up Cicero’s distinction in his treatise The Solitary Life
(De Vita Solitaria). This was the blueprint for Petrarch’s humanism: the unification of the
philosophical quest for individual truth, and the practical ability to function effectively in society
through the use of rhetoric and persuasion. To obtain the perfect balance the civilized individual
needed rigorous training in the disciplines of the studia The Renaissance humanitatis, namely
grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy.
. Cicero’s definition of the civilized humanist, able to philosophize on humanity while also training
the elite in the skills of public oratory and persuasion, gave humanism and its practitioners greater
autonomy to ‘sell’ their ideas to social and political institutions. Humanism’s triumph lay in its ability
to utilize its skills in rhetoric, oratory, and dialectic to convince a range of potential political
paymasters of the usefulness of its services, be they republican or monarchical. Cicero also served as
a source of inspiration in the development of civic humanism. These men believed that one must
lead an active life for one’s own state and that everything, including wealth, should be considered
good if that increased one s power of action. An active life in civic matters does not put hurdles in
the development of intellectual strength but actually stimulates it. They argued that through
participation in state affairs an individual grows to maturity, both intellectually and morally. Like
Cicero, the civic humanists believed that moral and ethical values were hidden within public life and
therefore participation in public life was seen as an exercise in virtue. The civic humanists saw their
task as preparing men who would promote public virtue and through them make the government
and administration promote republican qualities.
The consequence of this massive dissemination of print was a revolution in knowledge and
communication that affected society from top to bottom. The speed and quantity with which books
were distributed suggests that print cultivated new communities of readers eager to consume the
diverse material that rolled off the presses. The accessibility and relatively low cost of printed books
also meant that more people than ever before had access to books. Printing permeated every area
of public and private life. Initially presses issued religious books – Bibles, breviaries, sermons, and
catechisms – but gradually more secular books were introduced, like romances, travel narratives,
pamphlets, broadsheets, and conduct books advising people on everything from medicine to wifely
duties.
The most famous northern European humanist, Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), used
the printing press as a way of distributing his own particular brand of humanism, and in the process
self-consciously styling himself as the ‘Prince of Humanism’. Responding to claims that the early
humanists were more interested in classical pagan writers than Christianity, Erasmus embarked on a
career of biblical translation and commentary that culminated in his edition of the Greek New
Testament with a facing Latin translation. Erasmus also appreciated that, as well as reforming
education and religion, humanism needed to ingratiate itself with political authority. In 1516 he
composed his Education of a Christian Prince and dedicated it to the Habsburg prince, the future
Emperor Charles V. This was an advice manual for the young prince in how to exercise ‘absolute rule
over free and willing subjects’, and the need. Dürer’s portrait of Erasmus, engraved in 1526,
established Erasmus’s reputation as the great humanist intellectual The humanist script for
education and advice from those skilled in philosophy and rhetoric.
Erasmus’s generation saw the creation of two of the most influential books in the history of political
theory and humanism: Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513) and Thomas More’s Utopia. this
chapter has argued, humanism is not the idealized celebration of humaneness that it often claimed
to be, but has a hard core of pragmatism. The legacy of Renaissance humanism is far more
ambivalent than many have been led to believe, partly because its rhetoric remains so seductive.
What gave them a semblance of unity was their enthusiasm for the rediscovery of Latin and Greek
classics and the immense values they found in them for literature and morals. Despite their varied
conclusions, they laid emphasis on elegance of writing, speech and morality by stressing the
uniqueness of man, his feelings and his potential. They believed that the Romans knew how to say
things. Many humanist writers adopted the Latin model because of its beauty of expression.
chief hallmarks of Italian humanism included individualism and dignity of man, secularism, revival of
Latin and Greek, promotion of vernacular literature, study of histoiy and a new approach to
philosophy. As Heinrich Decker suggests, the efforts towards a religious understanding of the world
and humanist strivings towards education were not merely two parallel trends; they merged and
became one. However, instead of ascribing everything to God, the humanists believed that God had
laid down an irreversible programme for the universe and that man was responsible for his own
good and evil acts.The human will and human morality was, therefore, not controlled by God but by
man himself. They believed that active public life benefitted others and was more praiseworthy than
a strictly private monastic life. Humanists wanted to create an environment in which the potential of
man could be fully exalted and his mental faculties could reach its full potential. In this way they
paved the way for secularism in which civic life was freed from ecclesiastical domination. The
humanists made available the recovered and restored classical literature in the purest form.
Humanism’s relationship to women was far more ambivalent. In his treatise On the Family (1444),
Leon Battista Alberti defined a humanist vision of the domestic household, owned by men but run by
women. They did not completely reject women’s pursuit of learning, but were adamant that it
should only go so far. In an address written around 1405 Leonardo Bruni, according to Hans Baron
the great hero of civic humanism, cautioned that for women to study geometry, arithmetic, and
rhetoric was dangerous because ‘if a woman throws her arms around while speaking, or if she
increases the volume of her speech with greater forcefulness, she will appear threateningly insane
and require restraint’. Women could learn cultivation, decorum, and household skills, but formal
expertise in applied subjects that could lead to public and professional visibility were frowned upon.
In spite of such hostility, some learned women did attempt to carve out intellectual careers. In The
Book of the City of Ladies (1404–5) the French writer Christine de Pizan argued that ‘those who
blame women out of jealousy are those wicked men who have seen and perceived many women of
greater intelligence and nobler conduct than they themselves possess’. In the 1430s Isotta Nogarola
of Verona responded to attacks on women’s loquaciousness by suggesting that, ‘rather than women
exceeding men in talkativeness, in fact they exceed them in eloquence and virtue’.
’. Once a woman crossed the line from accomplished student to orator in the public sphere, the
humanist response was to either castigate her for being sexually aggressive, or mystify and trivialize
women’s intellectual dialogue as amorous exchanges between lovers. Renaissance humanism did
not necessarily create new opportunities for women. It encouraged women’s education as a social
adornment and an end in itself, not as a means to step out of the household and into the public
sphere.
Visual art was popular in Renaissance Italy as it was considered a symbolic language. It was seen as a
medium of communication with social, spiritual and political values. During the Renaissance it
possessed an inner power and became a matter of civic pride. According to Peter Burke, the arts
between 1350 and 1550 were transformed in two ways — through a return to nature and through a
return to antiquity. The former influenced the field of painting while the latter determined the
trends in architecture. Humanism as a cultural movement had great impact in creating interest in
art, architecture and music. The aim of humanism was to perfect all forms of art and scholarship.
The emancipation of man and the focus on the dignity of men created an atmosphere of intellectual
freedom and individual expression. The recovery of the secular and humane philosophy of Greece
and Rome not only led to individualism but promoted new trends and styles in the sphere of art. The
architects, sculptors and painter. The craze of classics and the love o f beauty became the most
striking features of Italian Renaissance. Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455), Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-
1446), Masaccio (1401-28) and Donatello (1386?-1466). Their sculpture, architecture and paintings
were based on experiments and in the process they brought about visual representation of space
through the laws of perspective. T
Donatello was the greatest sculptor. His work broke new grounds. His creations were full of energy
and spirit. There was realism and vigour as is evident from his bronze statue of David. Donatello tried
to replace the gentle refineness of his predecessors by a new and vigorous study of nature. He
encouraged the study ot anatomy and he also believed that beauty was a matter of proportion. This
attitude of the Renaissance artists towards beauty was one of the key features of Renaissance art.
The Last Supper, painted on the walls of a refectory in Milan. Every character in this painting reveals
an emotion as the painting concerns the betrayal of Jesus Christ. Mona Lisa has become a legendary
painting and a thing of eternal beauty. The treatment of main and secondary characters, the sense
of composition and the use of light and shade are the hallmarks of da Vinci’s art. As an architect, he
built the Medici residence and the Milan cathedral.
Michelangelo. His greatest achievement in painting was the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-12). It
depicted a scene from the Book of Genesis, presenting a concentration of paintings at a single
location. While maintaining his commitment to the Greek style, he retained the principles of
harmony, solidarity and dignity. His famous art piece in the form of the Last Judgment was a fresco
on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel.
h'lichelangelo is also remembered as a talented poet. He wrote a htrgc number of poems,
particularly love poems consisting of 343 sonnets, madrigals and capitoli (satirical pieces). As a
sculptor, his greatest creations were the Rebellious Slave and David. The latter is a statue 5.5 meter
in height and presents the best possible expression of beauty of the male figure.
Thus, the Renaissance is seen as much as a period o f revival of antiquity as the formation of new
ideas. It brought to the fore a vast range of human pursuits from literature, education, and writing of
history to art, architecture, music and civic virtue. It recaptured classical models, analysed political
institutions and created fresh interest in human society. This period presents divergent voices and
talents with a critical attitude towards the contemporary world. By encouraging experimentations
and artistic expressions, the movement set diverse cultural trends.Though the Renaissance was not a
distinct movement and had its roots in the medieval past, there is no denying the fact that it
contributed in the emergence of modern world.
PAtRONAGE
