The Renaissance
Jonathan Davies
(Powerpoint and handout are on the website)
Questions
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What was the Renaissance?
What was humanism?
How did the Renaissance develop and spread?
What were the legacies of the Renaissance?
Cicero
Petrarch
Cimabue,
Madonna di S. Trinità
Giotto,
Madonna di
Ognissanti
Once they have seen how art... had fallen
into complete ruin from such a noble height
... they will now be able to recognise more
easily the progress of art’s rebirth (rinascita)
and the state of perfection to which it has
again ascended in our own times...
Giorgio Vasari, Preface, The Lives of the Most
Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects
(1550)
‘[The Renaissance is] the most intractable
problem child of historiography.’
Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance
(New York, 1940), p. 2.
Jules Michelet
Jacob Burckhardt
Ernst Gombrich
Georg Hegel
…the Renaissance was not so much an “Age” as it was
a movement. A “movement” is something that is
proclaimed. It attracts fanatics, on the one hand, who
can’t tolerate anything that doesn’t belong to it and
hangers-on who come and go; there is a spectrum of
intensity in any movement just as there are usually
various factions or “wings.” There are also opponents
and plenty of neutral outsiders who have other worries.
I think we can most effortlessly describe the
Renaissance as a movement of this kind.
E. H. Gombrich, ‘The Renaissance - Period or
Movement?’, in A.G. Dickens et al., Background to the
English Renaissance. Introductory Lectures (London,
1974), pp.9-30
Rather than a period with definitive beginnings and
endings and consistent content in between, the
Renaissance can be (and occasionally has been) seen
as a movement of practices and ideas to which
specific groups and identifiable persons variously
responded in different times and places. It would be
in this sense a network of diverse, sometimes
converging, sometimes conflicting cultures, not a
single, time-bound culture.
Randolph Starn, ‘Renaissance Redux’, The American
Historical Review 103 (1998), 122-124
The studia humanitatis
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Grammar
Rhetoric
Poetry
History
Moral philosophy
Manual
Chrysoloras
Leonardo Bruni
Angelo Poliziano
and Marsilio Ficino
Niccolo’ Machiavelli
Francesco Guicciardini
Coluccio Salutati
Marsilio Ficino
Gasparino Barzizza
Guarino Guarini da Verona
Vittorino da Feltre
Filippo Brunelleschi,
The Dome of
Florence Cathedral
Luciano Laurana
The Ideal City
Donatello
David
Paolo Uccello
The Flood and Waters Subsiding
Pinturicchio
Enea Silvio
Piccolomini and
Emperor Frederick
III
Matthias
Corvinus
Rosso Fiorentino, Gallery of Francis I, Fontainebleau
Benvenuto Cellini, Nymph of Fontainebleau
Rodolphus Agricola
Johann Reuchlin
Willibald Pirckheimer
William Grocyn
Thomas Linacre
John Colet
Hans Holbein
Erasmus
Albrecht Dürer
Self-portrait
Antonello da
Messina
Crucifixion
Hugo van der Goes
Portinari Triptych
Giambologna
Rape of the
Sabines
‘Of the many tributaries which contributed
to the flow of the Reformation, by far the
most important was Renaissance
humanism.’
Alister E. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An
Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1993), p. 40
Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus