Continuity and Change:
1. Renaissance Society
2. Renaissance Ideals
Continuity:
• Family primary economic
unit; marriage NOT based
on love
• Subsistence SOL for the
masses
• No cures for most
diseases; medical
knowledge is VERY
limited
• Religion, church center of
life
Change:
• Possibility of progress
glimpsed by some
• Population shifts after the
Plague of 1348
• Urbanization in Italian
peninsula
• Civic pride in Italian citystates
• Wider choices in
consumer goods; more
luxuries available; small
but growing urban
bourgeoisie enjoys
above-subsistence SOL
Continuity and Change:
1. Renaissance Society
2. Renaissance Ideals
What are the indexes of
modernity?
• Pressures for increased democracy
• Loosening of old customs
• Questioning of ancestral religions; increased
secularization
• Demands for individual liberation
• Expectation of a higher standard of living
• Drive for more equality (gender, race, class, religious,
nationalities)
• Elaborate means of transportation and communication
• Advanced science, medicine, hygiene, agriculture
• Sophisticated means for fighting or negotiating peace
• Complex networks of finance and trade
“Renaissance thought went hand in
glove with Renaissance art”
What is humanism?
A few quotes to prompt you:
• “Man is born to be useful to other men”
-Alberti
• “The whole glory of man lies in activity”
-Bruni
• “What a piece of work man is”
-Shakespeare, “Hamlet”
Core concepts:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Individualism
Civic humanism
Secularism
Liberal arts
Sprezzatura
Virtu
Political science
A.
1.
2.
Which painting most likely comes
from the Renaissance?
Similarities?
a. subject matter:
b. techniques:
B.
3. Differences?
a. subject matter:
b. techniques:
4. So…why is one picture more
“typically” a Renaissance painting?
Valla, on
“The Donation of
Constantine”
“But am I foolish to inveigh
against the audacity of this
(forgery), instead of inveighing
against the insanity of those
who give him
credence…would you not bid
him name his author, produce
his book, and the passage, to
be explained by a reliable
translator, before you could
believe it?”
– Lorenzo Valla
1.
What tone does Valla use in this
passage?
2.
Why is Valla ‘inveighing against’ the
document in question?
3.
What are the Renaissance ideals Valla is
attempting to champion?
1.
2.
Identify the techniques used that help
achieve naturalism.
Explain how the techniques used in
this sculpture express at least TWO
Renaissance ideals.
a.
b.
Michelangelo’s
“David”