Chapter 13 Lecture Notes
1) The Italian Renaissance
a) The Renaissance was an intellectual movement that began in Italy in the 14th
century
b) Two key hallmarks of the Renaissance were:
i) an extreme hostility to the culture of the Middle Ages
ii) a fascination with the ancient world
(1) The Renaissance was the first, for example, to use the term "Dark Ages"
to describe the period after the fall of Rome.
c) Their love affair with the ancients led to an increasing literacy in Latin and Greek
i) The term "Renaissance" is this sense refers to the rebirth of the classic Greek
and Roman ways
d) The main emphasis of the Renaissance centered around the individual and the
potential of human nature
e) At first, it was restricted to a relatively small group of educated, self-conscious
elites, but especially in the north, it spread out to embrace other social classes
which deeply affected the history of Europe
f) In short, most historians mark the Italian Renaissance as the beginning of the
modern world
2) Why did it begin in Italy?
a) The northern Italian cities had led the way in the economic revival of the 12th and
13th centuries--art flourishes in a society with money
i) Florence, especially, at the end of the 13th century became the bankers to the
pope, taking a sizable cut out of church transactions for its services.
ii) The Italian middle classes wanted to show off their pride in their city states
iii) Italy had never been completely feudalized either; cities had always survived
there and the tradition of lay education remained strong.
b) Moreover, Italian society of the 14th century was primarily urban
i) Nobles here lived in cities, a stone's throw from one another, so ideas could
spread more rapidly here than in the isolated manors of northern Europe
c) Finally, Italian artists considered themselves the natural heirs to Roman art
because they were surrounded with the remaining monuments
d) In the Renaissance, Italy would enjoy the prestige that France had had in the
Gothic period.
e) The ideals of the Renaissance centered on individualism, the hallmark of the
period
i) for example, Renaissance writers invented the autobiography, a form which
presumes the reader is not only interested in your particular life, but in how
you tell it
ii) They were proud of their abilities and scorned the Christian humility that the
Middle Ages prized
iii) When the public thought Donatello had sculpted the Pietá, Michelangelo crept
into St. Peters at night and carved his name, Michelangelo Buonarotti, across
the Virgin's dress, so everyone would know he was the artist
f) The Renaissance was also the first period to embrace quantification
i) For the first time, clocks helped quantify time with hours of the same length
(1) The medieval belief in the timelessness of the world disappeared to be
replaced by the Renaissance's obsession with time and numbers
(2) The new vogue for clocks on the village church helped to educate even
peasants about new ideas of time and orderliness
ii) Renaissance thinkers saw numbers as neutral things, rather than imbued with
special characteristics and religious meaning
iii) Medieval scholars, for example, saw 6 as a perfect number because it was
created by adding the numbers of the Trinity; Renaissance people saw 6 as
simply a number like any other
iv) One of the earliest examples of this rage for quantification was music that was
now divided into equal measures; music could be "seen."
(1) the musical staff was Europe's first graph
3) Humanism
a) The Renaissance ideas all came together in a new philosophy known as humanism
i) This involved the study of the classics to create a new definition of what made
man truly human
ii) To quote Erasmus, "Men are made, not born."
iii) This was far cry from the medieval assumption that man was born with a soul
that distinguished him from the animals
iv) Now, to be truly human, one would need to become truly educated
b) Humanists differed from those who had studied the ancient works before; they did
not feel inferior to the ancients, but rather saw themselves as equals
c) Humanism consists of four essential aspects
i) Admiration and emulation of the Ancient Greeks and Romans
ii) Philosophy of enjoying this life, instead of just waiting for the next one
iii) The glorification of humans and the belief that individuals are can do anything
iv) The belief that humans deserved to be the center of attention.
d) Humanists stressed the dignity of man, the best of God's creatures below the
angels
i) Moreover, they did not interpret these ancient texts for their Christian
meaning, but instead tried to see them on their own terms
ii) Aristotle, humanists would argue, was not a proto-Christian, having lived
centuries before Christ, but rather a Greek who would have to be understood
in terms of his own culture
e) In a profound way, the humanists and the Renaissance invented history.
Humanists were excited by the purity of ancient Latin, scorning the barbaric Latin
of the medieval church
i) Their insistence on going back to the original texts helped them to expose
errors in translation, not just of Aristotle and Cicero, but more importantly of
the Latin Vulgate Bible then in use in the Catholic Church
f) Humanists
i) Petrarch (1304-1374) First humanist of the Renaissance
ii) Boccaccio (1313-1375) Writes The Decameron
iii) Baldassare Castiglione - Writes The Courtier
4) Renaissance art
a) One place that clearly demonstrates the ideas of humanism is Renaissance art
i) Most art was now bought by patrons who were not churchmen, but rather
important secular people like bankers
ii) This freed art from service to religion, permitting themes and treatments that
would have been off limits in a church
iii) The emphasis on individualism led to the development of the individual
portrait, where the sitter was presented warts and all, not idealized but
realistically
(1) Even the human body was presented in a more scientific/natural manner
(2) One thinks of Michelangelo dissecting bodies to discover how muscles
were connected so he could draw everything exactly (dissection was very
much against church doctrines and law at the time.)
iv) Perhaps most important, artists were now regarded as intellectual geniuses,
not simply craftsmen
(1) Some became wealthy; Michelangelo was paid 3000 ducats to decorate the
Sistine Chapel when a man could live like a prince on 300 a year
(2) He even refused payment for working on St. Peters Basilica because he
was already so rich
b) New technological advances made much of Renaissance art possible
i) Oil painting allowed richer, deeper colors, and required much less speed to
produce than frescoes which had to be painted while the plaster was still wet
ii) Oil paintings could be done in the north where wetter, colder climates caused
frescoes to pop off the wall, something which bedeviled Leonardo da Vinci's
Last Supper painted in wet Milan rather than drier Rome
iii) Brunelleschi's Dome of the Cathedral Santa Maria del Flore in Florence as an
engineering marvel
c) Renaissance artists were interested in making money and changed their style and
production techniques to maximize their profit
i) Albrecht Durer, for example, refused to do more oil paintings because they
were so time consuming, and he concentrated instead on wood block prints
that were quick and more profitable
ii) More painters entered the middle classes as a result of their improved fortunes
iii) Patron consumerism was reflected in the popularity of tapestries
iv) Such works ostentatiously displayed the owner's wealth and erudition, and
moreover the tapestries could easily by moved if the owner changed
residences in a way a fresco could not
d) Characteristics of Medieval Art
i) Paintings were lacking on depth and perspective, usually lacked a background
ii) Religious themed focusing on heaven or religious people
iii) Not realistic (geometrically or mathematically), showed no emotions
e) Characteristics of Renaissance Art
i) Emulated Greeks and Romans
ii) Good use of depth (linear and atmospheric)
iii) Detailed backgrounds with earthly themes/more realistic and accurate
iv) Emotions and more natural poses
f) Artists of the Early Renaissance
i) Giotto (1267-1337) Famous for painting solid bodies with emotion
ii) Masaccio (1401-1428) First Renaissance artist to show nudes in his paintings
(1) Emphasis on nature and three-dimensional figures
iii) Donatello (1386-1466) Sculpture who focused on the beauty of humans
iv) Brunelleschi (1377-1446) Groundbreaking architect using symmetry/balance
g) Niccolo Machiavelli
i) The key political thinker of the Renaissance
ii) The Prince
(1) written as a how-to manual for his Florentine patrons
(2) Machiavelli focuses on the individual qualities needed to rule
(3) The Prince is filled with harsh advice--murder, intrigue, betrayal-basically describing what it takes to gain power and stay in power
(4) There are no notions of ruler ship by "divine right" in Machiavelli's
writing, simply a naked truth about what it took to be a ruler in those times
h) The Renaissance may have begun in Italy, but as it spread north, it changed in
ways that would have a profound impact on the development of Protestantism
i) As many historians have noted, once you had the Renaissance with its ideals of
individualism, historical precision, and understanding people in the context of
their original cultures, the Protestant reformation was inevitable.
5) Northern Renaissance
a) The Renaissance spread north about 1500
i) Students from the North carried the ideals of the Italian Renaissance back with
them
ii) Spanish and French armies invading Italy were exposed to new theories
before returning home
iii) More important was printing with moveable type, invented in the mid-15th
century, which made printing easier and cheaper; this helped spread books and
knowledge of Renaissance ideals as well
b) But soon differences developed between the northern and southern Renaissance
i) In the north, the prime patrons were kings of the new nation states, not the
wealthy burghers of Italy adding prestige to their cities
ii) The northern Renaissance had a more Christian, religious aspect than did the
more Greco-Roman, pagan aspect of Italian Renaissance
(1) The north had always stressed theology in its universities, while Italy had
trained lawyers and administrators in its schools
(2) In the north, they edited the commentaries of St. Paul, in the south, Plato;
both were Greek writers, but one was a father of the Christian church and
the other a pagan philosopher
iii) Northern humanists tended to be of a more varied social background as well,
unlike the elites of Italy
(1) Perhaps because of this, northern Renaissance thinkers were more willing
to write for a lay audience, not just the educated intelligentsia
c) Erasmus
i) An example of the northern Renaissance is Erasmus, a Christian humanist
who sought to blend the humanities with the Christian tradition
(1) To the stoical patience, calmness and broadmindedness of the classical
period, Erasmus sought to add the Christian virtues like love, faith, and
hope
(2) He faced up to the serious ills of his time, becoming a reformer, especially
of religion
(3) His ideas are characterized by a tolerant view of man
(4) He was horrified by the intolerance of Luther, for example
(5) Erasmus was interested in developing ethical purity of religion which the
Italians by and large were not, and he showed great faith in education to
prepare people for a pious life
(6) He was impressed with the purity and simplicity of the early Christians, as
opposed to the formalism and complexities of the Renaissance church
6) Art of the Northern Renaissance
a) Northern Renaissance painting reflected these differences in ideas of the Italian
and Northern Renaissances
i) It is characterized by a deep religious feeling and spiritualism frequently
missing in the south
ii) When Hans Memling did a portrait, the sitter was almost always in an attitude
of prayer, rather than dressed in Sunday best facing the artist
iii) Even the architecture of the north remained Gothic, a truly "Christian
architecture," they believed, as opposed to the pagan Roman building of the
south
iv) Towns halls remained mini-cathedrals. The frescoes of Italy were rarely seen
in the north, and instead they experimented with oil painting and the
meticulous care of miniatures
b) Durer and Brueghel
i) The two most famous of these northern painters may be Albrecht Dürer and
Peter Brueghel
ii) Durer
(1) Dürer got the idea of perspective, the new use of color and modeling from
Italy, but his themes tend to be religious
(2) Primarily an engraver, Dürer remained concerned with outline and
extraordinary attention to detail
(3) Many of his drawings could easily be turned into wood block suitable for
printing in books
iii) Brueghel
(1) Brueghel shows the religious aspect of the north as well in his Slaughter of
the Innocents
(2) Most artists approached this subject by painting a mythical scene of
people dressed in vaguely Roman costumes, but Brueghel painted it as a
Flemish village being attacked by Spanish soldiers
(3) Flanders were being occupied by the Spanish and the Flemish people
resented it greatly
(4) One sees here the close alliance of religion and politics so typical of the
north as well as the idea that religion was not far away and irrelevant but
contemporary and vital
c) As historians have argued, the Reformation had to begin in the north
7) Artists of the High Renaissance
a) In Italy during the 2nd half of the Renaissance
i) Leonardo (1452-1519) Artist who excelled in technical perfection with
detailed backgrounds; also wrote, inventor and was a scientist)
ii) Raphael (1483-1520) Artist who used perspective and ancient styles to
produce a sense of peace
iii) Michelangelo (1475-1564) Artist, architecture and sculpture who gave a sense
of strength and ambition
iv) Titian (1479-1576) Artist whose scenes of luxury seemed real to the viewer
8) Social Life in Renaissance Europe
a) Marriage and family
i) Marriage for Catholics was dominated by economic factors, not love or
physical attraction
(1) Men needed to have sufficient land before marrying, meaning they usually
had to wait until the father died or yielded up the land
(a) That meant people continued to marry late, and this in turn affected the
number of children a couple had
(2) Divorce according to the Catholic church simply did not exist except for
non-consummation of the marriage
(3) But while divorce was impossible, marriage was easy
(a) All it took was an oral promise between the two partners
(b) The church preferred to have these vows solemnized in the church, but
it was not technically necessary
(c) To be sure, difficulties arose when one party claimed such a promise
had taken place in secret when the other one denied it
(d) Grievances resulting from these misunderstandings kept ecclesiastic
(church) courts busy for years
ii) Protestants changed the concept of marriage, praising it as a noble estate
rather than a third best alternative to celibacy
(1) They used the cloister as a symbol of what they saw as the church's antifeminism
(2) Protestants argued that putting women in a home would liberate them
from the sexual repression, cultural deprivation and male clerical rule
which characterized the nunnery
(3) Because of their more favorable view of marriage, Protestants made it
easier, reducing the number of impediments prescribed by the Catholic
church
(a) So successful was this that the Catholic quickly followed suit
iii) Protestants rejected the idea of marriage as a sacrament, and so they permitted
divorce
(1) It certainly wasn't easy, however
(2) Protestants argued in favor of the sexual and spiritual equality of the
spouses, and so passed tough laws against wife beating
(3) Many women joined the Protestant faiths hoping to escape violent
husbands, and in fact much modern research has demonstrated the critical
role of women in allowing the new faith to spread
iv) Protestants practiced contraception as well with the aid of botanicals high in
estrogen
(1) Pennyroyal, Queen Anne's lace and myrtle, for example, were used, but
one needed to know how to harvest and prepare them
(2) Without such knowledge, these botanicals became highly poisonous
(3) Most had as much as a 70% effectiveness rate in preventing or terminating
pregnancies
b) Size of families
i) Renaissance women bore more babies than women do nowadays, delivering a
child on average once every 24-30 months
ii) Ten percent of women died in childbirth, a rate 20 to 24 times higher than in
the 19th century
iii) City born babies died twice as fast as country born ones, even though the city
baby might be sent to the country within days of its birth
iv) Since daughters in a family divided the family wealth when they received a
dowry to marry, "superfluous" daughters were sent to convents which
required a dowry but a much smaller one
(1) In 16th century, half of women from elite families ended up in convents
9) Changes in Warfare and the Printing Press
a) Social life in the Renaissance was affected by two major changes that helped
create the devastating loss of life associated with the wars of religion
b) These two developments were changes in warfare and the development of
printing with movable type
c) Changes in Warfare
i) The changes in warfare created the huge population losses we associate with
Renaissance war and the need for substantial tax increases to provide for the
large armies
ii) Gunpowder was increasingly used with the result that killing now took place
at a great distance and indiscriminately
(1) The cannons required mass armies unlike the ragtag bands of feudalism
(2) Each marching square surrounding the cannon batteries contained 3000
men
(3) Thus, Spain by the mid-16th century had an army of 40,000
(4) Gustavus Adolphus, the king of Sweden, developed the salvo in which he
fired all his cannons at once instead of in sequence
(5) The Swedes lost continuity of fire but produced a fearsome blast which
could shatter an enemy's ranks
(6) By the mid-17th century when Gustavus Adolphus ruled, the Swedish
army was 175,000, and Louis XIV of France toward the end of the century
considered 400,000 a necessity
iii) Such large armies meant the use of conscription because volunteers were so
unreliable, and armies also had to stay encamped year round, instead of just in
the summer, since collecting so many men and then dispersing them a few
months later was too difficult to do
(1) Such large armies would also have to paid year round, meaning a huge rise
in taxes, primarily on the poor who paid most of the taxes and were most
of the recruits
(2) Nonetheless, the new armies created some social mobility, especially for
artillery officers who needed expertise
(3) Armies in some cases became too expensive to actually risk in battle!
(4) When Sulieman attacked Vienna, for example, he was so deeply in debt he
dared not use his army and instead paraded them around the walls of the
city in a magnificent show of his power, hoping the city would surrender
based only on his displayed might
iv) As the armies became more professionalized, a large bureaucracy was created
to mobilize a country for war, a development that spurred absolutism
d) The Printing Press
i) Printing also helped spread the Protestant Reformation's ideas and thus helped
cause religious divisions which encouraged bloody, Renaissance warfare
(1) Printing with moveable type replaced block printing from China
(2) Paper had not been a problem since the mid-1400s, but wooden blocks had
to be individually carved and frequently became saturated with ink making
the image blurred
(3) Using individual metal letters allowed many copies to be made from the
same setting without smudging
ii) The Italians abandoned the Gothic script first used by Gutenberg for the
Carolingian minuscule, which they insisted on calling Roman style, since they
would not admit the medieval period could have invented anything worth
having
iii) Books, like Renaissance paintings, became a marketable commodity
(1) While books became cheaper to produce using the printing press, they
were more lavishly bound to serve as examples of the owner's erudition
and wealth
iv) Quantification also increased with the printing press; now uniform page
numbers allowed two readers to compare exactly the same passage with ease
v) Medieval scribes would have been unable to reproduce the complex
illustration of machines or maps of the New World which the Renaissance
needed to difuse such knowledge quickly and accurately
vi) Printing in a profound way made the Reformation possible, because while
challenges to church abuses had popped up before, they had almost always
been local phenomena
(1) Luther, by printing his sermons and treatises and spreading them quickly
throughout large populations made it impossible for the church to contain
his influence in any one area
1) The Revival of Classical Ideas
a) Brought about by the availability of Roman and Greek books preserved in the
Islamic Countries
b) Refuges from the fall of Constantinople brought the ability to translate these
classics
c) Humanism- Life should be centered on human interests and a belief in the worth
and dignity of man
d) Genius (Universal Man) - A person of extraordinary intellectual and creative
powers
2) In Literature
a) The vernacular or native languages replaced Latin as the language of writers
b) The invention of movable type by Johann Gutenburg leads to an explosion in
information and ideas
c) Dante Alighieri - The Divine Comedy
d) Giovanni Boccaccio - The Decameron a collection of 100 stories
e) Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales
f) Desiderius Erasmus - In Praise of Folly - Church dogma should be replaced by
the moral teaching of Christ
g) Thomas More - Utopia
h) Miguel de Cervantes Saaveda - Don Quixote de la Manche - The loss of the ideals
of chivalry in the new age
i) Michel Eyquem Montaigne - Invented the essay
3) In The Arts
a) Giotto Bondone - From stylized to life like figures and faces
b) Sandro Botticelli - Brought back color
c) Leonardo da Vinci d) Michelangelo Buonarvoti e) Raphael Santi 4) In Science
a) Nicolas Copernicus (Mikolaj Kopernik)
i) De Revolutionbas Orbium Celestia 1543 (On the Revolutions of the Celestial
Spheres)
ii) A sun centered universe
iii) The planets are in movement around the sun in circular orbits
b) Giordano Bruno
i) An outspoken defender of Copernican ideas
ii) Thought there was no difference between heaven and hell
iii) Burned at the stake by the Inquisition (1600) - “I await your sentence with less
fear, than you pass it. The time will come when all will see what I see.”
c) Johannes Kepler
i) Using the observations of Tycho Brahe he developed a theory of planetary
motion
ii) The New Astronomy (1609)
iii) Laws of Motion
(1) Each planet moves about the sun in an orbit that is an ellipse
(2) Law of Areas - A straight line joining planets and the sun sweeps out
equal areas in space in equal intervals of time
d) Galileo Galilei
i) Sidereal (Starry) Messenger (1610)
e)
f)
g)
h)
ii) Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems (1632)
iii) Rest and movement are equally natural states for matter
iv) Discovered that there were moons around Jupiter
v) Discovered that the moon did not have a smooth surface
vi) Discovered the phases of Venus
vii) Started the idea of experimenting and not just thinking
viii) Was forced to renounce all of his beliefs and was held under house arrest
until his death by the Inquisition
ix) This ended the Mediterranean as the center of Western thought
Christian Huygens
i) Saturn has rings
ii) There are objects beyond the solar system, so the sun is not the center of the
universe
iii) Star magnitude
iv) Invented the pendulum clock
Isaac Newton
i) Mathematical Principle of Natural Philosophy (1686)
ii) Opticks (1704)
iii) Force=Mass x Acceleration
iv) For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction
v) Planets speed up while approaching the sun and slow down while moving
away from it
vi) Gravity is a constant force and causes the movement of matter, this showed
what force made the planets move
vii) Gravity is equal to the masses of objects in inverse proportion to the square of
the distance between them
viii) Invented the reflecting telescope
ix) Fought with Gottfried Lebniz over the invention of calculus
Rene Decartes
i) Invented co-ordinate geometry
ii) “I think therefore I am”
William Harvey
i) The heart works like a pump and circulates blood