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Martin Luther (10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546)
He initiated the Protestant Reformation. As a priest and theology professor, he
confronted indulgence salesman John Tetzel with his The Ninety-Five Theses in 1517.
Luther strongly disputed their claim that freedom from God's punishment of sin
could be purchased with money. His refusal to retract all of his writings at the
demand of Pope Leo X in 1520 and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Edict
of Worms meeting in 1521 resulted in his excommunication by the pope and
condemnation as an outlaw by the emperor. Martin Luther taught that salvation is
not from good works, but a free gift of God, received only by grace through faith in
Jesus as redeemer from sin. His theology challenged the authority of the pope of the
Roman Catholic Church by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely
revealed knowledge and opposed sacerdotalism by considering all baptised
Christians to be a holy priesthood. Those who identify with Luther's teachings are
called Lutherans.
His translation of the Bible into the language of the people (instead of Latin)
made it more accessible, causing a tremendous impact on the church and on German
culture. It fostered the development of a standard version of the German language,
added several principles to the art of translation, and influenced the translation into
English of the King James Bible. His hymns inspired the development of singing in
churches. His marriage to Katharina von Bora set a model for the practice of clerical
marriage, allowing Protestant priests to marry.
Much scholarly debate has focused on Luther's writings about the Jews. His
statements that the Jews' homes should be destroyed, their synagogues burned,
money confiscated, and liberty curtailed were revived and used in propaganda by the
Nazis from 1933 to 1945. As a result of this and his revolutionary theological views,
his legacy remains controversial.
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John Calvin (10 July 1509 – 27 May 1564)
He was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant
Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian
theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he broke
from the Roman Catholic Church around 1530. After religious tensions provoked a
violent uprising against Protestants in France, Calvin fled to Basel, Switzerland,
where in 1536 he published the first edition of his seminal work Institutes of the
Christian Religion.
In that year, Calvin was invited by William Farel to help reform the church in
Geneva. The city council resisted the implementation of Calvin and Farel's ideas,
and both men were expelled. At the invitation of Martin Bucer, Calvin proceeded to
Strasbourg, where he became the minister of a church of French refugees. He
continued to support the reform movement in Geneva, and was eventually invited
back to lead its church. Following his return, he introduced new forms of church
government and liturgy, despite the opposition of several powerful families in the
city who tried to curb his authority. During this period, Michael Servetus, a Spaniard
known for his heretical views, arrived in Geneva. He was denounced by Calvin and
executed by the city council. Following an influx of supportive refugees and new
elections to the city council, Calvin's opponents were forced out. Calvin spent his
final years promoting the Reformation both in Geneva and throughout Europe.
Calvin was a tireless polemic and apologetic writer who generated much
controversy. He also exchanged cordial and supportive letters with many reformers
including Philipp Melanchthon and Heinrich Bullinger. In addition to the Institutes,
he wrote commentaries on most books of the Bible as well as theological treatises
and confessional documents, and he regularly gave sermons throughout the week in
Geneva. Calvin was influenced by the Augustinian tradition, which led him to
expound the doctrine of predestination and the absolute sovereignty of God in
salvation.
Calvin's writing and preachings provided the seeds for the branch of theology
that bears his name. The Presbyterian and other Reformed churches, which look to
Calvin as a chief expositor of their beliefs, have spread throughout the world.
Calvin's thought exerted considerable influence over major religious figures and
entire religious movements, such as Puritanism, and some have argued that his ideas
have contributed to the rise of capitalism, individualism, and representative
democracy in the West.
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Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519)
He was an Italian polymath, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor,
anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. Leonardo has
often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance man, a man whose
unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely
considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most
diversely talented person ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen
Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind
and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote".
Born the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman,
Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of
the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was
spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome,
Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by
Francis I.
Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona
Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied
portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only
by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also
regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text
books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his
constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his
chronic procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks,
which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of
painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that
of his contemporary, Michelangelo.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter,
a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a
rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed
or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as
an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire,
entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced
the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and
hydrodynamics.
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Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (March 6, 1475 – February 18, 1564)
Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet,
and engineer. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the
disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a
contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and
fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci.
Michelangelo's output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when
the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also
taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his
best-known works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite
his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the most influential
works in fresco in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling
and The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. As an
architect, Michelangelo pioneered the Mannerist style at the Laurentian Library. At
74 he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of Saint Peter's
Basilica. Michelangelo transformed the plan, the western end being finished to
Michelangelo's design, the dome being completed after his death with some
modification.
In a demonstration of Michelangelo's unique standing, he was the first
Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. Two biographies
were published of him during his lifetime; one of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed
that he was the pinnacle of all artistic achievement since the beginning of the
Renaissance, a viewpoint that continued to have currency in art history for centuries.
In his lifetime he was also often called Il Divino ("the divine one"). One of the
qualities most admired by his contemporaries was his terribilità, a sense of aweinspiring grandeur, and it was the attempts of subsequent artists to imitate
Michelangelo's impassioned and highly personal style that resulted in Mannerism,
the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.
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William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564 – died 23 April 1616)
He was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer
in the English language and the world's preeminent dramatist.[1] He is often called
England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon".[2][b] His surviving works, including
some collaborations, consist of 38 plays,[c] 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems,
and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living
language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.[3]
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he
married Anne Hathaway, who bore him three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet
and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an
actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's
Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around
1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life
survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his
physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to
him were written by others.[4]
Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613.[5][d]
His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of
sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. He then wrote mainly
tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered
some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote
tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.
Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy
during his lifetime. In 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the
First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the
plays now recognised as Shakespeare's.
Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his
reputation did not rise to its present heights until the nineteenth century. The
Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians
worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called
"bardolatry".[6] In the twentieth century, his work was repeatedly adopted and
rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain
highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed and reinterpreted in
diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.
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Giovanni Boccaccio (1313 – 21 December 1375)
He was an Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of
Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable
works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian
vernacular. Boccaccio is particularly notable for his dialogue, of which it has been
said that it surpasses in verisimilitude that of just about all of his contemporaries,
since they were medieval writers and often followed formulaic models for character
and plot.
Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), also known as Saint Thomas
More, was an English lawyer, scholar, author, and statesman.
During his life he gained a reputation as a leading Renaissance humanist, a
violent opponent of the Reformation of Martin Luther, and a government official.
For three years toward the end of his life he was Lord Chancellor.
More coined the word "utopia" - a name he gave to the ideal, imaginary island
nation whose political system he described in Utopia, published in 1516. An
important counsellor to Henry VIII of England, he was imprisoned and executed by
beheading in 1535 after he had fallen out of favor with the king over his refusal to
sign the Act of Supremacy 1534, which declared the King the Supreme Head of the
Church of England, effecting a final split with the Catholic Church in Rome. In
1980, More was added to the Church of England's calendar of saints, jointly with
John Fisher, on July 6, the anniversary of More's death.
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Johannes Gutenberg (c. 1398 – February 3, 1468)
He was a German goldsmith and printer who is credited with being the first to
use movable type printing, in around 1439, and the global inventor of the mechanical
printing press. His major work, the Gutenberg Bible (also known as the 42-line
Bible), has been acclaimed for its high aesthetic and technical quality.
Among the specific contributions to printing that are attributed to Gutenberg
are the invention of a process for mass-producing movable type, the use of oil-based
ink, and the use of a wooden printing press similar to the screw olive and wine
presses of the period. His truly epochal invention was the combination of these
elements into a practical system. Gutenberg may have been familiar with printing; it
is claimed that he had worked on copper engravings with an artist known as the
Master of the Playing Cards. Gutenberg's method for making type is traditionally
considered to have included a type metal alloy and a hand mould for casting type.
The use of movable type was a marked improvement on the handwritten
manuscript, which was the existing method of book production in Europe, and upon
woodblock printing, and revolutionized European book-making. Gutenberg's
printing technology spread rapidly throughout Europe and is considered a key factor
in the European Renaissance. Gutenberg remains a towering figure in the popular
image; in 1999, the A&E Network ranked Gutenberg #1 on their "People of the
Millennium" countdown, and in 1997, Time–Life magazine picked Gutenberg's
invention as the most important of the second millennium.
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Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (April 6 or March 28, 1483 – April 6, 1520)
Better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the
High Renaissance, celebrated for the perfection and grace of his paintings and
drawings. Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the
traditional trinity of great masters of that period.
Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large workshop,
and despite his death at thirty-seven, a large body of his work remains. Many of his
works are found in the Apostolic Palace of The Vatican, where the frescoed Raphael
Rooms were the central, and the largest, work of his career. After his early years in
Rome, much of his work was designed by him and executed largely by the workshop
from his drawings, with considerable loss of quality. He was extremely influential in
his lifetime, though outside Rome his work was mostly known from his collaborative
printmaking. After his death, the influence of his great rival Michelangelo was more
widespread until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Raphael's more serene and
harmonious qualities were again regarded as the highest models.
His career falls naturally into three phases and three styles, first described by
Giorgio Vasari: his early years in Umbria, then a period of about four years (from
1504-1508) absorbing the artistic traditions of Florence, followed by his last hectic
and triumphant twelve years in Rome, working for two Popes and their close
associates.
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Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527)
He was an Italian philosopher, writer, and is considered one of the main
founders of modern political science. He was a diplomat, political philosopher,
musician, and playwright, but, foremost, he was a civil servant of the Florentine
Republic. In June of 1498, after the ouster and execution of Girolamo Savonarola,
the Great Council elected Machiavelli as Secretary to the second Chancery of the
Republic of Florence.
Like Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli is considered a typical example of the
Renaissance Man. He is most famous for a short political treatise, The Prince, written
in 1513, but not published until 1532, five years after Machiavelli's death. Although
he privately circulated The Prince among friends, the only work he published in his
lifetime was The Art of War, about high-military science. Since the sixteenth century,
generations of politicians remain attracted and repelled by the cynical approach to
power posited in The Prince and his other works. Whatever his personal intentions,
which are still debated today, his surname yielded the modern political word
Machiavellianism—the use of cunning and deceitful tactics in politics.
Machiavelli died in 1527. His grave site is unknown, but a cenotaph
honouring him was erected at the Church of Santa Croce, in Florence. The Latin
legend reads: TANTO NOMINI NULLUM PAR ELOGIUM (No eulogy would be
adequate to praise so great a name).
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Renaissance and Reformation Topics:
Humanism
The great intellectual movement of Renaissance Italy was humanism. The humanists
believed that the Greek and Latin classics contained both all the lessons one needed to lead
a moral and effective life and the best models for a powerful Latin style. They developed a
new, rigorous kind of classical scholarship, with which they corrected and tried to
understand the works of the Greeks and Romans, which seemed so vital to them. Both the
republican elites of Florence and Venice and the ruling families of Milan, Ferrara, and
Urbino hired humanists to teach their children classical morality and to write elegant,
classical letters, histories, and propaganda.
In the course of the fifteenth century, the humanists also convinced most of the popes that
the papacy needed their skills. Sophisticated classical scholars were hired to write official
correspondence and propaganda; to create an image of the popes as powerful, enlightened,
modern rulers of the Church; and to apply their scholarly tools to the church's needs,
including writing a more classical form of the Mass.
The relation between popes and scholars was never simple, for the humanists evolved their
own views on theology. Some argued that pagan philosophers like Plato basically agreed
with Christian revelation. Others criticized important Church doctrines or institutions that
lacked biblical or historical support. Some even seemed in danger of becoming pagans. The
real confrontation came in the later sixteenth century, as the church faced the radical
challenge of Protestantism. Some Roman scholars used the methods of humanist
scholarship to defend the Church against Protestant attacks, but others collaborated in the
imposition of censorship. Classical scholarship, in the end, could not reform the Church
which it both supported and challenged.
Secularism
Secularism is the concept that government or other entities should exist separately from
religion and/or religious beliefs.
In one sense, secularism may assert the right to be free from religious rule and teachings,
and the right to freedom from governmental imposition of religion upon the people within a
state that is neutral on matters of belief. In another sense, it refers to the view that human
activities and decisions, especially political ones, should be based on evidence and fact
unbiased by religious influence.
Patrons of the Arts
Patronage is the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organization or
individual bestows to another. In the history of art, Patron of the Arts refers to the support
that kings, popes, or wealthy merchants have provided to musicians, painters, and sculptors.
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Rebirth of Classical learning
The Renaissance was a rebirth in a second sense. It was a rebirth of classical learning and a
rediscovery of ancient Rome and Greece. Renaissance artists and scholars looked back to
this Classical past. They deliberately rejected the scholarship and religious thought of the
Middle Ages. For them, the Middle Ages were a Dark Age. Nothing original and creative
had happened since the fall of Rome. They sought to imitate the art of Classical Greece
with its realistic depiction of the human form. They thought that the classical Latin written
by Vergil, Cicero, or Julius Caesar was much superior to the Church Latin spoken during
their own time. They wanted to purify Latin of its medieval corruptions. In the process of
doing so, ironically, they helped to destroy the living Latin of the Middle Ages and turned it
into the dead language which it is today.
The Renaissance was a rebirth of the human spirit, a rebirth of creativity. While taking the
classical past as its model, the Renaissance was one of the most creative periods in human
history, comparable only to the Golden Age of Hellenic Athens in the fifth century before
Christ. Florence has often been called the Athens of the Renaissance because so many great
artists were born or worked there.
Lutheranism / Calvinism / Protestantism vs. Catholicism
Please see textbook and Renaissance-Reformation packet for information
regarding this topic.
Shift from the Manor system to the Growth of Towns
Please see textbook and Renaissance-Reformation packet for information
regarding this topic.