The Renaissance: A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles)

illustrated boards dust jacket 196 pp

PART ONE--THE HISTORICAL AND ECONOMICAL BACKGROUND

The past is infinitely complicated, composed as it is of events, big and small, beyond computation. To make sense of it, the historian must select and simplify and shape. One way he shapes the past is to divide it into periods. Each period is made more memorable and easy to grasp if it can be labeled by a word that epitomizes its spirit. That is how such terms as "the Renaissance" came into being. Needless to say, it is not those who actually live through the period who coin the term, but later, often much later, writers. The periodization and labeling of history is largely the work of the nineteenth century. The term "Renaissance" was first prominently used by the French historian Jules Michelet in 1858, and it was set in bronze two years later by Jacob Burckhardt when he published his great book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The usage stuck because it turned out to be a convenient way of describing the period of transition between the medieval epoch, when Europe was "Christendom," and the beginning of the modern age. It also had some historical justification because, although the Italian elites of the time never used the words "Renaissance" or "Rinascita," they were conscious that a cultural rebirth of a kind was taking place, and that some of the literary, philosophical and artistic grandeur of ancient Greece and Rome was being recreated. In 1550 the painter Vasari published an ambitious work, The Lives of the Artists, in which he sought to describe how this process had taken place, and was continuing, in painting, sculpture and architecture. In comparing the glories of antiquity with the achievements of the present and recent past in Italy, he referred to the degenerate period in between as "the middle ages." This usage stuck too.

Thus a nineteenth-century term was used to mark the end of a period baptized in the sixteenth century. But when exactly, in real chronological terms, did this end of one epoch and beginning of another occur? Here we come to the first problem of the Renaissance. Historians have for long agreed that what they term the early modern period of European history began at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, though they date it differently in different countries. Thus, Spain entered the early modern age in 1492, when the conquest of Granada was completed with the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews, and Christopher Columbus landed in the Western Hemisphere on the instructions of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. England entered the period in 1485, when the last Plantagenet king, Richard 111, was killed at Bosworth and the Tudor dynasty acquired the throne in the person of Henry VII. France and Italy joined Spain and England by virtue of the same event, in 1494, when the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy. Finally, Germany entered the new epoch in 1519, when Charles V united the imperial throne of Germany with the crown of Spain and the Indies. However, by the time these events took place, the Renaissance was already an accomplished fact, in its main outlines, and moving swiftly to what art historians term the High Renaissance, its culmination. Moreover, the next European epoch, the Reformation, usually dated by historians from Martin Luther's act in nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517, had already begun. So we see that the connection between the Renaissance and the start of the early modern period is more schematic than chronologically exact.

The next problem, then, is defining the chronology of the Renaissance itself. If the term has any useful meaning at all, it signifies the rediscovery and utilization of ancient virtues, skills, knowledge and culture, which had been lost in the barbarous centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, usually dated from the fifth century A.D. But here we encounter another problem. Cultural rebirths, major and minor, are a common occurrence in history. Most generations, of all human societies, have a propensity to look back on golden ages and seek to restore them. Thus the long civilization of ancient Egypt, neatly divided by modern archeologists into the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom, was punctuated by two collapses, termed intermediate periods, and both the Middle and the New kingdoms were definite and systematic renaissances. Over three millennia, the cultural history of ancient Egypt is marked by conscious archaisms, the deliberate revival of earlier patterns of art, architecture and literature to replace modes recognized as degenerate. This was a common pattern in ancient societies. When Alexander the Great created a world empire in the fourth century B.C., his court artists sought to recapture the splendor of fifth-century Athenian civilization. So Hellenistic Greece, as we call it, witnessed a renaissance of classic values.

Rome itself periodically attempted to recover its virtuous and creative past. Augustus Caesar, while creating an empire on the eve of the Christian period, looked back to the noble spirit of the Republic, and even beyond it to the very origins of the city, to establish moral and cultural continuities and so legitimize his regime. The court historian Livy resurrected the past in prose, the court epic poet Virgil told the story of Rome's divinely blessed origins in verse. The empire was never quite so self-confident as the Republic, subject as it was to the whims of a fallible autocrat, rather than the collective wisdom of the Senate, and it was always looking over its shoulder at a past that was more worthy of admiration, and seeking to resurrect its qualities. The idea of a republican renaissance was never far from the minds of Rome's imperial elites.

Naturally, after the fall of the Western empire in the fifth century A.D., the longing for the recovery of the majestic past of Rome intensified among the fragile or semibarbarous societies that succeeded the imperial order. In the Vatican Library there is a codex, known as the Vatican Virgil, which dates from the fifth or sixth centuries. It is written in a monumental Capitalis Rustica, a self-conscious attempt to revive the Roman calligraphic majuscule, which had largely fallen out of use during the degenerate times of the third and fourth centuries. The artist-scribe, perhaps from Ravenna, who illustrated the text with miniatures, including one of Virgil himself, evidently had access to high-quality Roman work from a much earlier date, which he imitated and simplified to the best of his ability. Here is an early example of an attempted renaissance of lost Roman skills. There were many such.
A more successful and conscious renaissance, organized from above, took place during and after the reign of Charlemagne, king of the Franks, 768-814, who brought together virtually all the Christian lands of Western Europe in one large kingdom. In the quasi-millennarian year A.D. 800 he had himself crowned emperor of what became established as the Holy Roman Empire, a Christian revival of the past distinguished from its pagan predecessor by its qualifying adjective. The coronation took place in Rome, during Christmas mass in Old St. Peter's, Pope Leo III being the celebrant, but the new Roman emperor did not live there, preferring instead to erect a palace in his imperial heartland, Aachen. It was, however, built from materials transported from Rome and Ravenna, which had the right antique stamp and beauty. In Aachen Charlemagne created a court culture on what he believed to be Roman lines, having himself taught Latin and a little Greek, and summoning scholars to serve him from all over the known world. His chief intellectual assistant, Alcuin, wrote on Charlemagne's orders the Epistola de litteris colendis (785), which outlined a program for the study of the Latin language and texts sacred and profane at all the cathedral and monastic schools in the empire. A summary of the knowledge deemed authentic and needful, the Libri Carolini, was prepared and circulated. In Charlemagne's own scriptorium, and thereafter in other intellectual centers where his writ ran, his clerks developed what became known as the Carolingian minuscule, a clear and beautiful script that became standard in the early Middle Ages.

There survive in the Vatican Library two codices that illustrate the impact of Charlemagne's program. The first, the Sacramentarium Gelasianum, dates from the period just before he came to the throne, and is distinguished by superb if barbarous paintings of plants and animals. It records ancient Roman liturgical ceremonies and other documentary evidence of the past, and is written in a fine uncial, though the minuscule Charlemagne popularized makes its first appearance in places. This was the heritage on which the new emperor built. By contrast there is the far more sophisticated Terentius Vaticanus, dating from a few years after Charlemagne's death, written entirely in fine Carolingian minuscule and illustrated by paintings of actors performing Terence's plays. The book is interesting in itself as showing how familiar early medieval scholars were with Terence's writings, but the artwork is clearly and self-consciously based on earlier models from Roman times-the figures of actors in folio 55 recto, with their vigorous gestures, are powerful recapitulations of skills supposedly lost for centuries.

The Carolingian experiment had thus some of the characteristics of a genuine renaissance. But it remained an experiment. Ninth-century society lacked the administrative resources to sustain an empire the size of Charlemagne's, and anything less lacked the economic resources to consolidate and expand such an ambitious cultural program. All the same, it was something to build on, and in due course the Ottonians of Germany, who also had themselves crowned Roman emperors in Rome, did so. By the eleventh century, the Holy Roman Empire, the successor state (as it saw itself) to Rome, was a permanent element in medieval society, and a reminder that the achievements of Roman antiquity were not just a nostalgic memory but capable of re-creation. This was underlined visually by the spread of the architectural forms we call Romanesque, the sturdy round pillars, holding aloft semicircular arches, which early medieval masons, and their clerical employers, believed were characteristic of the architecture of imperial Rome at its best. Moreover, the Ottonian renaissance itself provoked a papal response, under the monk Hildebrand, enthroned as Pope Gregory VII This included a fundamental refashioning of the entire corpus of canon law, on the lines of the great law codes of late antiquity, and ambitious programs for the education and moral improvement of the clergy, and their physical and intellectual liberation from the secular authorities. This naturally led to papal-imperial conflict, perpetuated in the political-military struggles of the Guelfs and the Ghibellines in Italy. But the positive side was that the Hildebrandine reforms spread under their own momentum into every part of western Christendom, producing a self-confident clerical class that included in its ranks a growing number of accomplished scholars.

In due course, the new scholars congregated in critical numbers to form what became known as universities, an extension and amalgamation of cathedral schools and monastic training centers. The first emerged during the twelfth century in Paris, where Peter Lombard taught at the cathedral school of Notre Dame, Abelard at Ste. Genevieve and Hugh and Richard at St. Victor. A similar development occurred in Oxford, where there is evidence from the second quarter of the twelfth century that independent masters were teaching arts, theology and civil and canon law in schools grouped in the center of the town. The new universities were the core of what we now call the twelfth-century renaissance, and it is particularly significant that an arts faculty existed in Oxford as early as the 1120s because such courses provided the foundation for the true Renaissance more than two hundred years later.

This proto-renaissance was important not merely because it introduced qualitative improvements in the teaching, writing and spoken use of Latin, which became the lingua franca or hieratic tongue of a learned class composed mainly but not entirely of the clergy, but also because it was a quantitative explosion too. The growing number of scholars and literates stimulated a huge increase in the output of manuscripts from monastic scriptoria and secularized production centers in the towns. Some of the professional scribes were artists too, and their miniatures became a means by which artistic ideas circulated. Only the literate elites made use of codices and manuscripts, but their illuminations were seen and used by church wall-painters, workers in stained glass, sculptors, masons and other artisans engaged in the enormous building and rebuilding program that, beginning early in the twelfth century, transformed thousands of Romanesque churches and cathedrals into Gothic ones. It is worth noting that the new choir of Canterbury Cathedral, which replaced a Romanesque one after a fire in 1174, with a corona added to house the shrine of the murdered Thomas A Becket, included Corinthian columns, which we would date from fifteenth-century Italy, did we not possess documentary evidence that they were the work of William of Sense in the last quarter of the twelfth century.
With the new universities in place, the time and setting were ripe for the revival of Aristotle, the greatest encyclopedias and systematic philosopher of antiquity. The early church fathers had regarded Aristotle with suspicion, ranking him as a materialist, in contrast to Plato, whom they saw as a more spiritual thinker and a genuine precursor of Christian ideas. Booths in the sixth century expounded Aristotle with enthusiasm but he had few imitators, partly because the texts were known only in extracts or recessions. However, Aristotle's writings on logic began to circulate in the West from the ninth century, though they were not available in full until about 1130. The Ethics became available in Latin translation about 1200 and the Politics half a century later, and various scientific texts were translated from the Arabic, with learned Arabic commentaries, at the same time. Because of the transmission through Islam, Aristotle remained suspect in the church's eyes, as a possible source of heresy, but that did not stop the great thirteenth-century philosophers, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, from constructing their summae on an Aristotelian basis. Indeed they, and particularly Aquinas, used Aristotle with brilliance, the net effect being to place Christian belief on a solid foundation of reason as well as faith. The incorporation of Aristotelian ideas and methods must be regarded as the first great complicated act in the long story of the recovery of the culture of antiquity, and it took place in the thirteenth century, before the Renaissance as such even began.

If so many elements of what constitutes the Renaissance were already in place even before the year 1300, why is it that the movement took so long to gather momentum and become self-sustaining? Here it is right to look for two explanations, one economic, one ' human. Athens in its prime was a rich trading center, the center of a network of maritime colonies; and the Alexandrine Empire that succeeded it was much larger and disposed of far greater resources; and the Roman Empire, which incorporated Alexander's as its eastern wing, was far larger still, and disposed of resources that have not been equaled until comparatively modern times. Such wealth made possible not only colossal public wo...