Date post: | 31-Dec-2015 |
Category: |
Documents |
Upload: | randall-washington |
View: | 220 times |
Download: | 4 times |
Humanism
Florence and Venice in the Renaissance
The Development of Humanism
• Thriving northern towns eg. Padua, Florence
• notaries
• evolving notion of studia humanitatis
• restore and emulate culture of antiquity
• “For the humanists, the way forward was to go back, to follow the example of the best writers and thinkers in a culture which they considered superior to their own.” [Peter Burke]
• humanism mostly grew up outside universities
Andrea del Castagno, Portrait of Francesco Petrarca (from the cycle of famous men
and women), c. 1450
• Return to original texts
• connection to ancient authors
• new sense of confidence
• search for lost works
• copy, preserve, disseminate
• revive perfect Latin style
• imitate literary forms
• emulate handwriting
Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459)
Poggio Bracciolini’s handwriting
Carolingian miniscule
• primarily an educational movement?
• from C15th new schools focus on studia humanitatis
• ethics, poetry, history, rhetoric, grammar
• skills to be a good citizen
• not un-Christian
• Christian humanism
Sandro Botticelli, The Seven Liberal Arts
(c. 1484)
Humanist education
Hans Holbein the younger, Erasmus of Rotterdam (1523)
Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (1486)
• high literacy rates
• vernacular literary culture
• a Republic
• Rome as a model
• chancellor from 1375
• 1396 hires Manuel Chrysoloras to teach Greek
• encouraged young humanists like Bruni, Bracciolini
Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406)
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43BC)
• Florentine humanism shaped by political context
• ‘crisis’ around 1400
• republican ‘liberty’ versus despotic ‘tyranny’
• “an affirmation of worldly values”
• the root of modern civilisation?
1955
Hans Baron (1900-1988) and Civic Humanism
Ghiberti’s winning entry for the “Gates of Paradise” of the Florentine Baptistery (1401)
Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455)
• patron of humanists
• Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), head of Platonic Academy
• public library at San Marco
• civic humanism: “the ideological and intellectual underpinning to [the Medici] seizure of power”?
Cosimo de’ Medici (1389-1464) ‘Pater patriae’
• Relationship to Rome and Byzantium
• Small and stable patrician ruling class
• Patrician humanists eg. Francesco Barbaro (1390-1454)
• work in chancellery restricted to citizens
• university at Padua
• Giovanni Caldiera (1395-1474)
• 1446 founded San Marco school
Venetian patricians (detail from Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, Sermon of St. Mark in Alexandria
(1504-7))
Humanism in Venice
Cardinal Bessarion (1403-72), whose
manuscripts became the nucleus of the
Biblioteca Marciana
Edition of Lactantius, Sweyheym and Pannartz, Subiaco, 1465
• a ‘second-rank’ humanist
• chose Venice c. 1490
• aim to make Greek and Roman classics available in print
• network of humanist contacts
• Venice as centre of humanist ‘Republic of Letters’The house of Aldus Manutius (c. 1450 – 1515) at San
Stae
Aldus’ octavo edition of Catullus (1501)
Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of a
Young Man, 1530s
•vernac translation
Vernacular translation of a classical text (Venice,1518)
Pedro Berruguete, Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and His Son Guidobaldo (c. 1475)
Raphael, The
School of Athens (Vatican, 1510-11)
“[humanism] persuaded Italian and ultimately European society that without its
lessons no one was fit to rule or lead”, that “classical learning was an essential
ingredient of gentility, a necessary qualification for membership of the social elite”
[Robert Black, Renaissance Thought, 93-4]