The Renaissance

Jonathan Davies

(Powerpoint will be on the website)

Questions

• What was the Renaissance?• What was humanism?• How did the Renaissance develop and spread?• What were the legacies of the Renaissance?

Cicero

Petrarch

Cimabue,Madonna di S. Trinità

Giotto,Madonna di Ognissanti

Once they have seen how art... had fallen into complete ruin from such a noble height ... they will now be able to recognise more easily the progress of art’s rebirth (rinascita) and the state of perfection to which it has again ascended in our own times...

Giorgio Vasari, Preface, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550)

‘[The Renaissance is] the most intractable problem child of historiography.’

Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance (New York, 1940), p. 2.

Jules Michelet Jacob Burckhardt

Ernst Gombrich Georg Hegel

…the Renaissance was not so much an “Age” as it was a movement. A “movement” is something that is proclaimed. It attracts fanatics, on the one hand, who can’t tolerate anything that doesn’t belong to it and hangers-on who come and go; there is a spectrum of intensity in any movement just as there are usually various factions or “wings.” There are also opponents and plenty of neutral outsiders who have other worries. I think we can most effortlessly describe the Renaissance as a movement of this kind.

E. H. Gombrich, ‘The Renaissance - Period or Movement?’, in A.G. Dickens et al., Background to the English Renaissance. Introductory Lectures (London, 1974), pp.9-30

Rather than a period with definitive beginnings and endings and consistent content in between, the Renaissance can be (and occasionally has been) seen as a movement of practices and ideas to which specific groups and identifiable persons variously responded in different times and places. It would be in this sense a network of diverse, sometimes converging, sometimes conflicting cultures, not a single, time-bound culture.

Randolph Starn, ‘Renaissance Redux’, The American Historical Review 103 (1998), 122-124

The studia humanitatis

• Grammar• Rhetoric• Poetry• History• Moral philosophy

Leonardo Bruni

Angelo Polizianoand Marsilio Ficino

Filippo Brunelleschi,

The Dome of Florence Cathedral

Luciano Laurana

The Ideal City

Donatello

David

Paolo Uccello

The Flood and Waters Subsiding

Pinturicchio

Enea Silvio Piccolomini and

Emperor Frederick III

Matthias Corvinus

Rosso Fiorentino, Gallery of Francis I, Fontainebleau

Benvenuto Cellini, Nymph of Fontainebleau

Hans Holbein

Erasmus

Albrecht Dürer

Self-portrait

Antonello da Messina

Crucifixion

Hugo van der Goes

Portinari Triptych

Giambologna

Rape of the Sabines

‘Of the many tributaries which contributed to the flow of the Reformation, by far the most important was Renaissance humanism.’

Alister E. McGrath, Reformation Thought: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1993), p. 40

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus