Renaissance Society And Humanist Culture Notes

The Foundations of Early Modern Europe (1460-1559)

Chapter 3: Renaissance Society and Humanist Culture

Machiavelli's Letter (December 10, 1513)

Niccolò Machiavelli, exiled from Florence, described his life on a Tuscan farm in a famous letter. He detailed his routine, alternating between mundane activities like hunting and socializing with peasants, and intellectual pursuits such as reading classical literature in his library. He emphasized the transformative power of engaging with the great minds of antiquity, stating that he felt as though he were in the company of royalty, connecting with them meaningfully, and losing his worries in the process.

Renaissance Humanism

  • Classical Antiquity: The Renaissance admired classical antiquity, with many individuals striving to model their lives after the image of man found in Greek and Latin classics.

  • Definition of Humanist: The term "humanist" originated in fifteenth-century Italy, referring to teachers of studia litterarum, bonae artes, humanae artes, artes liberales, or studia humanitatis (the humanities).

  • Humanitas: Humanitas is a classical idea, translated by Cicero as the Greek paideia (“education” or “culture”). Aulus Gellius defined it as eruditio institutioque in bonas artes (“knowledge and instruction in the good arts”). Humanists saw it as the pursuit of activities proper to mankind, involving learning and training in virtue.

  • Core of Humanism: Humanism was an educational and cultural program centered on the study of the classics and the concept of human dignity derived from humanitas.

  • Key Figures: Prominent humanists include Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), John Colet (c. 1467-1519), Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples (c. 1460-1536), Guillaume Budé (1468-1540), Conrad Celtis (1459-1508), Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522), and Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536).

  • Impact: Humanism influenced literature, art, scholarship, medicine, law, theology, and morals. It became a dominant cultural trend.

The Study of History

  • Historical Perspective: Renaissance enthusiasm for the classics stemmed from a new sense of history. Humanists read the classics in historical perspective, establishing this perspective by conceiving the idea of the Renaissance, developing modern historical writing principles, and creating a new periodization of the past.

  • Medieval Periodization: Medieval scholars divided history into an age of darkness and error and an age of light and truth, separated by the Cross of Christ. Some used the scheme of four world monarchies from the Book of Daniel, while others adopted the six ages outlined by St. Augustine (354-430) in The City of God. They believed secular history illustrated a providential plan, moving from creation to Incarnation to the Last Judgment.

  • Humanist Periodization: Humanists established two chronological lines. The first divided antiqua (ancient history) from the “dark ages,” marked by Constantine’s conversion (312) and the sack of Rome by the Visigoths (410). The second line distinguished their own period from the preceding Middle Ages. This resulted in a tripartite division: ancient, medieval, and modern.

  • Reversal of Metaphors: Humanists reversed the traditional metaphor of light and darkness. Antiquity, previously seen as dark due to paganism, became an age of light, while the post-Roman period was branded as one of cultural decadence.

  • Renaissance as Rebirth: Humanists viewed their own age as a renaissance—a rebirth of light after darkness. They believed classical poetry had declined due to monastic contempt and barbarian invasions, with Petrarch reviving the Muses. Ancient art had deteriorated after Constantine until Giotto (c. 1276-1337) restored painting. Erasmus saw a similar pattern in religion, with the Church Fathers uniting wisdom and eloquence, but medieval theology becoming arid and presumptuous due to monks and scholastics. He felt sacred truth was emerging from darkness in his own day.

  • Optimism: Humanists were filled with optimism, believing they were at the beginning of a new and brilliant period of human history.

  • Historical Distance: Renaissance humanists encouraged a sense of historical distance, recognizing the separation from classical Rome. This acknowledged the past as dead and complete, remote from their own time.

  • Historical Sensitivity: A sharpened sense of history among Renaissance men helped produce clever imitations of Roman works, and enabled the exposure of less skillful forgeries. Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457) proved the Donation of Constantine to be spurious as it contained the word "fief", an institution unknown in fourth-century Rome. Erasmus applied similar techniques to the Bible, omitting the Comma Johanneum from his New Testament translation, as it lacked Greek manuscript support and pre-dated the Council of Nicaea (325).

  • Secularization of History: Renaissance historians secularized historical writing, emphasizing natural rather than supernatural causes. They focused on the appetites of individuals or ambitions of social/political groups. They narrowed narratives to single states, emphasizing politically relevant events.

  • Uses of History: History served as a guide to life, inciting virtue, discouraging vice, and training statesmen in politics and war.

The Rediscovery of the Classics

  • Recovery of Literature: Renaissance scholars aimed to have recovered ancient literature from neglect, popularizing Latin authors and works, such as Plautus and Cicero's Letters. Above all, they completed the European appropriation of its Hellenic inheritance and increased the amount of knowledge.

  • Medieval Access: The Latin classics survived through copying in monastic scriptoria. Virgil and Ovid were popular in the Middle Ages, and Cicero and Seneca were respected ethical teachers. Roman law was studied at Bologna, and medical knowledge was based on Galen and Aristotle.

  • New Perspective: Humanists read the classics with eyes trained in historical perspective. Classical themes and motifs in Renaissance art show this, closing the gap between classical theme and motif. Classical figures like Mercury and Venus were portrayed with renewed youth, beauty, and sensuality.

  • Reintegration of Meaning: Classical texts were no longer Christianized for information relevant to contemporary concerns, no longer interpreting Virgil’s Aeneid as the itinerary of the human soul. Though allegorical interpretations persisted, texts like the Aeneid were read in historical perspective, as glorifications of Augustan Rome.

  • Christian Platonism: Renaissance Platonists located Plato's Ideas in the divine intellect, equating man's contemplation of intelligible beauty as celestial love (desiderio intellettuale di ideal bellezza). At the same time, scholars founded disciplines like classical philology, archaeology, numismatics, and epigraphy.

  • Impact of Knowledge: Newer and more accurate knowledge of Greece and Rome fostered a freedom from temporal provincialism and a self-conscious understanding of European society and culture. Montaigne noted that societies tend to consider their own customs as the standard of truth.

  • Utopian Ideas: Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) was inspired by Amerigo Vespucci's voyages and Plato’s Republic, highlighting the variety of possible institutions and beliefs.

  • Comparative Knowledge: Exploiting the variety of societies forced readers to reexamine, accept, or modify their convictions in light of comparative knowledge.

The Dignity of Man

  • Objective Parallels: Transformations in European society created objective parallels between the problems of Europeans and those of the ancients. They grasped the Roman idea of sovereignty, absolute property rights, and the communal life of city-states.

  • Humanist Philosophy: The humanist philosophy of man emphasized positive capacities granted by God, rather than deficiencies.

  • Role of the Will: Humanists minimized the power of the speculative intellect to emphasize the greater freedom of the will. Man can know and will the good. Man is the “originator or generator of his actions” and has the freedom to do good or evil.

  • Human Freedom: Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) emphasized human dignity as freedom from any fixed place in the chain of being, allowing development toward good or evil. Charles de Bovelles (1480-1533) identified freedom as the harmonious union of knowledge, capacity, and will.

  • Ideal Man: The humanist ideal was less specialized than the medieval ideal of saint/monk/knight. It emphasized nobility based on virtue, encompassing mind and body, contemplation and action, and both spiritual and material well-being.

Humanism and Art

  • Humanist Art: Renaissance art was humanist in its sources, content, and style. Renaissance poems, orations, moral essays, histories, and educational treaties embodied the humanist vision.

  • Albrecht Dürer: Allegory of Philosophy by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) illustrates a humanist ideal of knowledge. Humanists had replaced clerics as the typical “inventors” of the subject matter of works of art.

  • Andrea Mantegna: Finished his Minerva Expelling the Vices from the Grove of Virtue, shows the kingdom of the will and of moral choice.

-Renaissance Church Architecture: Embodies the characteristics of humanist piety: simplicity, sobriety, serenity, equilibrium; its form and proportion make statements about God, man and nature.

  • Andrea Palladio: (1518-1580), Italian architect active in the Venetian Republic. Palladio is widely considered the most influential individual in the history of Western architecture.

-Donato Bramante: (1444-1514). Qualities of his Tempietto are also the qualities of humanist Piety.

-Tempietto: Perfectly round and domed and perfectly proportioned.

  • City Planning and Architecture: During the Renaissance, there was an aspiration to symmetry on teeming strees resulting in the reweavings of some of Europe's urban fabrics. The patrician’s own house proved an effective site of innovation.

-Italian Matematician: Declared that mathematics are from all measures and denominations and in it is to be found all and every ratio and proportion by which God reveals the innermost secrets of nature.

  • The greatest artistic innovation of the Renaissance: the systematic development of the techniques of perspective.

  • Perspective: anables the artist to project a unified three-dimensional space upon a plane.

-Masaccio: Artist, put new rules into practice in spectacular frescoes.

  • Leon Battista Alberti: wrote a treatise On Painting-which told both the artist and his patrons that painting was not a craft but a science of a sort.

  • Flemish painters: the van Eycks, developed the new technique of oil painting.

-Raphael: Artist, Galatea of Raphael (1483-1520)—a shows the general trends of artist and patron, resulting in spectacular arrangement of ideal forms with human nudes as the human embodiment.

The Theory and Practice of Education

  • Core Curriculum: The curriculum focused on Latin and Greek (including classical literature and rhetoric), history, and moral philosophy/ethics. These studia humanitatis were essential for training useful scholar-citizens.

  • Ancient Literature: Ancient literature provided access not only to indispensable voices of humanitas, but also civilizing forces which made man free, refined sensibility and molded moral attitudes.

  • Human emphasis on physical training: An integral part of a liberal education, to ensure that an individual's potential would be realized as well the individual's strengths.

  • Recruitment: Overwhelmingly from 2 groups: the nobility ad sociall ambitious mertchants, to make them better citiens and rulers.

  • Adaptability of Nobles: Forced aristocrats needed to have formal education in order to compete and represent their prince abroad. A humanist education developed rulers for the early modern state, cooperating with the prince. Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529) wrote The Book of the Courtier, which codified the new conception of the gentleman.

-Limitations of Humanist Program: In the court he portrays, noblewomen appear to take up a leading role, intervening when a male speaker errs on a point of etiquette. Men’s speeches provide the subsistence of debates.

-Urban Bourgeoisie: a significant role in humanist education, made them better citiens and rulers.