History of the Idea of Renaissance
Introduction
The Renaissance is a peculiar period in history—not in that the time itself was odd, but in that how historians came to define it as a distinct era is unusual.
It began as an era defined by an Italian writer in the 16th century, who applied it only to Italian painters and sculptors. Other arts were added to the mix, and other countries, but only in the 19th century with Jakob Burckhardt did "the Renaissance" become a historical era.
Other eras are essentially chronological. There's Antiquity, or the Classical World, by which we generally mean Greece and Rome. There's modern times, which we've subdivided between modern and early-modern. Then there's the Middle Ages which, well, is in between the two.
And then there's this odd little slice called the Renaissance, which isn't about a place or a time in the way Antiquity or the Middle Ages or Modernity are. Many historians don't like to use the term to define an era (you've probably noticed that I label these pages "late Middle Ages"), but the term is in very general use and there are still historians who hold out for its legitimacy as a valid historical era.
I won't try to settle that discussion here, but I will try to sketch how we came to have "the Renaissance." By doing so, you will at least have a better understanding of the controversies that still persist among historians of the era and will maybe be able to recognize some of the references in our textbooks that might otherwise be obscure.
Early Humanist Tradition in Italy
Before looking at modern histories, we should begin with interpretations from the time of the Renaissance itself.
The medieval historians wrote universal history--that is, they wrote histories from the beginning of time, usually speaking of Six Ages or the Four Empires, of which Rome had been identified by St. Jerome as being last. The purpose of writing such an account was mainly to show the working of God's will through history.
Decline since Rome's fall was held to be continuous--this theme appears in Dante's De Monarchia. Rome was generally the apogee of history, especially in the apostolic era. Since then, things have gone relentlessly downhill, heading toward the Apocalypse and the end of days.
Medieval writers were concerned with religious themes more than political themes. We rarely see them trying to explain events in terms of human motivation or social systems. Early Humanist Themes
Humanists valued history for its literary, pedagogical and patriotic worth; the latter especially was foreign to the medieval writers. Humanists were concerned solely with political history, not paying any attention to economic forces or social analysis.
The Italian humanists were concerned with the history of the Italian states, so they naturally began with the decline of Rome. Thus they divided history into two periods, ancient and modern.
An early example of humanist history is the 'Florentine Chronicle' of Giovanni Villani. He was a layman who wrote a history of his city and tried to create a periodization appropriate to his city. But he was still medieval in outlook: he began his 'Chronicle' with the Tower of Babel, and in his treatment, Providence guides all actions.
Humanist Writers
The next step came with Petrarch, who called pre-Christian Rome 'antiqua' and the age after it 'nova'. The Modern Ages (nova) he consistently called tenebra, which means "dark" or "shadowed." Christians had long had the idea that ancient days had been better days, hearkening back to the apostolic church. Since those ideal times, the church had steadily declined. Petrarch shifted the idea of decline from religion to culture, freeing this model up to secular interpretations.
Leonardo Bruni wrote the 'History of the Florentine People', which shows all the characteristics of the mature literary school of humanist history. It was supported by the city government. It had high style, coherence, and interpreted events in the light of human motives and natural causes. It served as a model for later historians.
Bruni celebrated the virtues of the republican commune, and viewed the fall of Rome as a necessary prelude to the communes, thus providing the first historical justification of the Middle Ages. He viewed the Republic as Rome's height, and recognized that Italy had begun to revive once the Empire went north into Germany.
The next step was taken by Flavio Biondo of Forli, who wrote the History from the Decline of the Roman Empire (1439-1453), a scholarly more than a literary work. He fixed the decline as beginning with the sack of Rome in 412 (recte, 410). The first period went from 412 to 752 (when Pepin conquered the Lombards).
Like Bruni, Biondo was conscious of the greatness of the Italian cities in his own day and so could recount the fall of Rome without a sense of entering into an age of unrelieved decline. He dated recovery with the rise of the communes in 1412; thus by implication his Middle Ages fall neatly into a millenium: 412-1412.
It should be remembered that there were still many 15thc histories written that show no trace of the new ideas and the the 'medieval' approach can be found even among other humanists.
Other Renaissance Views of the Past
The humanists broke with theological world history, abandoned the idea of perpetual decline, and established a new periodization. In the histories, though, the process was incomplete. The boundaries of the Middle Ages were drawn most clearly in the realm of literature and art.
The writers on cultural matters wrote biographies, not histories. In the prefaces & elsewhere, the biographers inserted historical summaries. These normally fixed the end of culture at the end of Rome; they dealt not at all with the barbarian age, but skipped directly to the rebirth of culture which was usually in the recent past.
Giovanni Boccaccio was an early example of this, but the best example is the work of Filippo Villani. Biondo and Bruni also wrote on this theme. The most comprehensive was Paolo Cortese's Dialogue of Learned Men, which reviewed "learned men" by the single standard of their knowledge of correct Ciceronian Latin.
Whatever the field -- architecture, painting, literature -- the humanists judged the past in classical terms & universally concluded that an age of barbarism had existed from the 5thc to the 15thc. The idea of Renaissance was strictly limited to intellectual and esthetic culture.
Northern Europe showed a similar tendency, with some new wrinkles. The French followed the Italian lead, adding little. The Germans, though, did not like the Italian periodization. They turned universal history to patriotic ends, so that the German Empire appeared as the product and culmination of history. They admired and published a good deal of medieval Germanic literature. They often portrayed Germany as the protector of learning in the age of darkness.
Erasmus did not appeal to national history. His contribution was in the command to return to the sources, knowledge of classical language, the idea that classical literature and evangelical Christianity had declined at the same time and had later been revived together, and the idea that monks and scholastics were responsible for the intervening darkness.
The Protestant writers valued history as a source of 'exempla', but especially for its polemical value. For them, the Middle Ages were not only barbaric but that barbarism was a direct result of popery and of Divine Judgement. And the rebirth of learning meant reform and a return to apostolic purity. More than the humanists, the reformers viewed their own day as the beginning of a new age. With the Reformation the rebirth of the Church, always a pious hope, became historical fact and therefore a practical concept in ecclesiastical historiography. They turned to the Middle Ages to find forerunners and to recall the works of those who had been persecuted in the cause of reform. The rebirth of literature and learning was part of God's plan to revive His church. Catholics played little role at this time in shaping historical thought.
In the 16thc and 17thc humanism continued in France & Italy. The idea of the Middle Ages became firmly fixed and the Renaissance as "la renaissance des lettres et des beaux arts" was finalized. The idea of Renaissance as a historical epoch was hindered because it was regarded as merely heralding the modern age, without a peculiar characteristic or an end date.
Inventing the Renaissance
Giorgio Vasari completed the conception of Renaissance art in his Lives of the Great Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550). He consciously created categories of style and chronology, weaving them into a whole picture. The Renaissance had developed its art in reconizable stages, each important in its relation to the next step in a steady progression toward the perfect style of his own day. This was his explicit thesis. It was Vasari who applied the word la rinascita to the whole process. Vasari dominated art history throughout the 17th century.
In France, Pierre Bayle gave currency to the idea of "renaissance des lettres" through his Historical and Critical Dictionary (1695 ff). He is a bridge to the 18th century rationalists. Bayle popularized the notion that the rebirth began with the Greek refugees who fled to Italy after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Inventing the Middle Ages
In the 17thc the phrase "medium aevum" became current. It was used in a broad historical sense first by the Dutch historian Georg Horn, but in the narrow literary sense it appears in the 16thc and, as media tempestas, as early as the 15thc. The German humanist Cellarius (later 17th century) was the first to use the threefold division of history (Ancient, Medieval, Modern) as a principal of organization.
The Philosophes
The philosophes of the 18th century utterly rejected the theological conception of history. Where the Italian humanists had merely ignored Providence, the philosophes rejected it and substituted their own causality.
Their substitution was natural law. Voltaire said that human nature is everywhere the same, but that every individual is shaped by his age. He (and others) thus created the idea of "general causes" coupled with variables such as climate, custom, religion, institutions, etc.
These large factors eluded precise identification, however, so the rationalists had recourse to Chance and to individual reason, leading to their ascribing great events to petty, accidental causes. They viewed the masses as ignorant and base, and held that progress came only from the occasional great man.
For Christian teleology they substituted the theory of progress. History was philosophy teaching by example, as Voltaire put it.
Voltaire was the first historian of civilization and embodied all the historiographic tendencies of the Enlightenment. His Essay on the Manners and the Spirit of Nations was a new type of history, which sought to explain the origins of society and culture and the causes of their diverse expressions.
The Middle Ages served as his whipping boy; it was the age of barbarians. He did not identify the Renaissance as an epoch, but he did pay tribute to Italy as the place where Reason first began to revive. Florence was the new Athens. e. He broadened the base of the revival to include commerce and industry, and the general spirit of the people. He also recognized the darker, violent side of the Italian cities. He, like Bayle, assumed the Italians in the 15thc were not religious.
Romantics
The Romantics of the 19th century valued national and nationalist history and loved the past for its religious and social content. They loved the idiosyncratic. It was they who first discovered positive value in the Middle Ages.
They seldom attacked the Renaissance directly; it was criticized only by implied contrast with the good, Christian, chivalrous, Germanic Middle Ages. They did love the picaresque, and novelists and poets found it in the later Italian Renaissance as an era of genius. They also played up the image of it as an age of "irreligion, violence, passion and unnatural crime".
Other Developments in the 19th Century
It was the historians of art who first identified the Renaissance as a distinct historical period. Praising or condemning it, various writers saw in their own day a decline and recongized the Renaissance as a distinct phase that had ended sometime in the 16thc.
Historians of literature also began speaking of a distinct period called the Renaissance. In political history in the early 19thc the Renaissance still did not exist.
It was Hegel who provided the stimulus toward periodization in general history that had been present for some time in art, literary and religious history. He portrayed the Renaissance as a reaction to the Middle Ages and their transcendentalism, and a reassertion of man's moral and intellectual autonomy, and his spiritual reconciliation with this world, still mainly expressed in art.
Jean Michelet first identified the Renaissance as a historical epoch, involving all aspects of human experience, though he placed it in the 16th century only, for Michelet was French and was primarily concerned with writing a history of France. Following in his tradition, the English historian J.A. Symonds wrote a history of the Renaissance that was the most influential until Jakob Burckhardt.
Jakob Burckhardt
Burckhardt created the modern conception of the Renaissance. His work is the starting point for all interpretations of the Renaissance: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1860.
His interpretation emphasizes the spirit of self-discovery and self-fulfillment. He portrayed the Renaissance as the first era that truly recognized and respected human worth and individualism. He identified this period as the true beginning of modern times. He emphasized the dramatic break between the medieval and the modern, and for him secularism, even paganism were the hallmarks of the era.
The political situation was the creation of "the State as a work of art", one of the chapters of his book. The revival was not the cause of the Renaissance, but the Renaissance revived antiquity to serve its needs.
Other elements of his version of the Renaissance include a higher regard for human nature, a greater appreciation of physical beauty, historical awareness, and movement away from "Christendom" toward nation states. It was a time of recovery from the calamities of the fourteenth century: of recuperation from the Black Death, and recovery from economic depression. It was also a time of expansion: the discovery of the New World, as well as economic, political, and intellectual expansion.
If all that sounds familiar and obvious, it's because your vision of the Renaissance, the one perpetuated through mass media and public school textbooks, is still largely conditioned by the work of a Swiss historian almost two centuries ago. As you might guess, among professional historians, there has been time for a revision or two. Or fifty.
Burckhardt's Continuators
The Renaissance became a moral image in the period 1860-1910. J. A. Symonds, more widely read than Burckhardt, took over the Burckhardtian portrayal and dramatized it. Gobineau and Nietzsche dwelt on the Renaissance as an age of titans and heroes; for Gobineau it was the last age of vitalism, while for Nietzsche it was the age of the Superman and he rejoiced in its paganism and amoralism. These men were very influential and are more responsible than Burckhardt himself for the popular image of the Renaissance as an age of genius, criminality, liberty and individualism.
Another contributor was Pasquale Villari, who was especially concerned with the perils attendant when the old order breaks down before the new arises; this, he says, happened in the Renaissance; it led to excessive individualism, which in turn led to moral and social decay that eventually did in the Renaissance. Since 1900 historians who work in the Burckhardtian tradition and have extended it have done so mainly in the fields of intellectual, social and economic history.
His continuators, however much they have modified him, still hold that the Renaissance marked a sharp and distinct, if not a total, break with the Middle Ages, and that the Italians were "the first born among the sons of modern Europe." They also all recognize individualism as a key characteristic of the new age.
Wilhelm Dilthey founded a historical approach called 'Geisteswissenschaften', which was the first real "history of ideas" in their historical context. He was concerned with 'Weltanschauung"--the general spirit of the times. For the Renaissance he saw this age as a time of breakup of the medieval intellectual synthesis of Christian and all the pagan branches into their component parts. From these parts -- Epicureanism, pantheism, skepticism, atheism, Stoicism, etc. -- came the new concern with the world and the individual.
Ernst Cassirer focused on science, and saw this age as the birthing of modern scientific thought. Notice how many of these authors concentrate on this or that aspect, but are all focused on how the Renaissance prefigured modern values. Leonardo Olschki created the idea that Renaissance science did not come fram a medieval tradition but was wholly new, springing from the vernacular tongue and from the work of technicians, artisans, engineers and artists who, as he clearly showed, were the real innovators, struggling with practical problems in the real world.
Burckhardt was a Protestant (Swiss) and many of the authors in his tradition were also Protestant. As you might guess, it was more difficult for Catholic historians to adopt an interpretation that was so critical of the very Catholic Middle Ages. The only Catholic in Burckhardt's tradition in the early 20th century was Francesco Olgiati, who accepted Burckhardt's Renaissance but who tried to show that it constituted no break with the Middle Ages. This would become a common revisionist theme, one that accepted the brilliance of the Renaissance but one that tried to demonstrate that it was not original, but rather one that derived from medieval foundations.
Hans Baron was the most successful in working out Dilthey's programme of tracing the relations between ideas and the social, political, and economic institutions of the age that produced the ideas. Civic Humanism was Baron's term for the relationship between the political developments of the city-states, particularly Florence, and the humanists (less so the artists). Our textbook author, Jensen, very much is in this tradition.
Alfred von Martin went even further by employing psychology and sociology as well as history to analyze the Renaissance. The picture he creates is of a new-born capitalism which first fired the social, political, intellectual and artistic changes, and of economic stagnation which caused the later decline.
The Northern Renaissance
The Northern Renaissance had no Burckhardt, but there were three ideas basic to its traditional interpretation:
1.
that the Renaissance began in Italy and later spread across the Alps, changing as it entered each new country; 2.
that the revival of antiquity was everywhere a dominant factor; 3.
that the Renaissance marked the end of medieval civilization and the dawn of the modern world.
A classic statement of the traditional view in France is by Gustavus Lanson (1894). Another is by Ferdinand Brunetiere. The best and classic view of French Renaissance art is in the 'Histoire de l'art' edited by Andre Michel (1912-13). The French have always stressed the original contributions of the French character to the Renaissance.
The English Renaissance has always, since Hippolyte Taine's 'History of English Literature' (1863-64), been put in the 16th century and even into the 17th century. They have been more willing than the French to acknowledge Italian influence, but Renaissance-related achievements are in England highly colored by the influence of the Reformation.
The Germans have always stressed the varied and native character of their Renaissance. One of the best is Paul Joachimsen, which is essentially a Protestant and liberal view. He defined humanism as a desire to revive classical antiquity. There could thus be no humanism in the Middle Ages, because the Burckhardtian position is that the Middle Ages had lost its classical past; humanism began with Petrarch. The Renaissance in Italy (1250-1550) was characterized by the rebirth of the antique "polis", in which the spirit of individualism developed and reigned supreme. The whole movement was borne out of social and economic change. In Germany, the effort to create a national culture on classical forms broke down. One of the significant factors in Germany humanism was a strong stain of "national romanticism". The other main factor was enlightened religious reform. The Reformation was the decisive event in Germany, not the Renaissance.
Another approach, taken by Hajo Holborn, was to regard the Renaissance and Reformation as parallel movements with different characters. This in contrast to the school represented by Michelet and Taine, which regarded the Reformation as a peculiar German form of the Renaissance.
Variations
Role of Religion
The first steps were taken by the Romantics of the 19th century, who found the trait of individualism in the Middle Ages, especially in St. Francis of Assissi. Emile Gebhart focused attention on the Franciscans as a whole, especially in Italy (1890). It was Paul Sabatier (1894) who popularized the idea of St. Francis as an original, independent, individualistic man. In general the view was that medieval mysticism anticipated and prepared the way for the Renaissance.
Role of Nationalism
Another strain of revision emphasized the popular national culture and its originality. Even some Italians, e.g. Adolfo Venturi (1892), felt that the emphasis on classical antiquity gave too little credit to theThe Renaissance Interpreted as a Continuation of the Middle Ages
I stated earlier that one variation on Burckhardt was to acknowledge that the Middle Ages were not completely barbaric. In the 20th century, this became the main effort of Renaissance studies: to examine the "roots" of the Renaissance, as it were. Not in classical antiquity, where earlier historians had looked, but in the Middle Ages themselves, and especially in the 12th and 13th centuries.
The revolt was led by Charles Homer Haskins with his 'The Renaissance of the 12thc' (1927). This was an enormously influential work (still is) that tried to demonstrate that the Renaissance was not unique. There had been, in fact, an intellectual revival in the 12th century that showed many, if not all, of the characteristics of 15th century Italian humanism. Haskins was so persuasive that later generations started seeing renaissances everywhere.
David Knowles (1941) saw humanism in the 12thc and even before. Edmond Faral (1913) saw humanism as native to France, not Italy, and as originating in the Middle Ages. Lynn Thorndike (1923-41) and George Sarton (1927-31) have rehabilitated medieval science and have portrayed Renaissance science as its continuation.
The neo-Thomists, most notably Etienne Gilson (1922), have done the same for philosophy, defending scholasticism. J. W. Thompson showed that lay literacy and good Latin both existed in the Middle Ages.
Taking a different approach, others discovered medieval elements in the Renaissance.
Among these were Ludwig von Pastor (1899-1928), Charles Dejob (1906), Alfred von Martin (1913), Ernst Walser (1920), and Giuseppe Toffanin (1919). The latter is especially important. These writers exposed medieval religious values in supposedly purely Renaissance thinkers. They showed the influence of medieval literary motifs, political thinking, and so on.
The final step was simply to deny the Renaissance any historical existence and to annex it to the Middle Ages. The Renaissance was a continuation of the Middle Ages, or even a decline. Most notable here is Jacob Huizinga (1919). Others were Johan Nordstrom (1933) for France, Rudolf Stadelmann (1929) for Germany, Sarton and Thorndike. These and other writers argue that the threads running through the era are so complex and contradictory that it doesn't constitute any sort of identifiable age at all, and so properly belongs to the Middle Ages. creative powers of the Italians. In France it was Louis Courajod (1887-96), Henri Chamand (1913-14) and W. F. Patterson (1935) who defended French originality and characteristics. Kuno Francke (1916), Carl Neumann (1903) defended Germany and Berthold Haendecke (1925) the Flemings and other Germanic peoples.
Modern Interpretations
This is how we get to our current authors. Walter Ferguson's book called it an "Age of Transition" which sounds fine except every age is a transitional age. And the phrase still makes the Renaissance distinct--an age when people knew that they belonged to a world different than the Middle Ages, but had not yet constructed an alternative - hence, they returned the more avidly to Rome. The period retained much that was medieval, exhibited much that was modern.
Delamar Jensen, our textbook author, casts the period as an "age of reconciliation"--the reconciliation of the Ancient with the Medieval. Humanists tried to link the two into a larger synthesis. They strove to end "not only the dichotomy between paganism and Christianity but also that between heaven and earth, and to create a world of consistency and concord". This reconciliation was achieved in the early 16thc, then was shattered by the Reformation.
The consensus in the profession at this point, early in the 21st century, is that the Renaissance has some validity as a period of art, and probably some validity in literary history, but that as a general term, it has too many problems to be useful. Many schools no longer offer a course called "the Renaissance." They offer the "late Middle Ages" or cover the period by way of various national histories.
Yet the term persists. The art is so dramatically appealing to modern eyes that we instinctively want to believe something modern was afoot everywhere at the time. Burckhardt and his continuators drew such a compelling portrait of the times that we are drawn to it. I've written this essay so that you might see those assumptions at work when you read about the Renaissance outside this course. My hope is that you'll recognize a statement as belonging in the Burckhardtian tradition or belonging to one of the various revisions that came later.
It is notable that, however much we have rejected Burckhardt in detail, no one historian's interpretation has succeeded in replacing the Swiss. We have dismantled his vision, but we have not managed to construct another as compelling.