AP European History

Barron’s

The Italian Renaissance

Individualism: A New Conception of Humankind

“Man is the measure of all things.” A sense of human power replaced religious awe. Pleasure and accomplishment superseded the medieval dedication to the cloistered life of the clergy. Instead of the disdain for the concerns of this world that the piety of the Middle Ages had fostered, people now valued involvement, a life of activity.

Virtu: Literally, “the quality of being a man”; possible for a woman to express, but expected among aggressive males, the “movers and shakers” of the day; whatever a person’s pursuit, in learning, the arts, or even in war, it meant living up to one’s highest potential and excelling in all endeavors. The “Renaissance man” was an all-around gentleman, as comfortable with the pen or the brush as with the sword-a lover, poet, painter, conversationalist.

The Arts as an Expression of Individualism

Before the Renaissance, the Church was the greatest patron of the arts. Painters and sculptors labored anonymously to fill the churches and cathedrals of the Middle Ages with figures of the saints-figures that lacked the proportions and animation of real human forms or faces. During the Renaissance, although the Church remained a major patron, the new commercial class and the governments of the city-states also supported the arts. Even though the work was religious in nature, the forms were anatomically proportional, the faces filled with emotion, and the artists reveled in their individuality of style.

• • Architecture adapted Greco-Roman symmetry, classical columns, arches, and domes.
  1. Architects such as Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), famous for Il Duomo (the first dome built since ancient times in Florence), and Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) studied ancient Roman buildings and used their principles of design to build cathedrals.
• • Sculpture once again became freestanding, not designed to fit in niches of churches, and portrayed nude subjects in the Greek tradition in both religious and mythological representations.
  1. Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455): sculpted a set of bronze doors for the Florentine baptistery with not only crowds of human figures but the illusion of depth.
  2. Donatello’s bronze David (c. 1440): was the first free-standing nude sculpted since Roman times in Europe and a tribute to his teacher, Brunelleschi.

Painting was primarily religious in theme but radically different from medieval art because of the invention of oil paints and because of the illusion of three dimensions created by precise variation of size (perspective). Art was less symbolic, more representational, depicting real people in recognizable settings, and glorifying the beauty of the corporeal world.

• • Giotto (1267-1337) painted on walls in Florentine buildings and created the illusions of depth and movement.
• • Massaccio (1401-1428) used light and shadow; the adoption of linear perspective, nude figures, and the illusion of perspective.
• • Sandro Botticelli (1444-1510) painted themes from classical mythology, such as his Birth of Venus.
• • Raphael (1483-1520) considered one of the greatest painters of any era; his portraits and Madonnas epitomize the Renaissance style.

The Greatest of the Great

• • Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) personification of the “Renaissance man”; painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, writer, scientist.
  1. The versatility of his genius marks the last time that a single human could command virtually all the realms of knowledge and create masterworks in several areas of competence.
  2. His Mona Lisa and his Last Supper rival any of the world’s great paintings for the perfection of their execution and sheer beauty.
• • Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) Primarily a sculptor whose Pietà (Mary mourning the body of Christ lying across her lap), is often considered the most perfect marble carving.
  1. His awesome statues of Moses and David are unrivaled masterpieces that reflect religiosity and real human emotion.
  2. His paintings on the Sistine Chapel in Rome, over which he labored for four years, portray biblical and allegorical figures with power, grace, and human clarity.
  3. He glorified God by depicting the beauty of His earthly creations.

Humanism

This was a literary and educational movement distinct from the writing of the late Middle Ages in both its subject matter (it dealt with issues of politics and personal concern outside the realm of religion) and in its practitioners (laypeople who considered writing a profession rather than being a pursuit of the clergy). They drew on antiquity, which ironically had been preserved by monks laboriously copying ancient manuscripts. They wrote in Italian rather than Latin, and thereby created the first European vernacular literature.

• • The works of the great poet, Dante (1265-1321), especially his Divine Comedy, along with the speech patterns of Florence influenced the standard form of modern Italian.
• • Petrarch (1304-1374) Considered the first “modern” writer, he wrote sonnets in Italian, other works in Latin, and used writing to contemplate the ebb and flow of his life and the human condition itself.
  1. The irony is that he is most known as a modern writer, but his largest contribution to the era was popularizing the study of the classical writers such as Plato and Cicero.
• • Juan Luis Vives (1493-1540) a humanist writer who outlined a theory of education based upon the classics that came to define humanism. He was also a strong influence on Montaigne.
• • Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499 A Catholic priest and an influential philosopher of the Italian humanist movement; he was the first to translate Plato’s works into Latin and was named by Cosimo de’ Medici as the first heir to the revived Platonic Academy.
• • Boccaccio (1313-1375) A contemporary of Petrarch and, like him, a Florentine.
  1. His most famous work is the Decameron, which satirized society and the clergy with entertaining tales that reflected upon the human condition.
• • Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) A chancellor of the Republic of Florence in the late fourteenth century, he wrote perhaps the first modern history, an account of the development of Florence, using narrative, drawing on authentic sources, and introducing new historical periods.
• • Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529) offered a manual for the manners of the modern gentleman, The Book of the Courtier.
  1. A gentleman is trained for polite company, poised and well dressed, skilled in arms and sports, capable of making music and conversation, a reader of the classics, a social mixer who is good humored, lighthearted, and considerate of others’ feelings.
  2. It was a civilized antidote to the crude social habits of the day, when even the wellborn spit on the floor, wiped noses on sleeves, ate without utensils, shrieked, and sulked.
• • Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) The Prince was the first meaningful treatise on political science, an observation of how governments actually rule without moral judgment or exhortation.
  1. It is one of the most maligned and misinterpreted books of modern times, called “cynical and ruthless,” the “handbook of dictators,” and the origin of the concept “The end justifies the means.”
  2. Machiavelli discovered that successful governments throughout history, whether Italian city-states or national monarchies, acted in their own political interest, making war or keeping the peace, true to their word or deceitful, benevolent or brutal when it was useful.
     1. Religion had virtually ceased to influence the process of governing as the rise of the nation-state became the ultimate goal.
  3. The Prince (1513) offers keen insights and is meant as a guide to the survival of the independent city-states of Italy, which were vulnerable to the predatory powers in the north.
• • Laura Cereta (1469-1499) A well-known humanist and early feminist, she probably taught moral philosophy at University of Padua, a center of Renaissance learning .
  1. Her 1488 Epistolae familiars (Familiar Letters) were widely condemned for her criticism of fifteenth-century gender bias.
  2. When told by a man that intelligent women were unattractive, · she retorted that so were unintelligent men.