The Renaissance Jonathan Davies (Powerpoint will be on the website)

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The RenaissanceJonathan Davies(Powerpoint
will be on the website)
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Questions

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

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Cicero
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Petrarch
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Cimabue, Madonna di S. Trinità
Giotto, Madonna di Ognissanti
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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 arts 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)
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The Renaissance is the most intractable
problem child of historiography. Wallace K.
Ferguson, The Renaissance (New York, 1940), p. 2.
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Jules Michelet
Jacob Burckhardt
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Ernst Gombrich
Georg Hegel
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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 cant tolerate anything that doesnt
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
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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
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The studia humanitatis

• Grammar
• Rhetoric
• Poetry
• History
• Moral philosophy

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Leonardo Bruni
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Angelo Polizianoand Marsilio Ficino
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Filippo Brunelleschi,The Dome of Florence
Cathedral
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Luciano Laurana The Ideal City
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Donatello David
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Paolo UccelloThe Flood and Waters Subsiding
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PinturicchioEnea Silvio Piccolomini and Emperor
Frederick III
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Matthias Corvinus
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Rosso Fiorentino, Gallery of Francis I,
Fontainebleau
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Benvenuto Cellini, Nymph of Fontainebleau
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Hans HolbeinErasmus
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Albrecht DürerSelf-portrait
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Antonello da MessinaCrucifixion
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Hugo van der GoesPortinari Triptych
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GiambolognaRape of the Sabines
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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
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Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus