What is the Renaissance?

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What is the Renaissance?

• What do you associate with Renaissance characters?

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Renaissance

• How do Renaissance writers portray characters?

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Renaissance characters

• They follow in the tradition of the Middle
  Ages they explore the relationship of their
  characters to their social roles (Canterbury
  Tales)
• Yet the most memorable characters of the
  Renaissance enjoy greater autonomy and more fully
  realized personalities than Chaucers pilgrims
• Broad-minded Gargantua
• Idealistic but mad Quixote,
• Romantic but doomed Othello
• Characters are presented in acts of thought,
  fantasy, doubt, and internal debate

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Salvadore Dali, Don Quixote
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Fabrizio Moraes,Don Quixote
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Gargantua
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Gustave Dore, Gargantua
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Othello
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Othello and Desdemona
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Hamlet
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Renaissance

• What are the reasons for the shift toward
  internal, mental portraiture?

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Revolutionary changes

• On scientific, geographical, and scholarly
  fronts, the world of Renaissance Europe was
  undergoing revolutionary change
• Renaissance authors could not passively receive
  the traditional wisdom of previous ages

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Revolutionary changes

• As a result of the new discoveries (Copernicus,
  Galileo, Columbus), the Renaissance mind had to
  reconcieve the nature of the universe
• The new discoveries challenged European and human
  centrality in the world
• The compass, the printing press, and the gun were
  signs of the union of the entire world
• For John Donne, the new discoveries amount to a
  second creation, so radical is the new theory of
  the worlds construction (no firm ground to stand
  on)

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Renaissance

• What is the meaning of the term Renaissance?

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the term Renaissance

• rebirth- one impulse toward creativity came
  from the example of ancient culture
• The restoration of ancient canons was regarded as
  a glorious achievement
• Machiavelli rulers should be as keen on the
  imitation of ancient virtues as are artists,
  lawyers, and the scientists

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What is the chronological span of the movement?

• The peak of the Renaissance can be shown to have
  occurred at different times in different
  countries (elasticity)
• Inception in Italy (visual arts)
• It developed later in England (main achievements
  in drama)
• The meaning of the word widened it conveys
  artistic creativity, zest for life and knowledge,
  sensory delight
• References to classical mythology, philosophy,
  and literature are not ornaments or affectations
• E.g. Erasmus speaks in a cluster of classical
  allusions in The Praise of Folly

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Erasmus
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Erasmus, In Praise of Folly
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Humanist

• What is the meaning of the term Humanist?

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meaning of the term humanist

• 14th c. the people who gave new impulse to the
  emulation of the classics
• The word is related to what we call the
  humanities, and the humanities at that time were
  Latin and Greek
• Every cultivated person wrote and spoke Latin,
  with the result that a Western community of
  intellectuals could exist, a spiritual republic
  of letters above individual nations

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Vocation

• Where does the archetype of literature as a
  vocation come from?

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Vocation

• Petrarch anticipated certain ideals of the high
  Renaissance
• A lofty conception of the literary art, a taste
  for the good life, basic pacifism, strong sense
  of the memories of antiquity
• Visionary and imaginative element
• Lack of a scientific sense of history (e.g.
  Shakespeares Romans)
• Hackneyed, inaccurate notion that the light of
  the Renaissance broke through a long night of
  the Middle Ages

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Francesco Petrarca
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Petrarch
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Renaissance

• What is the definition of Renaissance?

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Definition of the Renaissance

• Preoccupation with this life rather than with the
  life beyond
• Medieval man conceives of life on earth as
  transient
• Renaissance man earthly interests, immediate
  enjoyment

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Renaissance

• What is the Renaissance code of behavior?

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TThe Renaissance code of behavior

• Human action is judged not in terms of right or
  wrong, of good and evil, but in terms of its
  effectiveness, of the delight it affords (amoral,
  aesthetic character?)
• Architecture, sculpture, rhetoric taste for the
  harmonious and the memorable
• Virtue connotes active power, technical skill,
  virtuoso
• Machiavellian prince efficient management of
  princely powers not goodness

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Florence
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Renaissance architecture
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Sculpture
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The presence of God in the Renaissance

• Unrestrained and self-sufficient practice of
  ones virtues (Machiavelli, Rabelais, Cellini)
• such virtues and skills are God's gift
• But the presence of God in the Renaissance is
  less dominating than in the Middle Ages
  (extemporal design)
• Conflict between the values of worldly goods and
  spiritual renunciation
• Church and state inextricably bound together
• Papacy-political as well as spiritual power

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Machiavelli
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Machiavelli

•   "These methods are very cruel, and enemies to
  all government not merely Christian but human,
  and any man ought to avoid them and prefer to
  live a private life rather than to be a king who
  brings such ruin on men. Notwithstanding, a ruler
  who does not wish to take that first good way of
  lawful government, if he wishes to maintain
  himself, must enter upon this evil one. But men
  take certain middle ways that are very injurious
  indeed, they are unable to be altogether good or
  altogether bad."
• Niccolo MachiavelliThe Prince

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Machiavelli
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Church and state

• Charles V of Spain united most of Europe under
  his rule and declared himself the Holy Roman
  Emperor
• Henry VIII of England broke with the Catholic
  church and declared himself head of the Church of
  England
• The Reformist movements (Luther, Calvin) were
  rapidly adopted by Renaissance princes bridling
  under papal authority

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Religion vs. pleasure

• Sensuous appraisal of a womans beauties plays a
  large part in poetry
• Religious convictions did not hamper poets to
  appreciate sensuous beauty
• A womans body a spiritual experience and a
  paradise on earth to conquer
• E.g. Renaissance Madonnas serve celebrations of
  earthly beauty rather than mystical hopes of
  salvation

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Raphael, Madonna
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Raphael, Madonna