Back to the future, Italian-style
In a contest over game-changing innovation, my money is on Renaissance Italy every day
This week in my European History course I’m talking about the Italian Renaissance that began in the 1400s AD/CE. I only get to teach this course a couple times a year, and each time I’m pleasantly reminded about the cool things the past has sometimes given us that still resonate even today. As a historian who usually spends the bulk of her time researching and teaching about Vikings, I relish the opportunity to occasionally spend some time basking in the Italian sun. As an art historian with years of museum experience, I can’t imagine life without the artistic innovations that were sparked in the 15th century that have become hallmarks of the history of western art. From valuing education to completely remaking the way we “see” in the world, for my money Renaissance Italy gave us much to celebrate and be thankful for.
Let me first state as a medievalist historian I will never be convinced that, as is often thought, the Middle Ages that preceded the Renaissance were the so-called “Dark Ages” with nothing to offer. Those people weren’t completely without merit and could certainly teach us a thing or two, and my thoughts on that will probably be a post for another day. The idea of a dark age actually came from a bit of Renaissance propaganda. Those folks made that up because they were, well, a bit full of themselves. They wanted to distance their time from what they thought was an age full of nothing but backward peasants. It was not very nice of them, but I will concede that the Renaissance gave us something new. Innovation and reinvention was at the heart of it, and so you can’t help them for feeling it was a pretty cool time to be alive compared to what had come before.
Like my diagram says above, the key to what was special about the Renaissance was the overlap of Humanism, Politics, and Art. None of these were invented in 1400s Italy, but people found ways to revive them from the past — the word Renaissance literally means “rebirth” — combine them, and put them to good use.
Humanism came from the ancient Greco-Roman world and in its essence connoted a focus on us, the humans who inhabit this big blue ball. It was the idea that paying attention to what it took to create good humans, such as education, was worthwhile because by extension it could create the best societies in many ways including through informed political action. It was also the idea that the world we inhabit is worthy of investigating and appreciating in all its beauty and perhaps even its terror — especially if there were things that could be improved. In a medieval Europe that was overwhelmingly awash in Catholic Christianity where the focus was not supposed to be on this world but on the heavenly world to come, a redirecting of the focus from the will of God to the will of humans was bold.
As the thinking went, it is we who have the power to make a world where the most people can flourish most of the time; we don’t have to wait for God to do it for us. This was revolutionary thinking that would have far-reaching effects into the modern era, and one could certainly argue that in western cultures it is still behind what many of us think and do, even though we have to acknowledge that we are still a work-in-progress.
So, what drove this thinking?
Initially, like humanism, the revival of several aspects of the Classical past that Renaissance-era people believed were worthy of trying again. Their love of and curiosity about Greco-Roman life sparked an intense desire to try to emulate it. First up in the humanist tradition, revamp the education system.
From its inception in the ancient world, the “classic seven curriculum” formally known as the trivium and quadrivium of grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, astronomy, music and geometry, reflected the desire to combine science and the arts into the foundation of an education that produced individuals with the best ability to understand the world and their place in it. In modern terms, think of it as “Gen Ed,” Roman-style. They believed those disciplines provided the best lenses through which humans could investigate and express the workings of the world. The Renaissance folks took this idea and ran with it.
As someone who has been an academic for 20 years and seen the push in recent years toward STEM disciplines (science, tech, engineering, math) at the expense of the Humanities and Liberal Arts, I’m saddened by the fact that we don’t follow the example set by ancient and Renaissance thinkers and value both. We have created an “either/or” binary, but the classic seven provided ways of knowing that are actually more intertwined than we’ve come to believe in the modern world where we routinely separate science from art. And we do it precisely at a time when it feels more critical than ever that we don’t. People need both writing and science, music and math in order to flourish in a complex world. The adaptability afforded by general knowledge of lots of different things can make life’s challenges easier to manage, not to mention enable a person to simply live a more fulfilled and interesting life.
The Liberal Arts education of the Renaissance not only didn’t separate the arts from science, rather it actually paved the way for the Scientific Revolution that was to come. They understood the connection, and as you’ll see below, it was mainly the artists and architects of the day who were pushing the boundaries of human possibility and the world into a new understanding of what was all around them. All of this at a time when it seemed entirely at odds with the Christian ideal of striving to be in the world but not of it.
To use the language of the time, what a Renaissance person called “nature” we would call “science,” and their desire to learn about the inner workings of the natural world — what we would call scientific investigation — ended up being expressed in myriad ways by the artist’s hand.
One such intersection of the natural world and art came with the rebirth of contrapposto, an Italian word meaning “counter poise,” but a concept that had existed in the ancient world. The ability to realistically depict the human form, including the shifting of the hip’s weight from foot to foot, had been achieved by the ancient Greeks (seen in the statue Doryphoros from the 5th century BCE above left) but was finally replicated by the Italian sculptor Donatello with his rendering of David in bronze 1,000 years later. Gone forever would be the flat, stick figures of the medieval age. In the wake of the Black Death pandemic of the 1300s, the Renaissance artists were literally bringing humankind back to life.
Additional Italian techniques known as chiaroscuro (light/dark) and sfumato (smoke) also enabled artists to help people see “realistically” even when it was on a two-dimensional surface such as a piece of paper or canvas. That shading you learned to do in your middle school drawing class to create a sense of shape and volume came straight from the geniuses of the Renaissance. For the first time in centuries, renditions of people — including the Madonna and Child that proliferated in the art of the time — started to look like people actually look. Whereas the medieval baby Jesus had a tendency to always look like a flatish, 2D, 40-year old man, the Renaissance versions made it look like the artist had actually seen a real baby, chubby fingers, cheeks and all!
But by far the grand daddy of all innovations during the Renaissance that would forever change the way we see creating, as the historian Jerry Brotton once said, “a modern way of looking,” was the invention of Linear Perspective. Whom can we thank for this monumental advance in human history? One Filippo Brunelleschi, that’s who.
Many had tried for centuries to create the realistic perception of deep space — essentially something that looks 3D rendered on a 2D surface — but no one had succeeded until the brash artist, architect, and engineer Brunelleschi came up with it in the early 1400s by using math (I told you the Renaissance didn’t separate art and science…). The vanishing points and orthogonal lines that are the foundations of the formula would set the Renaissance world on fire. Never again would the flat art of the Middle Ages be a thing. Perspective became all the rage, and any artist worth his or her salt knew how to achieve it, including one of my favorite examples by Paolo Uccello, The Battle of San Romano, wherein remarkably even in the heat and chaos of battle the dead and their weapons fall exactly in line with the orthogonals!
Brunelleschi was an interesting character. My favorite quote about him comes from Ross King who wrote a biography about him and was featured in a documentary in which he describes Brunelleschi as a genius, but qualifies that by stating, “like most geniuses, he was probably someone you wouldn’t want to know.” That always makes me laugh :) But we should be thankful the world gave us that cantankerous soul, since his inventions — perspective wasn’t the only one; watch the documentary! — modernized the world in ways we still experience to this day.
These are but a tiny sampling of the unique and innovative things the Renaissance artists and thinkers achieved. They did succeed in what they set out to do, namely to remake their world and set it on a more modern path.
As I always stress to my students, historical context matters. When it comes to true innovation, the world those 15th century Italians lived in was ripe for the picking as lots of factors converged to make Italy the “it” place of the western world. Emergence from the devastation and confusion of the Black Death (worldwide pandemics will do that to you), combined with wealth, creativity, curiosity, a bit of bravado, and the will to make a new world from the ashes, and voila! As journalist Eric Weiner put it, what they created was a world where “Renaissance Florence was a better model for innovation than Silicon Valley is.” Amen to that.
So, the next time you think those of us in the modern era are the most innovative and progressive the world has ever seen, think again. We’ve seen this movie before, and we just might learn a thing or two if we watch it again. The only reason we can achieve much of what we do is because those geniuses in Renaissance Italy paved the way for what true innovation really looks like.
What a wonderful post, Terri. I think we need another Renaissance right now. (Preferrably a bloodless one!) Now I'm off to watch that Brunelleschi documentary! :D