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by Anthony Molho
WHAT WAS THE RENAISSANCE?
We
remember that the Italians themselves gave the name Renaissance to their
society of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries.
They chose the name to stress the differences they believed to exist
between their society and that of the Middle Ages. They used the word only for the Italy of their day.
Historians
call the 14th, 15th, 16th, and sometimes the early 17th centuries in western
Europe, the Renaissance. But they no
longer view with scam the culture of the Middle Ages. They see that many qualities of the Renaissance grew out of the
Middle Ages. Nor do they restrict the
Renaissance to Italy. If they believe
it began there, they also see that similar developments took place in other
areas in northern Europe, but beginning at a little later time.
In
this book we have not made any attempt to look at the development of the
Renaissance throughout Europe. We have
not even looked at all parts of Italy.
We have kept to the early Renaissance and to Florence.
We
could have used any of several cities as an example of a Renaissance city. A number of them can be thought of as
typical. What qualities, then, have we
found in Florence that we could expect also to find in other great Italian
cities between 1250 and 1450?
CHARACTERISTICS
OF THE RENAISSANCE
First
of all, Renaissance society was urban.
It grew up in cities.
Townspeople could use their time to make cloth or build great palaces or
read ancient manuscripts because the nearby farmers could grow food enough to
feed themselves and the people of the town as well. Only where there was a fairly large city population could there
be enough chance for education-or enough encouragement for artists-to permit
cultural life to grow as in Florence.
In Italy, because of ties to the ancient world, town life flourished
earliest and most strongly.
In
the second place, a strong economic life was needed for all aspects of
Renaissance culture. The great wealth
that came from industry, shipping, and banking paid for education and for the
support of artists. But Renaissance
cities were not all alike in their means of producing wealth. Port cities like Venice, Naples, and Genoa
grew rich from trade in the eastern Mediterranean. We remember that Lucca and Venice were silk-manufacturing
cities. Only after these and other
cities were already wealthy did Florence build up its wool business to the high
point where we first met it. But
however produced, wealth was essential to any great city of the Renaissance.
City
living and the great wealth of merchants were not, however, limited to the
Renaissance. In fact, Renaissance
cities did not differ in really significant ways from the cities of the later
part of the Middle Ages. In the more
vigorous medieval towns, the townspeople took part in the local government
somewhat as they did in Florence. What,
then, marked off the Renaissance from the Middle Ages?
The
greatest difference was cultural, a difference to be found in literature and
art -in the world of ideas. The
Renaissance was essentially a literary and artistic movement. It was marked by a tremendous burst of
cultural energy. The achievements of
the Renaissance artists and writers still hold our fascination. When Americans travel in Italy they seek out
the -famous Renaissance palaces and churches and go to the museums to see the
works of the Renaissance painters and sculptors. American museums have vied with each other and spent great sums
of money to get pieces of Renaissance sculpture and examples of great
Renaissance painting.
But
the Middle Ages had already produced great architecture, sculpture, and
painting that are highly prized today.
What, then, were the distinctions between medieval and Renaissance art?
Basically,
humanism was the distinctive characteristic of Renaissance thought and art,
Humanism itself had two aspects. The
people of the Renaissance were greatly attracted to what remained from the
civilizations of Greece and Rome. And
they were fascinated by the human being.
Their interest -in the individual was whetted by what they learned from
the Greeks and Romans.
It
was the concentration on these two aspects of humanism that distinguishes the
Renaissance from other times.