The Emergence of the Personal in the European Renaissance

Focus on Montaigne

"Characters . . . are frequently presented in acts of thought, fantasy, planning, doubt, and internal debate. Deliberating with others and themselves about what to do seems at least as important to these characters as putting their plans into action." (p. 2465)

"The first writer to ask 'Who am I?' and pursue the question with extraordinary honesty and rigor, Montaigne presents himself, in his essays, as an explorer of existential dilemmas and of cultural and psychological identity crises." (p. 2632)

Montaigne
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The personal essay

Human beings have always reflected on their experiences and tried to find meaning in them. Yet there was something new in the intensity with which Renaissance thinkers watched themselves going through this process. In the Letter to Dionisio da Borgo San Sepolcro in which Petrarch, the harbinger of the Renaissance, describes his ascent of Mount Ventoux, the author follows a Christian pattern and, apparently, interprets his climb retrospectively, refining the letter some years after the event took place. The modern essay, however, the invention of Montaigne, captures the mind in action.

To assay is to weigh, to examine, to try. In his essays, Montaigne proceeds by trying out ideas. This tentative approach toward understanding the world bespeaks skepticism about received truth. When he began these literary trials, Montaigne, good humanist that he was, relied heavily on his reading of the ancients. Thumb through the selections in the anthology and you will see quotations from Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Propertius, Juvenal, and other classical authors. As he wrote his essays, however, over the course of several decades, Montaigne began to rely more on his own authority. Although his essays are hardly autobiographical, they reveal a great deal about his own experience as he draws more and more on events he witnessed and persons with whom he conversed to shape his train of thought.

Image of a conquistador
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The historical moment: Reasons for doubt

Surveys of the Renaissance brightly note the influx of new ideas that opened windows onto new vistas: the Reformation expanded Christian thinking; the discovery of the Americas broadened human horizons. Yet those windows, as it were, had to be cut into an existing wall, causing dislocation and pain. Montaigne's darker reflections often respond to the cruelty associated with cataclysmic change. The religious wars in France and the conquest of the New World were horrific events to those who lived through them. Although he remained a Catholic, members of Montaigne's family, including his brother and sister, became Protestants; the city of which he was twice mayor, Bordeaux, was located in the center of southwestern France and therefore surrounded by pockets of Huguenot strength. Both "Of Cannibals" and "Of Coaches" link the brutality that was visited on the French Protestants with the treatment of the native populations of Mexico and Peru. Montaigne pondered the clash of different cultures both at home and abroad. Even if one subscribes wholeheartedly to a system of belief, it is hard to justify torturing others who do not subscribe to it. And if one is not so sure about what one believes—if one is skeptical about any single orthodoxy—the mind of the observer will shuttle back and forth between poles, trying to find a place where truth resides. Montaigne's essays reveal the routes tried and returned from in this inner traffic.

An eyewitness account of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre by François Dubois, from the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland.
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The emergence of personality

Through his willingness to judge for himself, Montaigne speaks to us as an idiosyncratic personality: as he says in his preface, "I am myself the matter of my book" (p. 2636). This sense of self reflects a popular understanding that every human being has unique features. As fascination with the oddity of individuals grew, the old humoral psychology began to seem inadequate. Greek science and medicine had taught that there were four elements (earth, air, fire, and water) and four complementary humors (black bile and blood, yellow bile and phlegm). One's attitude toward the world mirrored the preponderant humor.

These notions still attracted many Renaissance artists; Shakespeare's contemporary, Ben Jonson, for example, masterfully creates Humors Characters, whose actions could be diagnosed as expressions of excesses of, say, black bile (melancholic) or blood (sanguinic). "Character" is a term with a long history in Europe. "Personality," however, is something different. According to the Oxford EnglishDictionary, the word "personality" can be traced to fifteenth-century French. In his essays, writing in French, Montaigne explores this new conception of personal behavior, which is understood to be the result of individual quirkiness rather than physiological imbalance. In Shakespeare's plays, a character like Polonius, who represents old-fashioned thinking, may think that he can diagnose the behavior of a complex figure like Hamlet by matching it to a preexisting pattern (love melancholy). A hero like Hamlet, however, resists easy labels; his mentality, or his personality, defies pat analysis.

Portrait of Montaigne
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The portrait in the Renaissance

The visual equivalent of the simultaneous examination of the self and of the world that Montaigne conducts in his essays is the portrait. His note to the reader makes this explicit:

If I had written to seek the world's favor, I should have bedecked myself better, and should present myself in a studied posture. I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice, for it is myself that I portray. (p. 2636)

Writing in 1580, Montaigne knowingly links the self-awareness projected in his essays to that of the typical portrait subject of the era. In his magisterial study of this subject, John Pope-Hennessy traces the evolution of a style of painting that began in Florence in the 1420s with the works of Masaccio. Artists had begun to include small likenesses of donors who commissioned religious works of art in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. During the Renaissance, this urge to commemorate the self became the reason for the painting, not an afterthought to a larger composition.

. . . portraiture, like other forms of art, is an expression of conviction, and in the Renaissance it reflects the reawakening interest in human motives and the human character, the resurgent recognition of those factors which make human beings individual, that lay at the center of Renaisssance life. It is sometimes said that the Renaissance vision of man's self-sufficient nature marks the beginning of the modern world. Undoubtedly it marks the beginning of the modern portrait. - The Portrait in the Renaissance, 1966, p. 3

Writers and painters experimented with ways to represent inner life in words and pictures. Looking much like the exemplary figure who he celebrates in the Bookof the Courtier, Castiglione sat for a portrait by his friend, Raphael. The thoughtful eyes of the writer in this great painting seek out the viewer, creating a sense of intimacy and trust, even as the elegant hat and complicated sleeves bear witness to a flair for self-presentation that almost belies the clarity of the subject's gaze. Thus, even an image that mirrors the surface can be an essay in itself, faithfully recording the features and the posture of the sitter while simultaneously including details that argue against any simple interpretation of the portrait subject.

Raphael's portrait of Baldessar Castiglione
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Humanism, imitation, and innovation

My tables,—meet it is I set it down That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain (Hamlet, 1.5.107–08)

Renaissance humanists carried writing tablets so that they could make a record of aphorisms and quotations encountered in casual conversation or in the library. These tablets, or tables, also were handy places to jot down fresh thoughts and personal observations. Shakespeare's Hamlet resembles Montaigne as he cultivates the turns of his own mind responding to the political, cultural, and social peculiarities that surround him. Before Hamlet begins, Hamlet, like the young Montaigne or Castiglione, seems "the glass of fashion and the mould of form" (3.1.147). Like them, he draws on his copious knowledge of the past (as in the scene where he remembers the Player King's speaking of Aeneas's tale to Dido). Gradually, however, Hamlet must erase his memories to plunge deeper into the lived reality of Elsinore if he is to sort out the truth of his experience.

A drawing of Hamlet reading, by Eugène Delacroix
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Holding the mirror up to life

More than any other of Shakespeare's major figures, Hamlet is revealed to us through his soliloquies, in which he probes his own motives and fears, trying to understand why he does not measure up to his own conception of his duties, as traditional notions of honor would have construed them. Viewing oneself in mirrors (glasses) while measuring oneself against preexisting models (moulds) allow the self-examiner to search out the signs of a complex life unlike any other. The fictional Hamlet and the actual Montaigne explore the unexpected turns of their own minds in a language that constantly surprises us as it veers without apparent preparation from one point to another. In TheQuestion of Hamlet (1959), Harry Levin links the innovative quality of Shakespeare's plays, in which the characters seem spontaneously to be creating their beings before our eyes, to the influence of Montaigne:

the soliloquies are like the Essays in balancing arguments with counter-arguments, in pursuing wayward ideas and unmasking stubborn illusions, in scholarly illustrations and homely afterthoughts which range from the soul of Nero to John-a-dreams. (p. 72)

Although Western audiences associate such intellectual vivacity especially with the European Renaissance, it may of course be seen in the works of artists in other modes, periods, and places, too.

Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
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Renaissance music and the cult of personality

Like the visual artists of the Renaissance, musicians of the time both cultivated old traditions as the "mould of form" and experimented with new harmonic and melodic materials to express the complicated interior lives of individuals. Instead of having church choirs sing a single line of music in unison, composers like Palestrina introduced a new variety into sacred music by writing for polyphonic voices. New, more flexible instruments supported the exploration of secular voices that sang of the self and the idiosyncratic personality. Monteverdi invented opera at about the same time that Shakespeare was writing Hamlet. Significantly, Monteverdi's first operatic protagonist was Orpheus, the god of music; his last was the flamboyant and dangerous Roman emperor, Nero. Without abandoning the classical milieu, opera composers began to design distinctive musical means of embodying the evolving human self.

Portrait of Monteverdi.
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The Chinese poetic tradition and the innovative self-presentation of Tu Fu

The T'ang Dynasty (618–907) in China precedes the European Renaissance and cannot be easily assimilated to the periodization of Western thought. Still, it marks a height of lyric production in the visual and verbal arts that matches the Renaissance in terms of the impact it made on its own culture. Although we must always acknowledge the great gulf between them and their worlds, we can claim that Tu Fu (712–770) and Montaigne share certain characteristics worth examining.

Like Montaigne, Tu Fu made himself the subject of his book. Chinese poetry, it must be said, has always been read and understood as biographical, but the nature and means by which Tu Fu practiced self-revelation in his poems remains remarkable to this day. The same sudden onset of new matter and obscuring of obvious transitions that we observe in Montaigne's essays or Hamlet's soliloquies inform Tu Fu's work, and in each case, we feel in the presence of a mind energetic and brave enough to pursue thoughts wherever they may go.