Chapter 12: The Civilization of the Renaissance
Chapter Summary
The idea that our modern world shares a clear affinity with the world of the European Renaissance was first brought to light by the Swiss art historian, Jacob Burckhardt. In 1860, Burckhardt wrote his two volume The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, an astounding work which in many ways has done as much harm as it has much good. The problem is that Burckhardt colored our perception of this period by leading us to believe that modern man was born in the Renaissance. We all know that the word "renaissance" means rebirth, but the big question remains: for whom was this rebirth really a rebirth? That is, was the Renaissance a phenomenon affecting all Europeans, or just a select few? Answers to this question are not that difficult but what makes the issue more perplexing is that there is no specific Renaissance "style" that we can identify. The Renaissance was not a "school" or system of thought and action -- at the very least, it embraced the work of thinkers and artists of very different attitudes, achievements and approaches.
Beginning in the city-states of northern Italy, the Renaissance shed light on centuries of supposed darkness. The civic humanists of Venice, Milan and Florence glorified the work of their classical masters, hoping that the virtues of the past would empower the civic virtues of the present and future in Italy. Aristotle and Aristotelian logic, that great mainstay of the medieval world, was abandoned and in its place came Plato and the Neoplatonists, breathing new life into the new world. The world of medieval Scholastic logic-chopping gave way to the sometimes more mystical and clearly more human endeavors of the humanists. In art, music, philosophy and political theory, the new emphasis was on what was human, hence the word humanism has come to describe much of the Italian Renaissance.
But there was another renaissance at work as well. In northern Europe, specifically, the Low Countries, France and England, a Renaissance perhaps less concerned with secular concerns burst forth. It's greatest spokesmen like Erasmus and Thomas More, mocked the worldly concerns of state and church, and instead cautioned Europe that perhaps something even more fundamental had been lost from the historical past. Whereas the Italian Renaissance looked to the past to understand the present and move forward, the Christian humanists of the northern Renaissance looked to the past in order to mock and criticize the present. It was Erasmus who, after all, once wrote, "St. Socrates, pray for me."
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