An external event determined the direction which this outburst of the spirit of freedom should take.
Continuing Early Renaissance,
our selection from John Addington Symonds. The selection is presented in seven easy 5 minute installments.
Previously in Early Renaissance.
Time: 14th. To 16th. Century
Place: Italy
An external event determined the direction which this outburst of the spirit of freedom should take. This was the contact of the modern with the ancient mind, which followed upon what is called the Revival of Learning. The fall of the Greek empire in 1453, while it signalized the extinction of the old order, gave an impulse to the now accumulated forces of the new. A belief in the identity of the human spirit under all manifestations was generated. Men found that in classical as well as biblical antiquity existed an ideal of human life, both moral and intellectual, by which they might profit in the present. The modern genius felt confidence in its own energies when it learned what the ancients had achieved. The guesses of the ancients stimulated the exertions of the moderns. The whole world’s history seemed once more to be one.
The great achievements of the Renaissance were the discovery of the world and the discovery of man. Under these two formulas may be classified all the phenomena which properly belong to this period. The discovery of the world divides itself into two branches — the exploration of the globe and that systematic exploration of the universe which is in fact what we call science. Columbus made known America in 1492; the Portuguese rounded the Cape in 1497; Copernicus explained the solar system in 1507. It is not necessary to add anything to this plain statement, for, in contact with facts of such momentous import, to avoid what seems like commonplace reflection would be difficult. Yet it is only when we contrast the ten centuries which preceded these dates with the four centuries which have ensued that we can estimate the magnitude of that Renaissance movement by means of which a new hemisphere has been added to civilization.
In like manner, it is worthwhile to pause a moment and consider what is implied in the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system. The world, regarded in old times as the center of all things, the apple of God’s eye, for the sake of which were created sun and moon and stars, suddenly was found to be one of the many balls that roll round a giant sphere of light and heat, which is itself but one among innumerable suns, attended each by a cortège of planets and scattered — how, we know not — through infinity. What has become of that brazen seat of the old gods, that paradise to which an ascending Deity might be caught up through clouds and hidden for a moment from the eyes of his disciples? The demonstration of the simplest truths of astronomy destroyed at a blow the legends that were most significant to the early Christians by annihilating their symbolism. Well might the Church persecute Galileo for his proof of the world’s mobility. Instinctively she perceived that in this one proposition was involved the principle of hostility to her most cherished conceptions, to the very core of her mythology.
Science was born and the warfare between scientific positivism and religious metaphysics was declared. Henceforth God could not be worshipped under the forms and idols of a sacerdotal fancy; a new meaning had been given to the words “God is a Spirit and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” The reason of man was at last able to study the scheme of the universe, of which he is a part and to ascertain the actual laws by which it is governed. Three centuries and a half have elapsed since Copernicus revolutionized astronomy. It is only by reflecting on the mass of knowledge we have since acquired, knowledge not only infinitely curious but also incalculably useful in its application to the arts of life and then considering how much ground of this kind was acquired in the ten centuries which preceded the Renaissance, that we are at all able to estimate the expansive force which was then generated. Science, rescued from the hands of astrology, geomancy, alchemy, began her real life with the Renaissance. Since then, as far as to the present moment, she has never ceased to grow. Progressive and durable, science may be called the first-born of the spirit of the modern world.
Thus by the discovery of the world is meant on the one hand the appropriation by civilized humanity of all corners of the habitable world and on the other the conquest by science of all that we now know about the nature of the universe. In the discovery of man, again, it is possible to trace a twofold process. Man in his temporal relations, illustrated by pagan antiquity and man in his spiritual relations, illustrated by biblical antiquity: these are the two regions, at first apparently distinct, afterward found to be interpenetrative, which the critical and inquisitive genius of the Renaissance opened for investigation. In the former of these regions we find two agencies at work — art and scholarship. During the Middle Ages the plastic arts, like philosophy, had degenerated into barren and meaningless scholasticism — a frigid reproduction of lifeless forms copied technically and without inspiration from debased patterns. Pictures became symbolically connected with the religious feelings of the people, formulas from which to deviate would be impious in the artist and confusing to the worshipper. Superstitious reverence bound the painter to copy the almond eyes and stiff joints of the saints whom he had adored from infancy; and, even had it been otherwise, he lacked the skill to imitate the natural forms he saw around him.
But with the dawning of the Renaissance a new spirit in the arts arose. Men began to conceive that the human body is noble in itself and worthy of patient study. The object of the artist then became to unite devotional feeling and respect for the sacred legend with the utmost beauty and the utmost fidelity of delineation. He studied from the nude; he drew the body in every posture; he composed drapery, invented attitudes and adapted the action of his figures and the expression of his faces to the subject he had chosen. In a word, he humanized the altar-pieces and the cloister frescoes upon which he worked. In this way the painters rose above the ancient symbols and brought heaven down to earth. By drawing Madonna and her son like living human beings, by dramatizing the Christian history, they silently substituted the love of beauty and the interests of actual life for the principles of the Church. The saint or angel became an occasion for the display of physical perfection and to introduce un bel corpo ignudo into the composition was of more moment to them than to represent the macerations of the Magdalen. Men thus learned to look beyond the relic and the host and to forget the dogma in the lovely forms which gave it expression. Finally, when the classics came to aid this work of progress, a new world of thought and fancy, divinely charming, wholly human, was revealed to their astonished eyes.
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