Chapter Three The Renaissance
The positive side of Thomas Aquinas’s thinking was soon felt in art. Before Giotto (c. 1267–1337), Florentine painting was merely a less polished form of Byzantine art—flat and without depth. For example, Mary and Christ were not portrayed realistically; they were not so much pictured, as represented by symbols. Five hundred years had made no real change in Florentine art.
With Giotto, whose teacher was Cimabue (1240–1302), came a radical change. Giotto gave nature a more proper place, and his people were real people. Giotto’s first great work, produced in Padua in 1304, was a picture of the Last Judgment (see ). In this he painted a genuine likeness of Enrico Scrovegni, the man who had commissioned the picture. Giotto’s work did, however, have some technical flaws. For one thing, he never mastered the technique of having people’s feet fastened on the earth. His figures all seem to stand on tiptoe. And his people are much larger in scale than the world around them—hills, houses, and trees are too small for the size of the people. Nevertheless, Giotto took a huge step toward giving nature its rightful place. That is proper, for, because God made the world, nature is indeed important—and nature was now being portrayed more like it actually is. Giotto also began to show the versatility which was to characterize Renaissance man. At the end of his lifetime he designed the bell tower, the Campanile, next to the cathedral in Florence (1334–1337).
Plate 15 Giotto, Last Judgment, fresco, 1304, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy. “Giotto’s first great work.”
The positive drift toward an art in which nature had more emphasis occurred not only in painting but also in writing. The writers wrote the way the painters painted. Specifically Dante (1265–1321), who may have known Giotto and who refers to him in The Divine Comedy (1300–1320), wrote in the way Giotto painted (see ). A native of Florence, exiled in 1302 because of his political activity, Dante was one of the first men to write important works in the vernacular. His writing has a deep and profound beauty and is a work of genius on its highest level. But in the development of the humanistic elements of the Renaissance, Dante followed the unfortunate side of Thomas Aquinas in mixing the Christian and the classical pagan world in allusions throughout his work. To mention two examples from The Divine Comedy: first, Dante’s guide through hell is the Roman poet Virgil, who was to Dante what Aristotle was to Aquinas; second, the worst sinners in hell are Judas who betrayed Christ and Brutus and Cassius who betrayed Caesar.
Plate 16 Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). “. . . a romantic ideal.”
It is interesting that the nature-versus-grace problem is clearly reflected in the contrast in Dante’s writing between Beatrice and Dante’s wife. All his life Dante loved Beatrice (whom he actually only saw a couple of times), and he held up their love as a romantic ideal. For example, in about 1293 he wrote La Vita Nuova, celebrating his love for Beatrice: “Seeing her face is so fair to see . . . love sheds such perfect sweetness over me.” On the other hand, the wife he married in 1285 never had a place in his poetry. She was only for doing his cooking and rearing his children. Those in this school of thinking saw a strong contrast between two views of love—one totally sensual, the other totally spiritual. They understood that sensual love needs the spiritual to give it any real meaning beyond a physical response at the passing moment, but instead of keeping this as a unity, they allowed it to be separated into a kind of upper and lower story. The sensual love of the novelists and poets was the lower story; the spiritual, supposedly ideal love of the lyric poets was the upper story. This situation did not produce beauty but ugliness. The wife was a dray horse; the idealized woman, a disembodied phantom.
Other writers followed in Dante’s train. Petrarch (1304–1374) is rightly called “the father of the new humanism.” He had a deep enthusiasm for the classical Roman writers, such as Cicero, and a deep love for ancient Rome. Boccaccio (1313–1375), author of The Decameron, learned Greek in order to study the classics better. His translation of Homer was one of the foundation stones of the Renaissance, reviving Greek literature after seven hundred years of neglect. From Petrarch came a line of professional humanists. These paid men of letters translated Latin, wrote speeches, and acted as secretaries. They were largely laymen, like the Florentine chancellors Salutati (1331–1406) and Bruni (1370–1444). Their humanism meant, first of all, a veneration for everything ancient and especially the writings of the Greek and Roman age. Although this past age did include the early Christian church, it became increasingly clear that the sort of human autonomy that many of the Renaissance humanists had in mind referred exclusively to the non-Christian, Greco-Roman world. Thus Renaissance humanism steadily evolved toward modern humanism—a value system rooted in the belief that man is his own measure, that man is autonomous, totally independent.
The enthusiasm for the Greek and Roman classics was further stimulated by two events. First, a church council in Florence in 1439 discussed relations with the Eastern Orthodox Church and so opened the way for contacts with Greek scholars. Second, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 resulted in an exodus of Greek scholars who brought manuscripts with them to Florence and other northern Italian cities. It was the humanists of that time who, under the enthusiasm for the classics, spoke of what had immediately preceded them as a “Dark Age” and talked of a “rebirth” in their own era. Harkening back to the pre-Christian era, they visualized man as taking a great forward leap. The concept of autonomous man was growing. In other words, humanism in the form it took in the Renaissance (and after the Renaissance) was being born.
There was indeed a positive side to all that was occurring: a new and proper emphasis on nature and the enjoyment of it. About 1340 Petrarch climbed a mountain, Mont Ventoux, in the south of France just to climb it—something brand-new. Though this ascent may seem trivial, it was a parallel in life to Giotto’s painting of nature.
A bit later, in the early fifteenth century, architecture was beginning to change dramatically with Brunelleschi (1377–1446). His architecture shifted the emphasis from the Gothic back to the classical. His churches in Florence of San Lorenzo (1421–1434) and Santo Spirito (built in 1445–1482 from his designs) show his use of the classical form. In 1421 he began work on the Foundling Hospital, which can be said to be the first Renaissance building. His dome of the cathedral in Florence (1434) was an immense architectural breakthrough: it brought together great artistic triumph with an overwhelming feat of engineering. It was and is one of the wonders of the world in architectural engineering (see ). It was not only an artistic expression, but it showed the high state of his grasp of mathematics. In this dome Brunelleschi went beyond any dome ever built before—including the Pantheon of ancient Rome.
Plate 17 Florence Cathedral, Italy. The cathedral dome was designed by Filippo Brunelleschi and the campanile by Giotto. “. . . an immense architectural breakthrough.” Photo from Mary Evans Picture Library.
To see the interplay of the arts in the Renaissance period, it is interesting to note that the musician Guillaume Dufay (c. 1400–1474) wrote a motet especially for the consecration of the dome built by Brunelleschi. Later, Michelangelo used Brunelleschi’s dome as the model for the dome of St. Peter’s. All this is especially impressive when one realizes that Brunelleschi was trained not as an architect but as a goldsmith, which again emphasizes the versatility of the men of the Renaissance. The Renaissance architects emphasized the simple geometrical forms of the square and circle. And Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) made drawings that fitted man himself into these simple forms. Brunelleschi worked out perspective, as did Ghiberti and Donatello (1386–1466), while Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) wrote the first treatise on its theory and technique. Perspective made possible a new way of depicting space. Brunelleschi, the master of space, also greatly influenced the painters and sculptors of his day by making open space an important factor in their artistic concepts.
Plate 18 The architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), who “even made self-portraits.”
But for the men of the Renaissance the new view of perspective was also something more: it placed man in the center of this space, and space became subordinated to mathematical principles spun out of the mind of man. The emphasis on man was coming out in other new ways. For example, we know very little about those who built the cathedrals in the Gothic era or about those who wrote the Gregorian chants. By contrast, Brunelleschi’s biography was written in detail by a friend, and Cellini (1500–1571) later wrote about his own life in a swaggering autobiography in which he assumed that ordinary morality did not apply to a genius like himself. Now too, for the first time, portraits became a generally accepted art form. The architect Alberti even made self-portraits (see ).
Now we come to the next big step forward in the flow of the art of the Renaissance. Masaccio (1401–1428), who died as a young man of twenty-seven, has been called the father of Renaissance painting. He knew Brunelleschi and, in turn, his work influenced Ghiberti’s work on the north door of the Baptistry. The best place to see Masaccio’s work is in the Brancacci Chapel, Church of the Carmelite Order in Florence. He seemed to have had a special relationship with the Carmelite Order, for he had already worked in one of their churches in Pisa. In the panels of this chapel where Masaccio and his master, Masolino (c. 1383–c. 1447), labored together, his work far surpassed his master’s in its lifelikeness. When Masaccio left some work unfinished in the chapel, Filippino Lippi (1457–1504) was brought in fifty years later to complete it. Even though Lippi’s contribution was so much later, Masaccio’s work was still far superior to Lippi’s. In Masaccio’s work many faces were clearly portraits. He made studies from life and was able to give his work a true-to-life quality. Nature had thus now truly come to its proper place.
Masaccio was the first painter who consistently used central perspective, though Donatello’s earlier relief St. George and the Dragon also showed some knowledge of this. The Romans never knew central, one-point perspective, though they used a kind of perspective, seen for example in the wall paintings of Pompeii. So in painting (as in Brunelleschi’s dome in architecture) the men of the Florentine Renaissance surpassed the ancients. Masaccio also was the first to bring light into his paintings from the naturally correct direction. He painted so that his figures looked “in the round” and in the midst of a realized space. One can feel the atmosphere about Masaccio’s figures, this sense of true atmosphere being caused by the combination of perspective plus light. In addition, his work had real composition; there was a balance to the total work in the relationship of the figures and the whole. Vasari (1511–1574), who was also an architect and painter, in The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550), wrote that Masaccio was the first artist who painted people with their feet actually standing on the ground. One can see this by comparing Masolino’s and Masaccio’s Adam and Eve on two walls facing each other in the Carmine chapel. In short, in the painting of Masaccio there were a massive number of breakthroughs and firsts.
In the north of Europe, the same techniques were wrestled with by the Flemish painters, of whom Jan van Eyck was the greatest (c. 1390–1441). Van Eyck in the north worked at the same time as Masaccio in the south in Italy. Van Eyck mastered light and air and placed a strong emphasis on nature. He also used a new technique of oil plus tempera. In this he preceded the painters in Italy. By 1420—earlier than the Italians—the Flemish painter Campin (c. 1378–1444) had made real portraits, and van Eyck followed. The painting by van Eyck of Rolin in Madonna with Chancellor Rolin (about 1436), for example, is a true portrait.
At an earlier period in the north than in the south, painters also were interested in landscapes. Van Eyck, who was doing landscapes as early as 1415–1420, was the first great master of this subject, the first great landscape artist. A number of paintings show this early interest, but let us examine just one: his Adoration of the Lamb (1432) in the Cathedral of St. Bavon in Ghent, Belgium (see ). It is an altarpiece containing wonderful pictures of Eve, Adam, and singing angels. But most impressive is the central theme: the rich, the poor—people of all classes and backgrounds—coming to Christ. And who is this Christ? Van Eyck comprehended the biblical understanding of Christ as the Lamb of God who died on the cross to take away the moral guilt of those who accept Him as Savior. But this Christ is not now dead. He stands upright and alive on the altar, symbolizing that He died as the substitute, sacrificed, but He now lives! As van Eyck painted this, almost certainly he had Jesus’s own words in mind, as Christ speaks in the Apocalypse, the last book in the Bible: “I am he that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death” (Revelation 1:18).
Plate 19 Jan van Eyck, Adoration of the Lamb, detail of Ghent Altarpiece, 1432, oil on panel, St. Bavon Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium. “. . . the biblical understanding of Christ as the Lamb of God.”
The background of this painting is marvelous, a real landscape. Soon the Flemish painters’ work in natural backgrounds was copied in the south—for example, in the background of Piero della Francesca’s (c. 1416–1492) Duke of Urbino, now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
In passing, we should note that the north influenced the south in music as well as in painting. Josquin des Prez (1450–1521) was a Fleming who came to Italy and served in the court of Milan. He excelled in his music as a “tone painter.” He was one of the great composers of all time, and had considerable influence on the development of Renaissance music in the south. Music in the Renaissance made both technical and artistic advances. Technically, for example, the first printer of music, Ottaviano Petrucci (1466–1539), worked in Venice and printed music with movable type in 1501. Artistically, perhaps the most significant innovation was the art of orchestration. The main instruments were the lute (the most popular solo instrument), sackbut (like a trombone), shawm, viol, drum, and krumhorn (a curved horn), along with an extraordinary variety of wind instruments, all built in sets so that one uniform timbre was available throughout the entire range from bass to soprano. This was in keeping with the Renaissance ideal of homogeneous sound. Music was important in the Renaissance, and popular interest in music soon led to the rise of opera in Florence.
It is crucial to notice that with Masaccio and the others up to this point, art could still have moved toward either a biblical or a nonbiblical concept of nature and the particulars (that is, the individual things, including the individual man). Up to this time it could have gone either way. It was good that nature was given a proper place. And there could have continued an emphasis on real people in a real world which God had made—with the particulars, the individual things, important because God made the whole world. Masaccio, as we have noted, pictured Adam and Eve as the Bible portrays them—as real people in a real world. Or at this point humanism could take over, with its emphasis on things being autonomous. Immediately after Masaccio, the die was cast and the movement went in this direction. Man made himself increasingly independent and autonomous, and with this came an increasing loss of anything which gave meaning, either to the individual things in the world or to man. With this we begin to see the dilemma of humanism which is still with us today.
This position and its dilemma is strikingly shown in a shift in art. In France, one sees this with Fouquet (c. 1416–1480) in his painting The Red Virgin (c. 1450) (see ). The word red refers to the overall color used in part of the picture. The girl was shown with one breast exposed, and everybody who knew the situation knew that this was a picture of the king’s mistress, Agnès Sorel. Was this the Madonna about to feed her baby? No, the painting might be titled The Red Virgin, but the girl was the king’s mistress; and when one looked at the painting one could see what the king’s mistress’s breast looked like. Prior to this time, Mary was considered very high and holy. Earlier she was considered so much above normal people that she was painted as a symbol. When in the Renaissance Mary was painted as a real person, this was an advance over the representations of Mary in the earlier age, because the Bible tells us that Mary was a real girl and that the baby Jesus was a real baby. But now not only was the king’s mistress painted as Mary with all of the holiness removed, but the meaning, too, was being destroyed. At first it might have seemed that only the religious aspect was threatened. But, as we can see in retrospect, gradually the threat spread to all of knowledge and all of life. All meaning to all individual things or all particulars was removed. Things were being viewed as autonomous, and there was nothing to which to relate them or to give them meaning.
Plate 20 Jean Fouquet, Madonna and Child (also known as The Red Virgin), right wing of Melun Diptych, c. 1450, oil on panel. Koninklijk Museum Voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, Belgium. “. . . everybody who knew the situation knew that this was a picture of the king’s mistress.”
Let us now look at another aspect of art to show that humanism had taken over. In the Academy in Florence is Michelangelo’s (1475–1564) great room. Here we see on either side Michelangelo’s statues of men “tearing themselves out of the rock” (see ). These were sculpted between 1519 and 1536. They make a real humanistic statement: Man will make himself great. Man as Man is tearing himself out of the rock. Man by himself will tear himself out of nature and free himself from it. Man will be victorious.
Plate 21 One of the four statues in a series by Michelangelo commonly known as Awakening Prisoners or Awakening Captives, 1519–1536, marble, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, Italy. Pictured here is his Awakening Slave (1519–1520), Bridgeman Images. “Man will be victorious.”
As the room in the Academy is arranged, it strikingly sets forth humanistic thought. As we go past these men tearing themselves out of the rock, we come finally, at the focal point of the room, to the magnificent statue of David (1504). As a work of art it has few equals in the world (see ). Michelangelo took a piece of marble so flawed that no one thought it could be used, and out of it he carved this overwhelming statue. But let us notice that the David was not the Jewish David of the Bible. David was simply a title. Michelangelo knew his Judaism, and in the statue the figure is not circumcised. We are not to think of this as the biblical David but as the humanistic ideal. Man is great!
The statue was originally planned to stand forty feet above the street on one of the buttresses of the cathedral, but was placed outside the city hall in Florence, where a copy now stands. The Medicis, the great banking family which had dominated Florence since 1434, had run the city by manipulating its republican constitution. A few years before David was made, the Medicis had been thrown down by the people and a more genuine republic restored (1494). Thus, as the statue was raised outside the city hall, though Michelangelo himself had been a friend of the Medicis, his David was seen by the populace as the slayer of tyrants. Florence was looking with confidence toward a great future.
The David was the statement of what the humanistic man saw himself as being tomorrow! In this statue we have man waiting with confidence in his own strength for the future. Even the dis-proportionate size of the hands says that man is powerful. This statue is idealistic and romantic. There was and is no man like the David. If a girl fell in love with the statue and waited until she found such a man, she would never marry. Humanism was standing in its proud self and the David stood as a representation of that. But there are signs that by the end of his life Michelangelo saw that humanism was not enough. Michelangelo in his later years was in close touch with Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547), a woman who had been influenced by Reformation thought. Some people feel they see some of that influence in Michelangelo’s life and work. However that may be, it is true that his later work did change. Many of his early works show his humanism, as does his David. In contrast stand his later Pietàs (statues of Mary holding the dead Christ in her arms) in the cathedral in Florence and in the castle in Milan, which was probably his last. In the Pietà in the cathedral in Florence, Michelangelo put his own face on Nicodemus (or Joseph of Arimathea—whichever the man is), and in both of these Pietàs humanistic pride seems lessened, if not absent.
Plate 22 Left Author and film crew in the Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence. Right, Michelangelo, detail of David, 1504, marble, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, Italy. “There was and is no man like the David.” Photo by Mustafa Arshad.
Another giant of the Renaissance, equal to Michelangelo, is Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) who historically stood at a crucial place. He was a chemist, musician, architect, anatomist, botanist, mechanical engineer, and artist. He was the embodiment of the true Renaissance man: he could do almost everything and do it well. The classic work Leonardo da Vinci, published in Italy and translated into English in 1963, contained a section by Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) on Leonardo’s thought-forms. He spells out the fact that Leonardo really grasped the problem of modern man. Leonardo anticipated where humanism would end.
Leonardo is generally accepted as the first modern mathematician. He not only knew mathematics abstractly but applied it in his Notebooks to all manner of engineering problems (see ). He was one of the unique geniuses of history, and in his brilliance he perceived that beginning humanistically with mathematics one only had particulars. He understood that man beginning from himself would never be able to come to meaning on the basis of mathematics. And he knew that having only individual things, particulars, one never could come to universals or meaning and thus one only ends with mechanics. In this he saw ahead to where our generation has come: everything, including man, is the machine. Realizing this, Leonardo thought that perhaps the painter, the sensitive man, could come to meaning, so he tried to paint “the soul”—not the soul as a Christian thinks of it, but rather the universal. He attempted to paint one thing that would include all of that class of things.
Plate 23 Sketches by Leonardo da Vinci. Bottom right, da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, c. 1487, pen and ink. Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice. “. . . one of the unique geniuses of history.” Photos courtesy of Anderson-Giraudon.
Plates 24–25 Sketches by Leonardo da Vinci. Bottom right, believed to be a self-portrait. “. . . one of the unique geniuses of history.” Photos courtesy of Anderson-Giraudon.
As you will remember, Thomas Aquinas emphasized Aristotelian thought. Think back to Raphael’s fresco in the Vatican, The School of Athens (). There Plato pointed upward, Aristotle downward. Aristotelian thought was directed toward the particulars and led through Thomas Aquinas to all the subsequent problems of an emphasis on the particulars at the expense of meaning. But in Florence the emphasis gradually shifted to Plato (c. 427–347 BC). The Western interest in Plato accelerated as Greek scholars fled after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and brought their texts with them. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) taught neo-Platonic thinking to Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449–1492), and this thinking became important in Florence. He was an influence on Michelangelo and other artists such as Sandro Botticelli (1444–1510), as well as on Lorenzo and the thinkers surrounding him. As Aristotelian thought emphasized the particulars, neo-Platonic thought emphasized the universals. The early men of the Renaissance had tried to syncretize Christianity and Aristotelian thought, but had failed. Thereafter, men of the Renaissance tried to syncretize Christianity and Platonism—and likewise failed.
In the midst of these crosscurrents of thought, Leonardo tried to paint the universal, thinking that a painter might be able to achieve what the mathematicians could not. But he never was able to paint the universal on a humanistic basis, any more than the mathematician could provide a mathematical universal on a humanist basis. Leonardo, the humanistic man (beginning only from himself), failed both as the mathematician and also as the artist who tried to paint the universal out of his observation of the particulars. The humanists had been sure that man starting from himself could solve every problem. There was a complete faith in man. Man starting from himself, tearing himself out of the rock, out of nature, could solve all. The humanistic cry was, “I can do what I will; just give me until tomorrow.” But Leonardo, in his brilliance, saw at the end of his life humanism’s coming defeat.
There was a split between Leonardo’s theory and the way it worked out in practice. He could not bring forth the universal or meaning in either mathematics or painting, and when King Francis I of France (1494–1547) brought Leonardo to the French court as an old man, Leonardo was in despondency. As a man thinketh so is he—and humanism had already begun to show that pessimism was its natural conclusion. Actually, we could say that we went to Renaissance Florence and found modern man!