The Renaissance: A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles) - Hardcover

Buch 1 von 33: Modern Library Chronicles

Johnson, Paul

 
9780679640868: The Renaissance: A Short History (Modern Library Chronicles)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 067964086X ISBN 13: 9780679640868
Verlag: Modern Library, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

The Renaissance holds an undying place in the human imagination, and its great heroes remain our own, from Michelangelo and Leonardo to Dante and Montaigne. This period of profound evolution in European thought is credited with transforming the West from medieval to modern; reviving the city as the center of human activity and the acme of civilization; and, of course, producing the most astonishing outpouring of artistic creation the world has ever known. Perhaps no era in history was more revolutionary, and none has been more romanticized. What was it? In The Renaissance, the great historian Paul Johnson tackles that question with the towering erudition and imaginative fire that are his trademarks.

Johnson begins by painting the economic, technological, and social developments that give the period its background. But, as Johnson explains, "The Renaissance was primarily a human event, propelled forward by a number of individuals of outstanding talent, in some cases amounting to genius." It is the human foreground that absorbs most of the book's attention. "We can give all kinds of satisfying explanations of why and when the Renaissance occurred and how it transmitted itself," Johnson writes. "But there is no explaining Dante, no explaining Chaucer. Genius suddenly comes to life, and speaks out of a vacuum. Then it is silent, equally mysteriously. The trends continue and intensify, but genius is lacking." In the four parts that make up the heart of the book--"The Renaissance in Literature and Scholarship," "The Anatomy of Renaissance Sculpture," "The Buildings of the Renaissance," and "The Apostolic Successions of Renaissance Painting"--Johnson chronicles the lives and works of the age's animating spirits. Finally, he examines the spread and decline of the Renaissance, and its abiding legacy. A book of dazzling riches, The Renaissance is a compact masterpiece of the historian's art.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Educated at Oxford, author of a number of landmark works of history, philosophy, and religion, Paul Johnson is one of the preeminent historians of our time. He lives in England.

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PART ONE--THE HISTORICAL AND ECONOMICAL BACKGROUND

The past is infinitely complicated, composed as it is of events, big and small, beyond computation. To make sense of it, the historian must select and simplify and shape. One way he shapes the past is to divide it into periods. Each period is made more memorable and easy to grasp if it can be labeled by a word that epitomizes its spirit. That is how such terms as "the Renaissance" came into being. Needless to say, it is not those who actually live through the period who coin the term, but later, often much later, writers. The periodization and labeling of history is largely the work of the nineteenth century. The term "Renaissance" was first prominently used by the French historian Jules Michelet in 1858, and it was set in bronze two years later by Jacob Burckhardt when he published his great book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The usage stuck because it turned out to be a convenient way of describing the period of transition between the medieval epoch, when Europe was "Christendom," and the beginning of the modern age. It also had some historical justification because, although the Italian elites of the time never used the words "Renaissance" or "Rinascita," they were conscious that a cultural rebirth of a kind was taking place, and that some of the literary, philosophical and artistic grandeur of ancient Greece and Rome was being recreated. In 1550 the painter Vasari published an ambitious work, The Lives of the Artists, in which he sought to describe how this process had taken place, and was continuing, in painting, sculpture and architecture. In comparing the glories of antiquity with the achievements of the present and recent past in Italy, he referred to the degenerate period in between as "the middle ages." This usage stuck too.

Thus a nineteenth-century term was used to mark the end of a period baptized in the sixteenth century. But when exactly, in real chronological terms, did this end of one epoch and beginning of another occur? Here we come to the first problem of the Renaissance. Historians have for long agreed that what they term the early modern period of European history began at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth, though they date it differently in different countries. Thus, Spain entered the early modern age in 1492, when the conquest of Granada was completed with the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews, and Christopher Columbus landed in the Western Hemisphere on the instructions of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. England entered the period in 1485, when the last Plantagenet king, Richard 111, was killed at Bosworth and the Tudor dynasty acquired the throne in the person of Henry VII. France and Italy joined Spain and England by virtue of the same event, in 1494, when the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy. Finally, Germany entered the new epoch in 1519, when Charles V united the imperial throne of Germany with the crown of Spain and the Indies. However, by the time these events took place, the Renaissance was already an accomplished fact, in its main outlines, and moving swiftly to what art historians term the High Renaissance, its culmination. Moreover, the next European epoch, the Reformation, usually dated by historians from Martin Luther's act in nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517, had already begun. So we see that the connection between the Renaissance and the start of the early modern period is more schematic than chronologically exact.

The next problem, then, is defining the chronology of the Renaissance itself. If the term has any useful meaning at all, it signifies the rediscovery and utilization of ancient virtues, skills, knowledge and culture, which had been lost in the barbarous centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, usually dated from the fifth century A.D. But here we encounter another problem. Cultural rebirths, major and minor, are a common occurrence in history. Most generations, of all human societies, have a propensity to look back on golden ages and seek to restore them. Thus the long civilization of ancient Egypt, neatly divided by modern archeologists into the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom, was punctuated by two collapses, termed intermediate periods, and both the Middle and the New kingdoms were definite and systematic renaissances. Over three millennia, the cultural history of ancient Egypt is marked by conscious archaisms, the deliberate revival of earlier patterns of art, architecture and literature to replace modes recognized as degenerate. This was a common pattern in ancient societies. When Alexander the Great created a world empire in the fourth century B.C., his court artists sought to recapture the splendor of fifth-century Athenian civilization. So Hellenistic Greece, as we call it, witnessed a renaissance of classic values.

Rome itself periodically attempted to recover its virtuous and creative past. Augustus Caesar, while creating an empire on the eve of the Christian period, looked back to the noble spirit of the Republic, and even beyond it to the very origins of the city, to establish moral and cultural continuities and so legitimize his regime. The court historian Livy resurrected the past in prose, the court epic poet Virgil told the story of Rome's divinely blessed origins in verse. The empire was never quite so self-confident as the Republic, subject as it was to the whims of a fallible autocrat, rather than the collective wisdom of the Senate, and it was always looking over its shoulder at a past that was more worthy of admiration, and seeking to resurrect its qualities. The idea of a republican renaissance was never far from the minds of Rome's imperial elites.

Naturally, after the fall of the Western empire in the fifth century A.D., the longing for the recovery of the majestic past of Rome intensified among the fragile or semibarbarous societies that succeeded the imperial order. In the Vatican Library there is a codex, known as the Vatican Virgil, which dates from the fifth or sixth centuries. It is written in a monumental Capitalis Rustica, a self-conscious attempt to revive the Roman calligraphic majuscule, which had largely fallen out of use during the degenerate times of the third and fourth centuries. The artist-scribe, perhaps from Ravenna, who illustrated the text with miniatures, including one of Virgil himself, evidently had access to high-quality Roman work from a much earlier date, which he imitated and simplified to the best of his ability. Here is an early example of an attempted renaissance of lost Roman skills. There were many such.


A more successful and conscious renaissance, organized from above, took place during and after the reign of Charlemagne, king of the Franks, 768-814, who brought together virtually all the Christian lands of Western Europe in one large kingdom. In the quasi-millennarian year A.D. 800 he had himself crowned emperor of what became established as the Holy Roman Empire, a Christian revival of the past distinguished from its pagan predecessor by its qualifying adjective. The coronation took place in Rome, during Christmas mass in Old St. Peter's, Pope Leo III being the celebrant, but the new Roman emperor did not live there, preferring instead to erect a palace in his imperial heartland, Aachen. It was, however, built from materials transported from Rome and Ravenna, which had the right antique stamp and beauty. In Aachen Charlemagne created a court culture on what he believed to be Roman lines, having himself taught Latin and a little Greek, and summoning scholars to serve him from all over the known world. His chief intellectual assistant, Alcuin, wrote on Charlemagne's orders the Epistola de litteris colendis (785),...

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Verlag
Modern Library
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
067964086X
ISBN 13 
9780679640868
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
196
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Modern Library
https://www.randomhousebooks.com/imprint/modern-library/

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