Analysis: The Renaissance

The Renaissance began in the fourteenth century in Italy. It spread to other European countries at a slower rate, not flowering in England until the sixteenth century.

Secondary Source: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt.

The Development of the Individual: In Italy, the long struggle between Pope and Holy Roman Emperor (a German since the collapse of the Roman Empire at the hands of the barbarous Germanic invaders) prevented the development of a central power in Italy. Innumerable urban authorities (city states) existed but were constantly at war with each other. The Pope moved for safety reasons out of Italy to Avignon, France early in the fourteenth century. At the same time,the Emperor was distracted from Italian affairs by his worries with other European countries: Spain remained disunited and involved in its long struggle with the Moors; France speedily became engaged in the Hundred Years’ War with England, and was internally divided as well. The outcome for Italy approximated what today would be called a political vacuum . . . The freeing of Italy for roughly two centuries from either a native sovereign or any significant interference from without (Holy Roman Emperor) is given as the cause for the remarkable energy that was invested in inner political struggles and individual development. Dante, Leonardo da Vinci.

The more frequently the governing party was changed, the more the individual was led to make the utmost of the exercise and enjoyment of power . . . Dante . . . finds a new home in the language and culture of Italy, but goes beyond even this in the words, “My country is the whole world.”

Antiquity, the “new Birth”: it was not the revival of antiquity(interest in the ancient world, Greek and Roman) alone, but its union with the genius of the Italian people, which achieved the conquest of the Western world.

There were medieval scholars and monasteries that copied the classics and kept them alive, “but the great and general enthusiasm of the Italians for classical antiquity did not display itself before the fourteenth century. For this a development of civic life was required, which took place only in Italy, and there not till then. It was needful that noble and burgher should first learn to dwell together on equal terms, and that a social world should arise which felt the want of culture and had the leisure and the means to obtain it.” In short, the rise of the middle class, the merchant class,created new wealth and powerful men who had the money and the free-time to study, read, and commission art and the building of great houses.

The Humanists, Scholar-poets:

Boccaccio writes a defense of poetry, the proof that the poetry of the ancients and of their modern followers contains nothing mendacious, the praise of it, and especially of the deeper and allegorical meanings which we must always attribute to it, and of that calculated obscurity which is intended to repel the dull minds of the ignorant. (Augustine)

Italy in the sixteenth century was overrun by foreign armies and lost not only its freedom but the Renaissance culture that it had achieved. But this ruin, Burckhardt believes, was prepared by the Italians themselves. “It cannot be denied,” he writes, “that Italy at the beginning of the sixteenth century found itself in the midst of a grave moral crisis, out of which the best men saw hardly any escape.”This crisis was caused by the excess of that very individualism he so admired and felt to be the key to Renaissance culture: “The individual first inwardly casts off the authority of a State which,as a fact, is in most cases tyrannical and illegitimate . . . The sight of victorious egotism in others drives him to defend his own by his own right arm.”

Out of the individualism of the Renaissance there would grow a sense of moral responsibility in modern man: “But this individual development did not come upon him through any fault of his own, but rather through an historical necessity. It did not come upon him alone, but also, and chiefly by means of Italian culture, upon the other nations of Europe, and has constituted since then the higher atmosphere which they breathe. In itself it is neither good nor bad,but necessary; within it has grown up a modern standard of good and evil — a sense of moral responsibility — which is essentially different from that which was familiar to the Middle Ages.”

The legacy which the Renaissance was to leave to the future was not without ambiguity: it was more a summons to responsibility than a release from restraints.

http://ftp.ccccd.edu/andrade/BritLitI2322/RenBurkhardt.html