RENAISSANCE

Renaissance is a word that means rebirth. This was the period when the medieval world collapsed and the modern world was born, the date for this transition generally put at 1500. Of course, it was not as neat as this.
The first seeds of the collapse of the Medieval world had come during the Spanish Reconquest, when Classical texts were reintroduced to Europe from the Islamic world. Many of these texts had been known, but not on such a scale. And above all else they made it popularly known that there was an intellectual tradition apart from the Bible.
This had a slow but profound effect on European consciousness, speeded up by the failure of the supernatural to save Europe from the Black Death, which took away a huge chunk of the population. A new, leaner, more questioning Europe arose from the Black Death. And with the introduction of printing in the l5th century, these questioning Christians had a rich tradition of literature to feed further questions. Finally, when Christopher Columbus discovered a new world in 1492 not even hinted at in the Bible, the intellectual tide changed.
The Renaissance would still not have happened, however, if not for a major failure in Feudalism itself. The whole system was geared to maintaining the hierarchy of the system, with little thought for real enterprise. Commerce was at a near subsistence level, and no real civil authority existed.
This began to change in clusterings of newly created, enterprising cities. Headed by the Burghers, or local government officials, they began to think differently to the Feudalists, working towards real markets for wares. Flourishing in northern Italy, banking became essential to the system, with monarchies beginning to borrow heavily from this new empowered middleclass.
Including families such as the Medicis, it was these early tycoons who patronised those intellectuals prepared to look to alternative systems through which God could be appreciated. Becoming known as Renaissance Men, these new thinkers were thought of as complete human beings, expressing individuality and indulging in scepticism and free thought by looking back to the Greeks and Romans.
It is therefore little surprise that when the Renaissance flourished it was in these same northern Italian cities. And when it began it encompassed literature, art and architecture. Sacred elements of Christianity were no longer to be without images. Passions, for so long stilted by Christian orthodoxy, returned in the language of the poet. Buildings, for so long attuned to a Medieval world, began to reflect the styles of pre-Christian Greeks. In all areas of the senses, expression was freed from a medieval, Christian outlook.
Much of the spirit of the Renaissance had previously been encapsulated by the poet, Petrarch, who died in 1374. Among his works he wrote about an idealised love for a woman. She was married and refused to become his mistress. The sheer fact that he wrote about such illicit thoughts is evidence of how revolutionary the Renaissance was to become.
However, to say that the Renaissance was anti-Christian would be an error. Rather, the Renaissance was about looking at a Christian world in a new way. Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo enforced this idea. There are hints that da Vinci may have been sceptical of much of Christianity, but most of their work celebrated the Christian ideal. So what was so different about the Renaissance? In a way, it released imagery of Christianity from the establishment. It allowed rebels to express themselves within a Christian world, but influenced by non-Christian ideas. Such ideas were essentially pagan, which were very much associated with the passions.
Christianity had said the world was a preparation for afterlife, so life in Medieval times was stilted by this over-bearing sense of pointlessness in life other than preparing for death. Paganism shunned such an idea, seeing life as joyous and worth living. Medieval paintings reflected this drabness, being two-dimensional. With the discovery of perspective geometry, and its application to painting by Alberti, this all changed, with paintings becoming three-dimensional, seeing the world in all its glory. This perfectly identified the change in attitude. A life that was dark was suddenly full of vigour and vibrancy. And this is the real point of the Renaissance in world history and intellect. The Renaissance was a freeing of expression; and that freedom was very much geared to the passions. The world that was to follow was to often become rational, logical, and highly intellectual. But at the centre of the modern world was a new artistic way of seeing the world. And in seeing it in a new, passionate way, the modern world was allowed to appear.

(c) Anthony North, December 2003