Renaissance Culture
The Ultimate Golden Age
(The fourth in my series about European thought, society, and culture from the 400s to the 1700s. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Shakespeare, Haydn, and Mozart will be dealt with in separate posts.)
In the 1300s, Catholic Christians entered an era of astonishing social and cultural innovation and progress. From a quantum leap in the awareness and mindset of Europe’s Christians emerged the richest and highest-quality cultural outpouring the world has ever known.
The Catholic Renaissance began in Italy in the 1300s — as the Rinascimento — and from there spread across Europe. The Renaissance peaked in Italy from 1490 to 1525, reaching its greatest fulfillment in the High Renaissance led by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael.
By 1510 the Renaissance was clearly a Europe-wide phenomenon and by 1530 it could be seen from the frontiers of the Americas to the heart of Russia. Renaissance Christians shook off the stupor of the Dark Ages and became inventive, self-confident, inspired and inspiring, far freer in mind and spirit, and supremely accomplished.
The Renaissance swept across Christian culture, overturning everyone’s expectations of what artists are capable of achieving. Across 300 years, Renaissance culture was astonishing in its originality, volume, and scope. The Renaissance gave rise to hundreds of outstanding architects, sculptors, and painters — including dozens of original genius.
The Renaissance arrived late in England, where it flourished into the early 1600s. In the late 1500s and early 1600s there was a sudden flowering of genius in English drama and literature that eclipsed the previous attainments of any other nation.
Renaissance music can be seen as extending even to Haydn and Mozart in the late 1700s, when there was a neoclassical revival in architecture as well.
In one sense, Renaissance culture died out in the 1560s and 1570s, reached its fulfillment in English drama in the late 1500s and early 1600s, sprang to life again in the neoclassicism of the late 1700s, and then died out again.
In another sense, Renaissance culture has become part of our permanent cultural heritage. For hundreds of years, prints of Raphael’s artworks have graced the walls of convents, seminaries, presbyteries, and Catholic colleges. The legacy of Renaissance culture remains with us today, and its energy deserves to be constantly renewed by all of us.
Six Keys to Renaissance Culture
The Renaissance involved a passion to create, a drive to beautify, a deepening of observational powers, a new civic engagement, a new honoring of individual gifts, and a desire to excel in every way.
The passion to create was widespread. The Renaissance was not the outpouring of a few geniuses. The Renaissance involved hundreds of cultural leaders and hundreds of thousands of cultural participants.
The drive to beautify was intense. Individuals and cities competed to be recognized as the best in the visual arts.
The deepening of observational powers was profound. While modern science had not yet arrived, Renaissance Christians were far more curious, open-eyed, and observant than any before. Renaissance artists investigated the properties of the natural world and worked to render them accurately.
The new civic engagement was pervasive. Civic endeavors were respected as fundamental to life, business was elevated in value, and people encouraged each other to participate in society.
The honoring of individual gifts was revolutionary. In classical and medieval societies, community and hierarchical authority trampled on and stamped out individual strengths; they were, in effect, anti-individual societies. Renaissance Christians honored the value of the individual. In the 1300s and 1400s came a new affirmation of the dignity of the human mind and a new celebration of individual gifts.
The desire to excel was unprecedented. Renaissance artists and writers sifted and scrutinized the classical and medieval works for the best that had been thought, said, or produced — and synthesized and integrated it. What emerged was the new Renaissance philosophy, style, life, culture, and consciousness.
The flame of artistic vitality was combined with a keen observation of life. Artists and art became more complete, more truthful, and more faithful to nature and to real life — or deliberately idealized it.
Artists of the Renaissance engaged with vitality in their quest for absolute, ideal, and rich beauty. With the brush or the chisel, each artist turned to the examples of the past to get a foothold, and then made his (and, occasionally, her) own fresh advance.
More and more respect was shown to the individual energy, imagination, and personality of each artist. Artists who were free to develop their capacities to the full worked to get at the truth and meaning and present it to us visually.
Ultimately, Renaissance artists portrayed the Divine, the natural, the human, and the spiritual in a way that had never before been achieved. Even today, the visually artistic works of the Renaissance arrest our attention, amaze us, and make us wonder and marvel.
Renaissance Literature
It was not only the treatises of Francesco Petrarch (1304-74) that made him the most prominent writer of the 1300s. There was also his lyrical poetry, including his 14-line sonnets, which he invented. As a poet, Petrarch showed future poets a new beauty in sound, a new technical virtuosity, and better ways to express feelings, including the mix of feelings involved in personal love.
From the 1420s on, Renaissance culture gave rise to many morality plays, in which virtues were pitted against vices.
In the England of the late 1300s, Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400) produced The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer had a sublime gift for peering into the interiors of diverse human individuals. One Chaucer character after another jumped to life off the page, with a vividness of individuality that lived on in each reader’s memory.
From 1532 to 1552 there appeared segments of the wise and perceptive tongue-in-cheek novel Gargantua and Pantagruel by the French cleric Francois Rabelais (c. 1494-1553).
The Spanish playwright Lope de Vega (1562-1635) wrote as many as 1,500 plays, of which 500 survive. In 1605, Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) produced the first modern novel, Don Quixote, which soon brought its merry wisdom to readers across Spain and Europe and eventually throughout the world.
In the late 1500s, Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599), Philip Sidney (1554-1596), and John Donne (1572-1631) began to write poetry of great range and quality. Spenser’s allegorical poem The Faerie Queen fused Arthurian chivalry with ancient wisdom, Civic ethics, and Christian values. Donne wrote sophisticated love poems in his younger years and Christian poetry and sermons of great literary quality later in life, when he was a leading Anglican cleric.
From 1587 to 1613 there were 275 new plays written and produced in England. The English Renaissance was all about the genius and skill of its playwrights: Ben Jonson, Thomas Heywood, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Thomas Dekker, Cyril Tourneur, Thomas Middleton, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and, above all others, William Shakespeare.
Renaissance Music
In the mid-1500s, when the practice of printing sheet music had become widespread, Christian music began ascending to new heights. Christian composers innovated with the Mass, the oratorio, the cantata, and, finally, opera.
The versatile Flemish Catholic composer Adrian Willaert (c. 1490-1562) held several musical posts in Italy and in 1527 became maestro di capella at Saint Mark’s in Venice. The well-paid Willaert made the music at St. Mark’s the best in Europe, and composed nine Masses and innumerable other works.
Other great Catholic composers of the time were Giovanni Palestrina (1525-94), Orlande de Lassus (1532-94), and Tomas Luis de Victoria of Spain (1548-1611). Palestrino, maestro of the Papal choir, wrote hundreds of compositions, most in his placid rhythm. Lassus, who worked in England, France, and Germany, was a great composer of Masses and religious motets, and became famous and influential. Victoria wrote hymns with mystical intensity and direct emotion.
Renaissance Architecture
During the Renaissance, Italian architects revived the classical dome and arch as well as classical proportion. The Renaissance church was a building of unified structure, ordered with symmetry and harmony. In the 1400s, Italian architects showed the world how to erect buildings of lucid beauty.
The highly skilled architectural engineer Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) designed and oversaw the building of the dome for the chapel of the Santa Croce Cathedral in Florence. Completed in 1436, the dome still dominates the city. It is neither Roman nor Greek but an innovative new style, with an external appearance of delicacy, proportion, and grace. He also designed the sacristy of San Lorenzo.
Brunelleschi pioneered buildings with a balance between simplified elements and parts, in which no feature dominates but a pervading style — and a single system of lighting where possible — brings the whole together.
Donate Bramante (1444-1514) pioneered a modern grandeur in architecture. His Tempietto di Sant’Andrea, a circular stone chapel with columns and a dome, is a perfect building and a pure Renaissance original— a small building with all the dignity of a vast building.
Bramante died in 1514, but the new Saint Peter’s Basilica – completed by Michelangelo and others between 1546 and its consecration in 1626 – was a version of Bramante’s Lombardy churches — the Santa Maria delle Grazie and the Pavia Cathedral — on a grand scale.
Andrea Palladio (1508-80) gave Venice much of its modern magic. Both his refrectory and his church at Venice’s San Giorgio Monastery are riveting. The church is especially elegant, and almost ethereal from a distance, seeming as a temple floating on the water — a dramatic and magnificent achievement.
Brunelleschi and Palladio proved two of the most influential architects of all time. Renaissance Italian architecture guided Europe and went global, and set the visual patterns of buildings around the world.
In Portugal, the monastery cloister, church, and mausoleum chapel in Belem was an astonishing architectural achievement with a unique style. And near Tomar in the mid-1500s, the architects Joao de Castilho (1470-1552) and Diego de Torralva (1550-66) designed and built the pure classical Chapel of the Immaculate Conception. When the monastery and main cloister are considered together, the buildings of de Castilho and de Torralva may be the finest classical church complex in all of Europe.
Renaissance Sculptures
The perfectionist Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455) worked 20 years on his 34,000-pound bronze doors for the baptistry in Florence. In 28 panels later called The Gates of Paradise, Ghiberti recreated events from scripture in dramatic life.
In Florence, Donata di Nicolo, better known as Donatello (1386-1466), revived the Roman bust and pioneered separate statues of individuals. Like no sculptor before him, Donatello expressed dramatic emotions in stone and bronze. His skill and his artistic integrity were matched by his exceptional grasp of humanity.
Donatello began his earliest masterpiece, Saint John the Evangelist, in 1410 for the west portal of the Florence Cathedral. He was able to distort the proportions of these four roundels of John’s life so that from the viewer’s angle the impact is strong, powerful, and immediate — as if the roundel was a window through which we look into a living scene.
There is confident beauty and innocence in Donatello’s Annunciation in the Santa Croce chapel. His Resurrection relief at San Lorenzo is deeply humane.
Donatello statues were strikingly real and lifelike. His best works include his 1413 marble Saint Mark, his 1422 bronze Saint Louis of Toulouse, his sorrowing Mary in the Florence Baptistry (after 1419), his sinuous and naturally graceful bronze David, his bronze-relief Healing of the Israelite Son for the Sant’Antonio church altar in Padua, and, in the Florence Cathedral, his Singing Gallery of the ecstatic dance of the souls of the innocent in Heaven.
Luca Della Robbia (c. 1399-1482) was a huge Renaissance influence. The charming, cheap, and popular tin-based glazed terra-cotta of Luca Della Robbia was exported across most of Europe. You could reassemble it from bits and decorate your study, bedroom, dining hall, or church, including altarpieces.
In 1415, the classical sculptor Nanni di Banco (c. 1380-1421) delivered The Four Crowded Saints – of four Christian sculptors of the 200s who refused to carve statues of a pagan deity and so were martyred by the Emperor Diocletian.
Renaissance Paintings
With their own brilliant new style, Catholic artists added smiles, pure and sweet faces, joy, life, beauty, nobility, warmth, tenderness, passion, and grace to their portraiture. Giving flesh to spirit, by the 1200s Catholic painters had become peers — equal peers — to the painters of Periclean Athens and Augustan Rome.
One of the greatest achievements of Renaissance artists was perfecting the ability to make two-dimensional paintings seem three-dimensional. Renaissance artists could make the visual world appear with depth in a natural manner on a two-dimensional surface.
The Renaissance artists created rounded beings — with three-dimensional bodies and true facial expressions — who relate with each other in three-dimensional space: in a room, on a street, or along a stretch of countryside. With this appearance of depth, paintings seemed to come alive.
Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337) was the first painter to use perspective instinctively. In 1305 and 1306, Giotto painted at Padua’s Arena Chapel his two finest surviving paintings: The Lamentation and Betrayal of Christ. Giotto’s figures are wisely and skillfully grouped and are clearly located in real space and surroundings. With their anxious and tearful faces, both paintings convey deep intensity of feeling.
Two decades later, Giotto had added movement to his figures, and freedom, facility, and grace. And so Giotto turned a painting into a window that makes visible a three-dimensional scene. Viewers could step into a painting’s virtual scene and feel right at home. Giotto used the new techniques to dramatize the battle between good and evil and scenes from the life of Christ and other Biblical figures.
The short-lived Masaccio (1401-28) produced a decade of art that improved on Giotto. Masaccio added more weight and volume to his figures and scenes, and made his settings with perspective appear even more natural.
Meanwhile, the Dutch and Flemish artists achieved precise representation of the human face and natural landscapes. The people in Deposition, the 1435 painting of Rogier van der Weyden (c. 1399-1464), have strong and supple living bodies with faces full of both thought and feeling.
Jan Van Eyck (c. 1395-1441) painted detailed and realistic portraits. Van Eyck’s paintings showed sensitivity and great depth, and no one had yet depicted light with such impact. Van Eyck’s brilliance at depicting color, space, and fully realized people who are true to life can be seen in many paintings, including the altarpiece panels in Ghent.
Both van der Weyden and Van Eyck made the Gospel story as real as possible. As Dutch art progressed, one of the finest works of the time was an anonymous work from around the year 1550: an oak relief of The Prodigal Son.
The friar Filippo Lippi (c. 1406-69) painted his majestic cathedral frescoes of Spoleto and Prato, including holy and serene saints and crowds of regular people. Lippi’s finest is his 1490 Vision of Saint Bernard in the Badia of Florence, in which Bernard gazes at Mary and child angels.
In Venice, Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516) displayed a distinctive personal style in his sacred altarpieces and other paintings. He had an eye for the human face and great skill for capturing it on a panel or canvas. He painted women with special tenderness and he painted with sensitivity, delicacy, and high finish, including such charming touches as with the boy instrumentalists seated at the foot of the Virgin in his San Giobbe altarpiece.
Bellini excelled in his renderings of Mary and her Child as well as the Repentant Magdalen and Saint John the Baptist. He brought new imagination to the Pieta. His finest work may have been the Procession in Piazza San Marco.
Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1465-1526) painted such sacred masterpieces as Scenes from the Life of Saint Ursula, The Healing of the Possessed Man, and his painting of Augustine in his study.
In the mid-1400s, the French artist Jean Fouquet was innovative in balancing and fusing Dutch and Italian styles, as in his Estienne Chevalier with Saint Stephen.
In his Saint Vincent Altarpiece for the chapel of Lisbon Cathedral in Portugal around 1470, Nuna Goncalves displayed organizing power and the humane psychological immediacy of his figures.
Around 1478 there arrived in Florence the three-panel altarpiece of Flemish painter Hugo von der Goes (c. 1435-82), the Adoration. Here in one painting we find contrast, the informal suggestion of space, a common landscape linking the tryptich’s wings and the central scene, a meticulous rendering of everything from the vase to the straw and from the costumes to the prayerful hands, excellent depiction of the spiritual devotions of the shepherds, and the emotional isolation of the Child.
Another beautiful post, Mike. I've so enjoyed this series. Thank you.