Why Did the Renaissance End?

The Three Main Causes

(The ninth of my nine posts about European civilization from the 400s to the 1700s.)

Why did the Renaissance end? The enduring legacy of the Renaissance in social conduct and in education would add to our answer two very complex and wide-ranging subjects. Let’s focus on culture, and try to answer why Renaissance culture ended.

To review the centuries of Renaissance culture:

            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 Italian Renaissance peaked 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 phenomena and by 1530 it could be seen from the frontiers of the Americas to the heart of Russia.  The people of the Renaissance shook off the stupor of the Dark Ages and became inventive, self-confident, inspired and inspiring, far more free in mind and spirit, and supremely accomplished.

            The Renaissance swept across 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 culture can be seen as extending even to about 1800 in Vienna and especially to the music of 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 music and architecture in 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. 

Why Did Renaissance Culture End?

            Three factors led to the decline of Renaissance culture.

            First, Renaissance style was subsumed by excesses in Mannerism that became a new Baroque and then Rococo style.  The Baroque was artificial — stylish, ornate, over-elaborate, extravagant, and even fantastic — and with svelte and overly-sumptuous elegance it flaunted artistic skills.  Instead of showing the relationship between the Divine, the spiritual, and the natural – as so much Renaissance culture did – the Baroque settled for playing with reality. 

            Catholic culture turned increasingly Baroque.  Catholic churches with huge altars, splendid vestments, sonorous organs, and vast choirs were set ablaze with light, clouded with incense, draped in lace, and smothered in gilt.  Catholic Church showed off its folklore and myths triumphantly, and told its story with riches, color, and glitter.  

            Even the British shifted to Baroque culture in the 1660s.  The gaudy Baroque style went global. 

            Second, the new social utopians were utilitarian.  They had no interest in non-utilitarian creative thought.  And in their imagined egalitarian and centrally planned society, there would be no “superfluous luxuries” like sculptures and paintings. 

            But third and most importantly, Christian leaders themselves brought Renaissance culture to an end.

            In 1563, the Council of Trent issued guidelines telling artists the correct way to paint. 

            Across the globe, Protestants aimed to return to Early Christianity – a worthy goal – but they assumed that Early Christianity had been intentionally simple and austere.  Early Protestant leaders including Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin were anti-art. 

            Protestants engaged in their first “image-breaking” in 1521.  In Swiss, German, Dutch, and Scottish cities, Protestants whitewashed frescoes and hammered, hacked, and burnt statues and paintings.  Watching the mindless vandalism in Basel in 1529, Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) was appalled and horrified by the wholesale destruction of works of art.

            In making the sermon the focus of their worship liturgy, early Protestants redefined the relationship between matter and spirit.  Many early Protestant leaders viewed art as idolatrous, extravagant, sensual, or, at best, an idle pleasure. 

            Early Protestants banned from Protestant churches statues and paintings and even candlesticks, altars, and bells — everything they thought might distract a Christian from hearing the truth.  In their anti-Catholic fervor, early Protestants purged more than corruption, magic, superstition, and medieval excess from Christianity.  They purged the arts.  They purged culture.