What is the Renaissance?

What do you associate with Renaissance characters?

Renaissance

• How do Renaissance writers portray characters?

Renaissance characters

• They follow in the tradition of the Middle Ages: they explore the relationship of their characters to their social roles (Canterbury Tales)

• Yet the most memorable characters of the Renaissance enjoy greater autonomy and more fully realized personalities than Chaucer’s pilgrims

• Broad-minded Gargantua• Idealistic but mad Quixote, • Romantic but doomed Othello• Characters are presented in acts of thought, fantasy,

doubt, and internal debate

Salvadore Dali, Don Quixote

Fabrizio Moraes,Don Quixote

Gargantua

Gustave Dore, Gargantua

Othello

Othello and Desdemona

Hamlet

Renaissance

• What are the reasons for the shift toward internal, mental portraiture?

Revolutionary changes

• On scientific, geographical, and scholarly fronts, the world of Renaissance Europe was undergoing revolutionary change

• Renaissance authors could not passively receive the traditional wisdom of previous ages

Revolutionary changes

• As a result of the new discoveries (Copernicus, Galileo, Columbus), the Renaissance mind had to reconcieve the nature of the universe

• The new discoveries challenged European and human centrality in the world

• The compass, the printing press, and the gun were ‘signs of the union of the entire world’

• For John Donne, the new discoveries amount to a second creation, so radical is the new theory of the world’s construction (no firm ground to stand on)

Renaissance

• What is the meaning of the term Renaissance?

the term ‘Renaissance’

• ‘rebirth’- one impulse toward creativity came from the example of ancient culture

• The restoration of ancient canons was regarded as a glorious achievement

• Machiavelli: rulers should be as keen on the imitation of ancient virtues as are artists, lawyers, and the scientists

What is the chronological span of the movement?

• The peak of the Renaissance can be shown to have occurred at different times in different countries (elasticity)

• Inception in Italy (visual arts)• It developed later in England (main achievements in drama)• The meaning of the word widened: it conveys artistic

creativity, zest for life and knowledge, sensory delight• References to classical mythology, philosophy, and

literature are not ornaments or affectations• E.g. Erasmus speaks in a cluster of classical allusions in

The Praise of Folly

Erasmus

Erasmus, In Praise of Folly

Humanist

• What is the meaning of the term Humanist?

meaning of the term ‘humanist’

• 14th c. the people who gave new impulse to the emulation of the classics

• The word is related to what we call the humanities, and the humanities at that time were Latin and Greek

• Every cultivated person wrote and spoke Latin, with the result that a Western community of intellectuals could exist, a spiritual ‘republic of letters’ above individual nations

Vocation

• Where does the archetype of literature as a vocation come from?

Vocation

• Petrarch – anticipated certain ideals of the high Renaissance:

• A lofty conception of the literary art, a taste for the good life, basic pacifism, strong sense of the memories of antiquity

• Visionary and imaginative element:• Lack of a scientific sense of history (e.g. Shakespeare’s

Romans)• Hackneyed, inaccurate notion that the ‘light’ of the

Renaissance broke through a long ‘night’ of the Middle Ages

Francesco Petrarca

Petrarch

Renaissance

• What is the definition of Renaissance?

Definition of the Renaissance

• Preoccupation with this life rather than with the life beyond

• Medieval man; conceives of life on earth as transient

• Renaissance man: earthly interests, immediate enjoyment

Renaissance

• What is the Renaissance code of behavior?

TThe Renaissance code of behavior

• Human action is judged not in terms of right or wrong, of good and evil, but in terms of its effectiveness, of the delight it affords (amoral, aesthetic character?)

• Architecture, sculpture, rhetoric: taste for the harmonious and the memorable

• Virtue –connotes active power, technical skill, ‘virtuoso’

• Machiavellian prince: efficient management of princely powers not goodness

Florence

Renaissance architecture

Sculpture

The presence of God in the Renaissance

• Unrestrained and self-sufficient practice of one’s virtues (Machiavelli, Rabelais, Cellini)

• such virtues and skills are God's gift• But the presence of God in the Renaissance is less

dominating than in the Middle Ages (extemporal design)

• Conflict between the values of worldly goods and spiritual renunciation

• Church and state inextricably bound together• Papacy-political as well as spiritual power

Machiavelli

Machiavelli

•   "These methods are very cruel, and enemies to all government not merely Christian but human, and any man ought to avoid them and prefer to live a private life rather than to be a king who brings such ruin on men. Notwithstanding, a ruler who does not wish to take that first good way of lawful government, if he wishes to maintain himself, must enter upon this evil one. But men take certain middle ways that are very injurious; indeed, they are unable to be altogether good or altogether bad."

• Niccolo MachiavelliThe Prince

Machiavelli

Church and state

• Charles V of Spain united most of Europe under his rule and declared himself the Holy Roman Emperor

• Henry VIII of England broke with the Catholic church and declared himself head of the Church of England

• The Reformist movements (Luther, Calvin) were rapidly adopted by Renaissance princes bridling under papal authority

Religion vs. pleasure

• Sensuous appraisal of a woman’s beauties plays a large part in poetry

• Religious convictions did not hamper poets to appreciate sensuous beauty

• A woman’s body: a spiritual experience and ‘a paradise on earth’ to conquer

• E.g. Renaissance Madonnas serve celebrations of earthly beauty rather than mystical hopes of salvation

Raphael, Madonna

Raphael, Madonna