Renaissance reinterpreted

Renaissance has been interpreted today as the passage between the Middle Ages and Modernity, but without the profound impact Burckhardt attached to it. (1) In his work, Burckhardt ended judging the Renaissance as ‘the leader of modern ages’. After all, Renaissance did not impose a stable plain of consistence, no philosophical system reunited the pieces and provinces of knowledge that developed. They became at most the exercises of diverse artists acting in different provinces; their actual involvement in several disciplines portrays this state of disaggregation. (2) All possible planes of construction were pierced by previous, basically fourteenth century, elevations, – namely Nominalism and Voluntarism-, that came to be the bedrock on which an actual encompassing constructive process took place debouching in the seventeenth century’s systematic endeavors. Those Renaissance personalities sedimented the basins that laid future projects of construction, but remained on a stranded, striated, plain of consistence.

Renaissance can be reappraised as the final phase of a rather homogeneous process that roughly commenced with the thirteenth century reception of the antique texts in Western Europe. (3) The alteration of the received meanings, the tradition, of the conceptual orography, revised and gradually re-elaborated, -a natural philosophy that was dominated by the ultimate reference to God in the ontological realm, and the Christian Church in the political reality. Burckhardt also referred to the general scepticism that invaded Renaissance authors and how natural philosophy became progressively independent of doctrine and open to inquire. This examination, based on singular and discrete beings rather than on abstract categories, this relapse into observation and the senses, individually endowed, encouraged a novel reappraisal of beings, among them, man itself. On the other hand, voluntarism, by positing divine will as sole reference beyond any rational plan, also resorted either to scepticism, or to a profound and unredeemable faith, circumventing the political projection of Christianism.

Hyeronimus Bosch ‘Last Judgement’ (1500s)

(1) For a more adequate reappraisal of Burckhardt’s theses cf. W.K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought, Boston, 1948. K.H. Dannenfeldt (ed.), The Renaissance: Basic Interpretations, Massachusetts, 1974. K.H. Dannenfeldt, The Renaissance: Ancient or Modern?, Boston, 1959. W.J. Bouwsma, The Waning of Renaissance 1550-1640, New Haven, 2002, on the anxiety Renaissance’s liberation produced and on modernity as a reaction to this. The general atmosphere conveyed countered the individual’s freedom and the need of order, a tension that will be central to our first author, Hobbes.
(2) Cf. A. Heller, Renaissance Man, New York, 1982.
(3) J. Huizinga, Herbst im Mittelalter. Studien über Lebens- und Geistersformen des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts in Frankreich und in den Niederlanden, Stuttgart, 1936.