Was the Renaissance Real?

Roeck goes on to address the great question of why Europe became the center of prosperity and innovation on the planet. Colonialism and imperialism can’t explain it; they’re as old as time. Roeck believes, surprisingly, that the Renaissance, and so the breakaway of Europe, happened not in spite of the era’s religious warfare but, in part, because of it. By fusing spiritual and temporal power, the period’s absurd-seeming battles over mystical doctrine—was the blood truly present in the chalice, or merely indicated in it?—were inseparable from struggles for worldly authority. The result was an enduring instability, which, however brutal, prevented the dead calm of enforced harmony. Roeck contrasts this, in a grand Spenglerian manner, with the East Asian spiritualities that, he insists, tended to make a neater division between what was owed to the divine and what belonged to the state. Necessity may be invention’s mother, but Chaos is its father—as he was the begetter of the Olympian gods. In Roeck’s picture, competitive, rather than imitative, habits of mind rose from religious warfare, establishing a cutthroat system of cultural and economic innovation which lasts to this day. We expect to fight for our lives even as we are living them. The Renaissance began this remaking.

Palmer, a historian at the University of Chicago, has no such Spenglerian horizons but instead drills down into the lives of her favorite subjects—which include herself. Palmer, who also writes science-fiction and fantasy novels, becomes a recurring character in her book, sharing personal anecdotes and memories of favorite professors. Her tone aims for chatty irreverence: she refers to the Florentine rulers as the “Nine Dudes in the Tower,” and at one point writes of a letter from the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino to Bernardo Rucellai “advising him not to respond to internet trolls detractors.” The crossing out is, as the scholars say, hers.

Palmer’s personal voice is part of an academic trend toward making scholarship more confessional and transparent. “Now you understand my biases,” she tells us, after recounting her own history as a student. Still, the key to first-person address, as that great Renaissance master Michel de Montaigne understood, is not to subtract complication but to supply it, registering doubt, hesitation, and irony even while developing an argument. Palmer manages this at times, but too often the self-presentation feels obstructive, like a friend sending selfies from Florence, positioning himself cheerfully in front of all the things he’s been gazing at. You’re glad to share his delight, but you’d quite like to see the Duomo.

Yet many are the charms of Palmer’s book. She argues, in contradiction to Roeck, against what she sees as the nineteenth-century idea that each age has a defining spirit, and that the Renaissance was “one great movement growing toward its mature form (modernity), reducing other modes of thought to remnants.” The Renaissance, she insists, was, in fact, plural, and “our modern age is just as plural.” Or perhaps the pluralism of Renaissance civilization is exactly what makes us see it as having begun the modernity we share.

Palmer’s demonstrations of this pluralism are mostly compelling. She re-centers the Renaissance within the double natures of its various principals. Lorenzo the Magnificent emerges as an unmagnificent, ambivalent figure. Palmer also knows how to make a minute story matter—as in her explication of the needlessly and ostentatiously ornate Latin of the era’s scholars. Far from shedding the scholasticism of the medieval mind, they were, she shows, actually aggressively obscure; where Dante and Petrarch wrote in the vernacular, their Florentine successors ran away to unreadable language. Palmer’s purpose throughout is to take the humanism out of the umanisti, as those who taught the Greek and Latin classics were called. There was, she explains, no particular humanism to them, in our sense; the later meaning is a pin-back by those nostalgic nineteenth-century admirers.

On certain subjects, though, Palmer seems weirdly off base. She insists, for instance, that “the Renaissance hierarchy of evidence put authority foremost, logic second, and observation at the bottom.” But Leonardo’s notebooks, which are surely as Renaissance as it gets, are nothing but observation. His drawings, however stylized, strive to capture what whorls of water actually look like—so much so that the art historian Irving Lavin found that they matched with uncanny precision our contemporary understanding of hydrodynamics. Leonardo was really looking. Palmer also claims that the Renaissance had no idea of progress—but the first modern art historian, Giorgio Vasari, whom she scarcely mentions, was preoccupied with progress above all else. As the art historian E. H. Gombrich reminded us long ago, Vasari’s whole project was to chart the technical advances in representation which culminated in Michelangelo.

It soon becomes evident that these blind spots are a consequence of how historians of ideas, like Roeck and Palmer, relegate the visual arts to the background—treating them as illustrations of intellectual change rather than as engines of it. Yet, as Gombrich and his students (Michael Baxandall first among them) made clear, painting was where the action was. The steady addition of new techniques—linear perspective, for space; aerial perspective, for distance; anatomical precision—meant that, even if philosophy and medicine remained static, painting was energized by a powerful sense of technological progress. The shift in what was possible for a Florentine artist between 1410, when Fra Angelico was painting his toylike and schematic landscapes, and 1510, when Michelangelo was painting “The Creation of Adam,” was without precedent in European history, in any domain.

This, surely, is the true originality of the Renaissance: for the first—and perhaps the only—time, the arts, especially painting, eclipsed science and philosophy as the main site of intellectual energy and advancement. The pictures tell us more about the age than the age can tell us about the pictures. You might have to labor over the umanisti’s Latin, but Botticelli requires no translation; the magnetic force of “The Birth of Venus” and “Primavera” has been evident since they were painted. Enigmatic they may be, but that’s their purpose, not their problem. The energy of a world remade—where spirituality and sensuality are mystically entwined—radiates from them. In the realm of the visual, the Renaissance umanisti became humanists in our sense, almost by accident: what the painters learned from the past gave them license to enliven their work with faces, bodies, and desires. The writers might have been trapped in the old tongues, but the painters had eyes left free to imagine.

Though painting and sculpture were the primary movers, they were not the only arts that counted. Galileo’s father, a lutenist, took part in heated debates with fellow-musicians and argued through experiments, like hanging weights from lute strings to test their tension. Even in music theory, the idea of progress burned brightly, well before physics had caught up. We sense in the father the son’s later irreverence: a willingness to challenge received wisdom—to pull the strings and see what sounds got made.

There is a constant paradox of art-making: as an art form accelerates its pace of change, its content grows more nostalgic. This is evident in the work of the other great warp-speed era, French avant-garde painting between 1870 to 1914. As painting raced from sunlit Impressionism to Cubist abstraction in a single generation, its subjects looked backward: to Gothic cathedrals, to a bohemian café-table culture already passing away. It is the speed of transformation, as much as anything transformed, that makes some periods of human civilization permanently compelling.

New things come from old things newly seen. If the Enlightenment aimed to grasp the world as it is, the Renaissance balanced the world as it once was with the world it was becoming. That double consciousness is what gives the pictures, and their period, their grace. Botticelli’s people have “the wistfulness of exiles,” in Pater’s beautiful phrase. Their melancholia was the uncertainty inherent in a time of enormous change. That spirit, to return to our original tune, wasn’t unlike the spirit of those disruptive rock records, which in retrospect were about longing for a lost England, or for a vanishing America of trains and outlaws. Renaissance painting occupies a similar space between the magical and the material, or, if you prefer, between the medieval and the modern—the same space that Shakespeare occupies and that makes him the last of the Renaissance masters. It’s this double consciousness which remains so lucid to us today. They knew that nothing was solid beneath their feet, even as the stars shifted above their heads. “Doubt as a form of sociability,” as another Renaissance scholar calls this feeling, brought people together to share their uncertainty, and moves us still.

“It fades into this and fades into that,” Chuck Berry wisely said, when he was mapping the innovations of his music. “Most people’s impressions overlap other people’s impressions, and music is like that, too,” he added, shrugging off the charge of being either an absolute innovator or a mere conservator. Sometimes the speed of art simply accelerates. One might prefer—sophisticated modern taste often does prefer—the simpler things, liking the Pre-Raphaelites more than Raphael, as much as we prefer vinyl to Spotify. But the painterly resources available to Raphael were vastly larger than those available to an artist a scant half century before, as the musical and lyrical resources available to a pop musician in 1970 were incommensurable with those available to a pop musician in 1960. Style is necessarily hybrid, but there are times when cultural speed really does get supercharged, in ways that draw on the past to create something new. If we’re trying to come up with a word for such times, it isn’t crazy to call the world they make reborn. ♦