The word “Renaissance” is the most sonorous and cheerful, but if you think about it, it is also the most incomprehensible in the history of art. At first glance, the Renaissance means something definite, unlike either the Middle Ages or the 17th-19th centuries. But the closer you look, the less clear the picture becomes. It turns out that this era owes its dissimilarity to the Middle Ages to the features of the Modern Age that emerged in it. In turn, its discrepancy to the Modern Age is due to the Middle Ages, which has not yet outlived its usefulness. Therefore, the question arises: What is actually the revival and renaissance in this period?
Renaissance is what Renaissance specialists, cultural and art historians think. Their tireless attempts to clarify what the Renaissance was, in essence, where it began and where it ended, led to a paradoxical result. Campbell (2019) notes that Renaissance has become universal: it supposedly exists by itself, regardless of the consciousness of scientists, as an ideal prototype or program for the deployment of all those specific events and phenomena.
Fletcher (2020) assets that everyone sees this entity differently. For one, the Renaissance is a type of culture that is eternally reproduced and does not know geographical boundaries. For another, this is a period when, in the literature and art of Western Europe, the imitation of antiquity was combined with a keen sense of the value of individual creative initiatives. For the third – the rhetorical and thus reminiscent of ancient sophistry, the culture of sophisticated people who were, moreover, jack of all trades. To the fourth, the Renaissance appears to be the flip side of titanium, a vicious, catastrophic self-affirmation of individuals who perceive themselves and the world exclusively in the material aspect. For some, this is just a revival of art and literature under the influence of classical samples, which began in Italy in the 14th century and continued throughout the 15th and 16th centuries. So what is the Renaissance to you? What is actually the revival and renaissance in this period?
Works Cited
Campbell, Gordon. The Oxford Illustrated History of the Renaissance. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Fletcher, Catherine. The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West. OXFORD University Press, 2020.