With minimal ingenuity, any historical period can be made to dissolve into the ones around it. Take the rock revolution—that great shift which, emerging in the mid-nineteen-fifties and established by the mid-sixties, definitively separated the Broadway-and-jazz-based tunes that had previously dominated popular music from the new sound. The break ravaged record companies and derailed careers. In the fifties, the wonderful jazz-and-standards singer Beverly Kenney performed a song she’d written called “I Hate Rock ’n’ Roll,” and then—perhaps for other reasons, but surely for that one, too—took her own life.
But listen closely and you hear continuities stronger than any rupture. The second song that the Beatles sang to the American public was a Broadway ballad from “The Music Man.” Chuck Berry, their hero, worshipped Nat King Cole, with Berry’s great rock songs of the fifties being variants on Cole’s witty hipster jazz songs from a decade before. (Berry also took most of his guitar licks from the sophisticated jazz guitarist Carl Hogan, of Louis Jordan’s band.) And the elements of Leonard Bernstein’s or Richard Rodgers’s music within the best work of a Paul Simon or a Paul McCartney are as obvious as is the intertwining of Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix. It was in the record business’s interest to convince the teen-agers to whom it was selling music that their music was nothing like their parents’ music. But the rock revolution can easily look more artifactual than authentic.
To anyone who grew up in the period, this is a bit absurd. Of course the rock revolution was real; of course the rock era was an era, with signatures and styles all its own. The first song that the Beatles sang was self-composed, in itself a huge change. By 1967, when “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” were wildly popular, the musical world had become completely different from what it had been a few years earlier. Still, attempts to dissolve a period, however unpersuasive, can be instructive, because they make you think hard about what a period style is. Your common sense goes to war with your critical theory—as it should, since the point of critical theory is to puncture what we call common sense, while the point of common sense is to see past theory to things as they are.
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As with rock music, so with the Renaissance. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, many educated Europeans and Americans shifted their model of a great-good-place-back-then from ancient Greece and Rome to Renaissance Italy. This reëvaluation coincided with nineteenth-century aestheticism—the idea that art could rival faith as a reason for living—and with a revived appreciation of material progress. Renaissance people didn’t just think things; they made things. And so celebrating the Renaissance became a way to pay respect to prosperity and materialism. When Walter Pater published “The Renaissance,” in 1873, he was implicitly aligning Botticelli with William Morris and the craft revival. Two decades later, when the art historian Bernard Berenson praised the “tactile values” of Italian painting, he was linking Giotto to the pragmatism of William James.
Yet doubts, of the kind that halo the rock revolution, have always hovered around the idea of the Renaissance. If it was really a rebirth of a classical past, why are its greatest monuments all Catholic affirmations of faith? If it marked a break with medievalism—well, what medievalism? Dante and Petrarch’s clear vernacular preceded what we now call the Renaissance. As the art historian Erwin Panofsky long ago observed, Europe saw many “renaissances” in classical form long before the fifteenth century—the rounded arches of Romanesque architecture in the twelfth century, for instance. Perhaps the Renaissance appeals to the modern imagination because it was an invention of the modern imagination.
Two new books from university presses take up this debate for the twenty-first century. Bernd Roeck’s “The World at First Light” (Princeton), translated, from the German, by Patrick Baker, runs to almost a thousand pages and, despite its title, actually offers a kind of macro-dissolution of the Renaissance. Seen from Roeck’s vast aerial perspective, the period vanishes into the whole of history—much as Manhattan shrinks to just another island in a satellite view. The Renaissance, in his telling, fades into the medieval world that spawned it and the Enlightenment that followed it.
Meanwhile, Ada Palmer’s “Inventing the Renaissance” (Chicago), at a mere six hundred and fifty pages, announces its thesis in its title. Hers is less macro-dissolution than a series of micro-disillusions: she goes deep into the minutiae of the lives of Renaissance luminaries to show that, far from being idealists reaching for the rebirth of a better world, they were the usual human mixture of self-promotion, self-delusion, and fakery. The Renaissance cities, far from being principalities of prosperity and enlightened rule, were desperately poor, violent, and anarchic. They turned to antiquity more for consolation than for confident renewal.
The Renaissance, in Palmer’s view, was a series of idiosyncratic local arrangements. It was given a shine later by those who needed something shining. Pater’s “The Renaissance” has about as much of a relationship to actual fifteenth-century Florence as Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” does to nineteenth-century Japan. Where Roeck sees the Renaissance as a broad spectrum of activities (rock is just one episode in the long history of pop music), Palmer argues that, under close scrutiny, the whole idea collapses into contradictions (rock is not an actual thing but a series of retrospective reflections around different things). For Palmer, then, the Renaissance is not so much a golden age as a glittering illusion—assembled, reassembled, and ultimately undone by the longings of those who came after.
Roeck’s Renaissance begins in the twelfth century—the high Middle Ages, in our usual accounting—and carries the story through the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Baroque. A professor emeritus of history at the University of Zurich, Roeck has written a book with an almost comically wide reach, in the spirit more of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” than of a conventional cultural history. In a Diamond-like manner, Roeck even devotes many speculative pages to the Little Ice Age as it was experienced in the sixteenth century; he credits it for the surge in witch hunts as failed harvests set off mass panic. (That’s surely overdrawn; after all, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was written in the chill of it.)
The book’s scope is partly academic mission creep. Roeck seems to know of every human being and social movement in Europe through those six centuries, and he wants to write about them all. (He also adds in Asia and Africa throughout.) This dots the book with delightful and animating cameos. We meet the first man since antiquity known to have celebrated his birthday—as sure a sign of individualism as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man—and learn that the library in the great ducal court of Urbino took manuscript books off the chains that had traditionally held them in place, allowing the reader to move them back and forth within the room. Even a longtime lover of Carpaccio’s 1502 picture of St. Augustine in his study—the greatest image of a humanist at work—might not have noticed that, for all the serenity of the study, the expensive books are actually strewn across the floor and under the desk, spines every which way, just as in a modern scholar’s study. It’s a tiny but telling sign that a new idea of reading and thinking was taking hold.
Inevitably, a net this large hauls in a lot of sardines along with tuna. In Roeck, everything comes in for scrutiny—and “everything” is not really a subject. Many pages go by that seem scarcely pointed toward a point. But a thesis does in time emerge, and it is that the Renaissance was neither the last effusion of the antique past nor a beautiful preliminary to modernity; it was modernity itself. The key ideas, social practices, and convictions that made the scientific revolution began here. The version of the Renaissance beloved of Pater or John Ruskin—a lyrical overture to beauty and communal order, refined by classical aestheticism—is, on this view, sentimental. Instead, the period marks a permanent alteration in what earlier scholars would have called “European man,” forged through a new union of artisanal craft and intellectual ambition, and shaped by the competitive worlds its makers inhabited.
It is impossible to imagine Thomas Aquinas actually building a Gothic cathedral, but Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo were profound neoclassical (and proto-scientific) souls and also guys who could engineer cannons and bridges and churches. Filippo Brunelleschi knew how to think buildings and how to build buildings. Galileo ground lenses as much as he theorized the movement of the planets. These pursuits were necessarily communal—it takes a guild to make a telescope—and helped develop “horizontal” social structures that shaped egalitarian, even democratic, habits, which then helped reshape the world. What marks a “Renaissance man” is not multifariousness of pursuits but, rather, an intensity of purpose so great that it has an appetite for all sides of a single activity.
This combination of practical skill and intellectual ambition inspired the scientific revolution. The marriage of the tenaciously artisanal and the wildly speculative eventually produced, among other things, Charles Darwin’s painstaking pigeon breeding—the groundwork for his theory of evolution. And, though democratic states were still a distant prospect, democratic habits flourished within guilds, faculties, and even monasteries. Renaissance people weren’t conscious egalitarians, but they were accustomed to open contests and competitions, one of the hallmarks of modernity.
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. ♦
