See how Petrarch's return to Greek and Roman authors broke with the Middle Ages and sparked the Renaissance
The intellectual and artistic climate of Florence during the 14th and 15th centuries...
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Transcript
[Music in]
NARRATOR: The traffic in these streets is modern. The streets themselves, the houses, the palaces, the churches date--many of them--from medieval times, others from the Renaissance.
Modern Florentines, citizens of Florence, live with these echoes of the past casually. Yet inside their heads and ours lives an older rhythm. This rhythm comes from a set of ideas born five centuries ago in these same streets and houses and Renaissance palaces.
In one way, there was no such clearly defined time as "The Renaissance." The Middle Ages did not end one day and a new age suddenly begin. Yet if you compare Florence of the Middle Ages with Florence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, you can see that some things, at least, are quite different. Compare the dark, confined feeling of these medieval streets to the light spaciousness of a Renaissance palace. Compare a medieval picture of the Three Graces--flat, unreal--with a Renaissance painting by the artist Botticelli or a later painting of the same subject by Raphael.
A medieval portrait of Emperor Frederick II: though called "the wonder of the world," no individual emerges--a face hard to remember. A Renaissance portrait of the Emperor Charles V: a face hard to forget. A medieval castle: high walls to keep the world out. A Florentine villa: open gardens from which to take the world in. Compared to the Middle Ages, art has changed, buildings have changed, man's attitudes have altered. A new spirit--hard to date, but perhaps beginning in the early fourteenth century--animated life. What was this spirit?
It was formed, of course, by men--men like Francis Petrarch, born in 1304. The first man of the Renaissance, Petrarch was a rebel. He looked at the world of the late Middle Ages: a world filled with violence, but a world filled also with the insistent voice of the Church. Petrarch longed for something other. He turned his back on the world of the Middle Ages. Yet his rebellion was not merely negative.
PETRARCH: I, Francesco Petrarca, would gladly forget those among whom I'm forced to live. I employ all my power of mind to escape them and seek out the ancients. The very sight of my contemporaries offends me. Yet the remembrance, the splendid deeds, the bright names of men of old allure me and fill me with joy; so that many would be shocked to learn how much more delight I find among the dead than the living.
NARRATOR: Petrarch, in fourteenth-century Florence, turned to the authors of ancient Greece and Rome. But his approach to the ancients represented a break with the Middle Ages.
PETRARCH: Our schoolmen are so devoted to the very name of Aristotle that they call it sacrilege to pronounce any opinion different from his [music out]. I certainly believe that Aristotle was a great man who knew many things. But I also believe that there were some things, indeed many things, that he did not know.
NARRATOR: Astrology was taught in all the great Italian universities. Petrarch's response:
PETRARCH: Can celestial bodies deviate from their courses, break all laws, run in irregular orbits to give warnings to men? Ridiculous!
[Music in]
What am I? A scholar? Hardly. A lover of woodlands, a solitary, scribbling presumptuously under a young laurel tree, passionate in my work but dissatisfied with the results, an adherent of no sect but very eager for truth. I am part of that humble band that knows nothing, holds nothing as certain, doubts everything except those things that it is sacrilege to doubt. What is the use, I ask you, of knowing the nature of birds and fish and serpents, and neglecting the nature of man?
NARRATOR: The nature of man: Petrarch had struck the first note of the Renaissance. He insisted that the study of abstract concepts give way to the study of man. And from this study he and his followers derived the term "the humanities."
[Music out]
ALBERTI: I, Leon Battista Alberti of the great Alberti family, have concluded that virtue is born not in the quiet of private life but in the bustle of public affairs. Our Florentine republic cannot be maintained when citizens are interested only in their private comforts. Good citizens must take up public office and suffer the burdens their country lays upon them.
NARRATOR: Petrarch had been born in 1304, Alberti in 1404. To Petrarch, the virtuous man was the solitary scholar. For Alberti, he was something more. He has been called the prototype of the Renaissance man. He knew Latin and Greek, wrote plays, tamed wild horses for pleasure, played the organ, sculpted. He was the leading architect of his day, the designer of the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence and other buildings throughout Italy. It was Alberti, also, who formulated another aspect of the Renaissance spirit: active participation in civic life. The son of a banker, his ideas made sense to businessmen of the time; for fifteenth-century Florence was very much a merchants' and bankers' city.
ALBERTI: Some say that the affairs of the marketplace are petty, ugly, and underhanded. I believe they are wrong. If wealth is used to serve those who need it, it can acquire friendship and praise. If wealth is used for grand and noble things--with magnificence--it can bring fame and authority.
NARRATOR: The wealthy merchant families of Florence agreed with Alberti, especially the most powerful, the Medicis. Their wealth, used "with magnificence" for works of art and architecture, brought fame to themselves and immortality to their city.
ALBERTI: I used to bewail the loss of the great art works of antiquity. I thought that nature, the master of the arts, had become old and tired. But now that I have seen the genius of our artists today, I know that they are not a bit inferior to those of ancient Rome and Greece.
NARRATOR: Alberti sensed that a new spirit now pervaded life. He looked at his own age and called it a rebirth, a revival. It was later called the Renaissance.
[Music in]
LEONARDO: I have dissected more than ten human bodies, removing the very minutest particles of flesh by which the veins are surrounded. I spend my night hours in the company of corpses, yet I rejoice that through the death of others we may better understand our own organism.
NARRATOR: To Francis Petrarch, man's duty was the pursuit of virtue. To Alberti, man was "the mode and measure of all things." To Leonardo da Vinci, he was also flesh and blood and bone.
LEONARDO: The arm is composed of thirty pieces of bone, because there are three in the arm itself and twenty-seven in the hand. Show first the simple bones of the hand, then clothe them gradually, stage by stage, in the same way that nature clothes them. Only lastly show the hand in its final beauty.
Does the pupil of the eye change size? If you wish to make an experiment, hold a lighted candle a little distance away. You will then see that the nearer the light approaches, the more the pupil contracts. You must represent in your art every kind of form produced by nature.
You will not know how to do this if you do not see them. Go through the fields and look now at this thing and now at that, so that you may collect a store of diverse facts.
[Music out]
NARRATOR: To Leonardo, nature was no longer a backdrop for contemplation as it had been for Petrarch. He insisted that trees, flowers, animals--the whole physical world--be analyzed.
[Music in]
LEONARDO: Study the action of waves and note that their motion may be likened to the movement of a field of grain in the wind. What makes a bird fly? And can men do likewise? A bird is an instrument, working according to mathematical law. I believe men should be capable of reproducing its movement. If an instrument with a screw be well made, it will make a spiral in the air and rise high.
I have also designed a vehicle on wheels, propelled by springs, in which a man might move very rapidly. I have made plans for fortification of towns and cities surpassing those of all other masters. I have secret means of offense and defense when assailed by ambitious tyrants. In time of war I will make covered chariots, safe and unassailable. Behind these [music out], infantry will be able to follow unharmed. Also I have invented mortars with which to hurl projectiles like a storm.
Make your work, Oh painter, in keeping with your purpose and design [music in]. That is, when you make each figure, consider carefully who it is and what you wish it to be doing. Note that that figure is most worthy of praise which best expresses by its action the passion which animates it.
NARRATOR: For Leonardo da Vinci, man was the center of his fascinating world. Thus the medieval ideal of the contemplative soul gave way to the Renaissance ideal of the universal man. The spirit of the Renaissance was to spread to the other Italian cities and eventually to much of northern Europe. The results of this spirit were tangible.
Drama became more worldly, concerned now with man rather than God. Its climax came in sixteenth-century England with William Shakespeare.
HAMLET: What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason [music out]! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
[Music in]
NARRATOR: Education changed. Students now not only studied the classical authors, they learned to fence, to box, as well as to write, draw, and build. Columbus and other explorers discovered new worlds, broadening men's horizons, convincing them of the uniqueness of their own age. But undoubtedly the triumph of the Renaissance spirit was in art, for men expressed directly in art the new way they felt about the world. Note the similarity between Hamlet's view of man and that of the philosopher Pico.
PICO: There is nothing more wonderful than man! He can have whatever he chooses, be whatever he will. When God fashioned the world, he assigned man a place in the middle of it and said to him, "The nature of all other creatures is limited; but you, Adam, I have set at the center of the world and confined by no limits. You shall be the molder and maker of yourself in accordance with your own free will."
NARRATOR: In the art of the Renaissance, figures were no longer isolated, as in the Middle Ages. Human beings now related to each other. They moved in vectors of space. Systematic perspective entered art.
LEONARDO: Perspective as it concerns painting is divided into three chief parts, of which the first treats of the diminution in the size of bodies at different distances. The second is that which treats of the diminution in the color of these bodies. The third of the gradual loss . . .
NARRATOR: Religious art, beginning with Giotto, was progressively humanized--even the Holy Family. Even Christ himself was shown as a human being who lived in the world and looked upon men as they really were. The culture of Greece and Rome, revered by the Renaissance, became the subject of art; figures from mythology appeared--the "Birth of Venus" by Botticelli.
SAVONAROLA: I tell you we are living in evil days! I go throughout Christendom, and in the mansions of the great lords there is no concern save for poetry and art.
NARRATOR: In the person of a monk named Savonarola came yet another side of the Renaissance.
SAVONAROLA: Go see them all, with their books of "the humanities," telling one another they can guide men's souls by means of Virgil, Horace, and Cicero. I tell you an old woman knows more about faith than Plato! Preachers preach just to satisfy the princes; and all--all are chained by love of earthly things. It is pomp and vanity, I tell you. Oh Lord, hasten the punishment and the scourge. Arise and deliver us from the hands of sinful princes and priests. Cleanse us of our vanities!
NARRATOR: Thus Savonarola reviled both churchmen and the Medici princes for their worldliness and warned of the destruction of Florence. The citizens of Florence exiled the Medicis. Savonarola became ruler of the city. He had the passion of a revivalist in a worldly age. Fine clothing, silks, old manuscripts, works of art--all was vanity, pomp and vanity.
But in the end the worldly spirit was too strong. Florence turned on Savonarola. He was imprisoned in the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio and cruelly tortured. Weeks later he and two of his followers were led to the scaffolding and burned. In the decades after Savonarola's death French armies invaded Italy. The destruction he had warned of came to pass. Historically, the Florentine Renaissance ended. But does the spirit of an age ever die? Francis Petrarch:
PETRARCH: The proper study of man is man.
NARRATOR: Leonardo da Vinci:
LEONARDO: Man should turn his attention to the physical world, of which he is the center.
NARRATOR: Alberti:
ALBERTI: Man must participate actively in civic life.
[Music out]
NARRATOR: The traffic in these streets is modern. The streets themselves, the houses, the palaces, the churches date--many of them--from medieval times, others from the Renaissance.
Modern Florentines, citizens of Florence, live with these echoes of the past casually. Yet inside their heads and ours lives an older rhythm. This rhythm comes from a set of ideas born five centuries ago in these same streets and houses and Renaissance palaces.
In one way, there was no such clearly defined time as "The Renaissance." The Middle Ages did not end one day and a new age suddenly begin. Yet if you compare Florence of the Middle Ages with Florence of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, you can see that some things, at least, are quite different. Compare the dark, confined feeling of these medieval streets to the light spaciousness of a Renaissance palace. Compare a medieval picture of the Three Graces--flat, unreal--with a Renaissance painting by the artist Botticelli or a later painting of the same subject by Raphael.
A medieval portrait of Emperor Frederick II: though called "the wonder of the world," no individual emerges--a face hard to remember. A Renaissance portrait of the Emperor Charles V: a face hard to forget. A medieval castle: high walls to keep the world out. A Florentine villa: open gardens from which to take the world in. Compared to the Middle Ages, art has changed, buildings have changed, man's attitudes have altered. A new spirit--hard to date, but perhaps beginning in the early fourteenth century--animated life. What was this spirit?
It was formed, of course, by men--men like Francis Petrarch, born in 1304. The first man of the Renaissance, Petrarch was a rebel. He looked at the world of the late Middle Ages: a world filled with violence, but a world filled also with the insistent voice of the Church. Petrarch longed for something other. He turned his back on the world of the Middle Ages. Yet his rebellion was not merely negative.
PETRARCH: I, Francesco Petrarca, would gladly forget those among whom I'm forced to live. I employ all my power of mind to escape them and seek out the ancients. The very sight of my contemporaries offends me. Yet the remembrance, the splendid deeds, the bright names of men of old allure me and fill me with joy; so that many would be shocked to learn how much more delight I find among the dead than the living.
NARRATOR: Petrarch, in fourteenth-century Florence, turned to the authors of ancient Greece and Rome. But his approach to the ancients represented a break with the Middle Ages.
PETRARCH: Our schoolmen are so devoted to the very name of Aristotle that they call it sacrilege to pronounce any opinion different from his [music out]. I certainly believe that Aristotle was a great man who knew many things. But I also believe that there were some things, indeed many things, that he did not know.
NARRATOR: Astrology was taught in all the great Italian universities. Petrarch's response:
PETRARCH: Can celestial bodies deviate from their courses, break all laws, run in irregular orbits to give warnings to men? Ridiculous!
[Music in]
What am I? A scholar? Hardly. A lover of woodlands, a solitary, scribbling presumptuously under a young laurel tree, passionate in my work but dissatisfied with the results, an adherent of no sect but very eager for truth. I am part of that humble band that knows nothing, holds nothing as certain, doubts everything except those things that it is sacrilege to doubt. What is the use, I ask you, of knowing the nature of birds and fish and serpents, and neglecting the nature of man?
NARRATOR: The nature of man: Petrarch had struck the first note of the Renaissance. He insisted that the study of abstract concepts give way to the study of man. And from this study he and his followers derived the term "the humanities."
[Music out]
ALBERTI: I, Leon Battista Alberti of the great Alberti family, have concluded that virtue is born not in the quiet of private life but in the bustle of public affairs. Our Florentine republic cannot be maintained when citizens are interested only in their private comforts. Good citizens must take up public office and suffer the burdens their country lays upon them.
NARRATOR: Petrarch had been born in 1304, Alberti in 1404. To Petrarch, the virtuous man was the solitary scholar. For Alberti, he was something more. He has been called the prototype of the Renaissance man. He knew Latin and Greek, wrote plays, tamed wild horses for pleasure, played the organ, sculpted. He was the leading architect of his day, the designer of the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence and other buildings throughout Italy. It was Alberti, also, who formulated another aspect of the Renaissance spirit: active participation in civic life. The son of a banker, his ideas made sense to businessmen of the time; for fifteenth-century Florence was very much a merchants' and bankers' city.
ALBERTI: Some say that the affairs of the marketplace are petty, ugly, and underhanded. I believe they are wrong. If wealth is used to serve those who need it, it can acquire friendship and praise. If wealth is used for grand and noble things--with magnificence--it can bring fame and authority.
NARRATOR: The wealthy merchant families of Florence agreed with Alberti, especially the most powerful, the Medicis. Their wealth, used "with magnificence" for works of art and architecture, brought fame to themselves and immortality to their city.
ALBERTI: I used to bewail the loss of the great art works of antiquity. I thought that nature, the master of the arts, had become old and tired. But now that I have seen the genius of our artists today, I know that they are not a bit inferior to those of ancient Rome and Greece.
NARRATOR: Alberti sensed that a new spirit now pervaded life. He looked at his own age and called it a rebirth, a revival. It was later called the Renaissance.
[Music in]
LEONARDO: I have dissected more than ten human bodies, removing the very minutest particles of flesh by which the veins are surrounded. I spend my night hours in the company of corpses, yet I rejoice that through the death of others we may better understand our own organism.
NARRATOR: To Francis Petrarch, man's duty was the pursuit of virtue. To Alberti, man was "the mode and measure of all things." To Leonardo da Vinci, he was also flesh and blood and bone.
LEONARDO: The arm is composed of thirty pieces of bone, because there are three in the arm itself and twenty-seven in the hand. Show first the simple bones of the hand, then clothe them gradually, stage by stage, in the same way that nature clothes them. Only lastly show the hand in its final beauty.
Does the pupil of the eye change size? If you wish to make an experiment, hold a lighted candle a little distance away. You will then see that the nearer the light approaches, the more the pupil contracts. You must represent in your art every kind of form produced by nature.
You will not know how to do this if you do not see them. Go through the fields and look now at this thing and now at that, so that you may collect a store of diverse facts.
[Music out]
NARRATOR: To Leonardo, nature was no longer a backdrop for contemplation as it had been for Petrarch. He insisted that trees, flowers, animals--the whole physical world--be analyzed.
[Music in]
LEONARDO: Study the action of waves and note that their motion may be likened to the movement of a field of grain in the wind. What makes a bird fly? And can men do likewise? A bird is an instrument, working according to mathematical law. I believe men should be capable of reproducing its movement. If an instrument with a screw be well made, it will make a spiral in the air and rise high.
I have also designed a vehicle on wheels, propelled by springs, in which a man might move very rapidly. I have made plans for fortification of towns and cities surpassing those of all other masters. I have secret means of offense and defense when assailed by ambitious tyrants. In time of war I will make covered chariots, safe and unassailable. Behind these [music out], infantry will be able to follow unharmed. Also I have invented mortars with which to hurl projectiles like a storm.
Make your work, Oh painter, in keeping with your purpose and design [music in]. That is, when you make each figure, consider carefully who it is and what you wish it to be doing. Note that that figure is most worthy of praise which best expresses by its action the passion which animates it.
NARRATOR: For Leonardo da Vinci, man was the center of his fascinating world. Thus the medieval ideal of the contemplative soul gave way to the Renaissance ideal of the universal man. The spirit of the Renaissance was to spread to the other Italian cities and eventually to much of northern Europe. The results of this spirit were tangible.
Drama became more worldly, concerned now with man rather than God. Its climax came in sixteenth-century England with William Shakespeare.
HAMLET: What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason [music out]! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
[Music in]
NARRATOR: Education changed. Students now not only studied the classical authors, they learned to fence, to box, as well as to write, draw, and build. Columbus and other explorers discovered new worlds, broadening men's horizons, convincing them of the uniqueness of their own age. But undoubtedly the triumph of the Renaissance spirit was in art, for men expressed directly in art the new way they felt about the world. Note the similarity between Hamlet's view of man and that of the philosopher Pico.
PICO: There is nothing more wonderful than man! He can have whatever he chooses, be whatever he will. When God fashioned the world, he assigned man a place in the middle of it and said to him, "The nature of all other creatures is limited; but you, Adam, I have set at the center of the world and confined by no limits. You shall be the molder and maker of yourself in accordance with your own free will."
NARRATOR: In the art of the Renaissance, figures were no longer isolated, as in the Middle Ages. Human beings now related to each other. They moved in vectors of space. Systematic perspective entered art.
LEONARDO: Perspective as it concerns painting is divided into three chief parts, of which the first treats of the diminution in the size of bodies at different distances. The second is that which treats of the diminution in the color of these bodies. The third of the gradual loss . . .
NARRATOR: Religious art, beginning with Giotto, was progressively humanized--even the Holy Family. Even Christ himself was shown as a human being who lived in the world and looked upon men as they really were. The culture of Greece and Rome, revered by the Renaissance, became the subject of art; figures from mythology appeared--the "Birth of Venus" by Botticelli.
SAVONAROLA: I tell you we are living in evil days! I go throughout Christendom, and in the mansions of the great lords there is no concern save for poetry and art.
NARRATOR: In the person of a monk named Savonarola came yet another side of the Renaissance.
SAVONAROLA: Go see them all, with their books of "the humanities," telling one another they can guide men's souls by means of Virgil, Horace, and Cicero. I tell you an old woman knows more about faith than Plato! Preachers preach just to satisfy the princes; and all--all are chained by love of earthly things. It is pomp and vanity, I tell you. Oh Lord, hasten the punishment and the scourge. Arise and deliver us from the hands of sinful princes and priests. Cleanse us of our vanities!
NARRATOR: Thus Savonarola reviled both churchmen and the Medici princes for their worldliness and warned of the destruction of Florence. The citizens of Florence exiled the Medicis. Savonarola became ruler of the city. He had the passion of a revivalist in a worldly age. Fine clothing, silks, old manuscripts, works of art--all was vanity, pomp and vanity.
But in the end the worldly spirit was too strong. Florence turned on Savonarola. He was imprisoned in the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio and cruelly tortured. Weeks later he and two of his followers were led to the scaffolding and burned. In the decades after Savonarola's death French armies invaded Italy. The destruction he had warned of came to pass. Historically, the Florentine Renaissance ended. But does the spirit of an age ever die? Francis Petrarch:
PETRARCH: The proper study of man is man.
NARRATOR: Leonardo da Vinci:
LEONARDO: Man should turn his attention to the physical world, of which he is the center.
NARRATOR: Alberti:
ALBERTI: Man must participate actively in civic life.
[Music out]