The Spirit of the Renaissance

The inspiration that fueled the Renaissance came from a rediscovery of the classical world of ancient Rome and Greece.  After the crusades, Greek scholars and monks began visiting Italy to maintain ties that had been developed after crusading Europeans had renewed contact with the eastern Mediterranean world.  For some time before the fourteenth century Greek scholars had been migrating to Italy, often to escape the expansion of the Muslim world into the Hellenic world.  The result of this cultural exchange was a reintroduction of classical Christian and pre-Christian thought to Italy.

The impact of this “new” knowledge on European thought was tremendous.  In the fifteenth century, Italian scholars eagerly studied Greek to be able to access information that for centuries had been “lost” from the Western perspective.  Perhaps the most important document translated in the early Renaissance was a first-century treatise on education written by a Roman scholar named Quintilian.  Quintilian argued that the goal of education was not simply learning or specialization, but the creation of a well-rounded, moral citizen who would use education to make society a just and better place.  His view of a moral education emphasized the potential of an individual.  This view became the dominant educational philosophy of the Renaissance.

This spirit of renewal and the presence of the knowledge and tenets of the ancients, combined to produce a new type of scholar called a humanist.  Humanists studied the humanities--subjects concerned with humankind and culture, as opposed to science--as Quintilian had outlined them: grammar (meaning Latin and often Greek), history, rhetoric, poetry, and moral philosophy.  Traditional medieval scholarship consisted of reading commentaries on ancient writers, oftentimes without ever reading any of the ancient author’s works or studying the context in which they were written.  Instead, humanists wanted to study the historical works themselves to discover the contextual meaning of the author.  Humanists believed this course of study would make them well-rounded individuals, better able to participate in civic government and the new urban society.
The first great humanist was Petrarch, who was born in Florence in 1304.  Petrarch’s great love was the discovery of ancient texts, works forgotten during the Middle Ages.  He especially prized the works of the Roman statesman, Cicero-who wrote about Roman history--and the early Christian writer St. Augustine.  Petrarch wrote lengthy letters to the ancient thinkers in which he copied their style and subject matter while presenting his own modern views about their ancient ideas.  Petrarch’s works, as well as the texts he discovered and translated, became masterpieces of the new spirit of the renaissance.

Petrarch’s work led many other scholars to study the past, which led to an outburst of cultural achievement that lasted to the seventeenth century.  Architects and artists traveled to the sites of ancient Roman and Greek ruins to study their style and engineering.  In the early 1400s, the Florentine sculptor Donatello began creating statues that copied the Roman ideal of the human body.  Likewise, the Florentine architect Brunelleschi designed buildings, like Florence’s cathedral, after studying ruins in Rome.  As artists, like scholars, looked to ancient Rome and Greece for themes and ideas, and used ancient art as models for paintings and sculptures of many subjects-stories of Greek mythology, scenes from the Bible, and Church history--innovations developed, within the framework of Christianity, that stepped away from medieval styles and revolutionized painting and sculpture.  Artists, scholars, and architects were attracted to the growing workshops and expanding city-states.  With a renewed confidence and creativity, they challenged traditional thought and style, leading to innovations--such as the discovery of how to achieve perspective and the technique of oil painting--that spread across Europe in the following centuries.

In following the example of classical Greece and Rome, the people of the Renaissance gained an intense appreciation of the individual, believing that each person could achieve great things.  Like the ancients, Renaissance Italians valued public service and believed that a liberal arts education liberated human beings to lead a rewarding life.  They began to view Greece and Rome as models for the kinds of activities that merchants and citizens based in urban environments were engaged in, such as political decision making.  As a result, humanists, artists, and members of the upper class developed their talents to the fullest as they strove to reach the Renaissance ideal of a well-rounded person: educated, witty, artistically creative, and skilled in many fields.  Becoming wealthy, famous, or learned gained new appeal.  The underpinnings of the Renaissance--what some Florentines dubbed “The age of Gold”-- was the modern believe in the importance of individual achievement and ability and an emphasis on human beings in the world in which they lived, rather than the medieval focus on the afterlife.