The Renaissance is unusual, in that unlike many other periods (e. g., the Baroque), its name can be traced back to one particular individual and his cultural agenda. In the centuries beforehand, annalists and chroniclers wrote universal history in which the flow of time was divided either according to a principle articulated by Jerome, whose commentary on Daniel’s prophecy about the statue (Daniel 2:31 ff. and 7:1 ff.) led to a succession of four world monarchies, or to one articulated by Augustine, which relied on six ages ( City of God 22). The decisive intervention into the system was the birth of Christ, which replaced the darkness of condemnation with the light of salvation. As Theodor Mommsen showed over 60 years ago, this approach was first challenged in a decisive way by Petrarch (1304-74). When he began planning his De viris illustribus (On illustrious men) in 1337/8, he intended to ‘‘bring together the illustrious men of all countries and of all times’’ (Familiares 8.3), just as the annalists and chroniclers before him had done. Five years later, however, he had decided to restrict his attention to the centuries from the Roman Republic to the first hundred years of the Empire. During the years in which his plans changed, Petrarch had gone to Rome to be crowned poet laureate in a ceremony that was believed to revive one from antiquity, and he had taken the time to think more about what the ruins around him might mean. From this point on, he conceived of the time from the end of the Roman Empire to his own day as an era of darkness: that is, the metaphor had been transferred from a fundamentally religious context, in which light represents revealed truth, to a fundamentally secular one, in which light represents the truth that people create through culture. The light shone brightly in antiquity but was extinguished afterward; now, ‘‘when the darkness has been dispersed,’’ those who return to the ancients ‘‘can come again in the former pure radiance’’ (Africa 9.456-7). Or, to use the other metaphor that became popular with Petrarch and his descendants, antiquity was in the process of being born again, in a renaissance (Mommsen 1942: 226-42; Ullman 1973).
This process was generally seen in the generations that followed Petrarch to be relatively uncomplicated. In a famous letter to his friend Francesco Vettori (dated December 10, 1513), Niccolct Macchiavelli (1469-1527) describes how, after a difficult day spent amidst the toils and tribulations of daily life, he would return home, retreat into his study, and ‘‘step inside the venerable courts of the ancients... where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives of their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me.... I absorb myselfinto them completely’’ (Atkinson and Sices 1996: 262-5). Macchiavelli makes two assumptions that are important here. First, the texts of the classical authors offered unimpeded access to their values and their culture: the reader can ‘‘become completely part of them.’’ And second, the classics were to be encountered in private, away from the distractions of daily life that keep the reader from a clear vision of the best that human beings once were, and could be again. As with Petrarch, the encounter was moved from the monastic cell to the scholar’s study, from a primarily religious to a primarily secular space.
In the following generations this scheme was refined. But it was Petrarch who presented himself as ‘‘situated as if at the boundary of two peoples, looking at one and the same time both forward and back’’ (Rerum memorandarum [Memorable matters] 1.2). Antiquity had been reborn.
World History
