If it has proved worth the effort to interrogate the idea of rebirth as the defining metaphor of the Renaissance and to ask what interests were being occluded in the use of the term, it should be instructive as well to ask briefly what we are doing when we use Petrarch’s term today. ‘‘Renaissance’’ does reflect the worldview of the people it purports to describe, but not all of them, equally. The idea that culture demands the revival of antiquity began among the rich and powerful, along with the scholars and educators whose livelihood depended on them, and the idea stayed centered there. It certainly drifted down to the masses, in a diluted form, now and again: when Philip II traveled through the Low Countries in an effort to secure the title of Holy Roman Emperor, the classicizing triumphal monuments that were erected along the way were designed to be viewed by everyone (Tanner 1993: 133-9). And when Francesco de’ Medici and Joanna of Austria married in 1565, the program ended in a procession of chariots on which the pagan gods who were supposed to be attending the wedding could be seen. Unfortunately the common people were thoroughly confused (Bull 2005: 44), and therein lies the point: even when classical culture drifted down to the masses, it generally failed to form a meaningful part of their lives. So when we use the term ‘‘Renaissance’’ today, we are approaching the period with a bias toward the rich and powerful people whose self-understanding rests disproportionately in the metaphor that was chosen by the scholars whose interests were allied with theirs.
There is another possibility. Instead of trying to write a linear cultural history that emphasizes the continuities with the past and fosters the interests of the rich and powerful, we could concentrate on the fissures and gaps that have been raised in the preceding discussion. At its best and most creative, the reborn culture was in dialectical debate with the past, probing and questioning rather than simply reproducing the cultural achievements of antiquity. A strategy like this links The Praise of Folly with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as well as with Lucian’s satires. Indeed, as we have seen, the remnants of the past often remained fragmentary, which seems (at least sometimes) not to have bothered their later viewers, a point in turn that links Michelangelo with Picasso. In other words, the culture that Petrarch initiated has links with modernity as well, so that ‘‘early modern’’ has emerged in recent years as a term to challenge ‘‘Renaissance’’ and the values it projects.
In an essay in a book entitled Companion to the Classical Tradition, I am not going to propose that we abandon the latter term in favor of the former one. But I do think that when we use the term ‘‘Renaissance,’’ we should do so with an awareness of the issues that are raised when we refer to the same period as ‘‘early modern.’’ As we do this, we should end up with a richer, deeper understanding of the impact of classical antiquity on Petrarch and the people who followed him, until a new metaphor, baroque, was required to signal a new aesthetic sensibility for a new period.
FURTHER READING
Surprisingly there is not a single survey of the classical tradition in the Renaissance that offers full geographical, chronological, and disciplinary coverage; older, more factually based treatments of the Renaissance as part of a larger survey may be found in Highet (1949) and Bolgar (1954), and Grafton (1992) offers an essay similar to this one that covers some of the same ground in a different way. On education, see Grafton and Jardine (1986) and Waquet (2001), with Grendler (1989) and Kallendorf (2002) providing good supplementary material for Italy. The intellectual underpinnings of the study of the classics in the Renaissance can be tracked in Kraye (1996), with the standard history of classical scholarship remaining Pfeiffer (1976). Wilkins (1961) offers a good orientation to Petrarch, and Jardine (1993) to Erasmus. Much has been written about how the texts of Greek and Roman authors were treated by scholars in the Renaissance; D’Amico (1988) and Grafton (1991) offer a good introduction. Reynolds (1983) and Reynolds and Wilson (1991) provide concise information on the transmission of classical authors to the Renaissance, Wilson (1992) offers a good introduction to Greek studies in western Europe, and Kristeller et al. (1960-) offers invaluable catalogues of the commentaries to classical authors written by Renaissance scholars and teachers. Exemplary studies of the impact of individual classical authors in the Renaissance may be found in Gaisser (1993), Hankins (1990), and Kallendorf (1989, 1999b), although the works of the two latter authors are restricted to Italy. For the archaeological evidence, the older study of Weiss (1973) has been updated by Schnapp (1996) and Barkan (1999). Bull (2005) offers an excellent, thought-provoking analysis of the role of classical mythology in Renaissance art. The role of the classics in Renaissance religious thought can be traced through Trinkaus (1970). Grafton (1992) and Lupher (2003) offer useful orientations to the way in which the classics shaped the understanding of the ‘‘new’’ world in the ‘‘old.’’
A Companion to the Classical Tradition Edited by Craig W. Kallendorf Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
World History
