The Italian Renaissance
Created | Updated Jun 3, 2002
The Renaissance
The term renaissance means rebirth and refers to a period in history when civilization was “reborn”.
The Italian renaissance was caused by the fact that feudalism, which was not a conducive governing system for “renaissance spirit”, had never fully developed in northern Italy, and that Italy’s people were wealthy because of Italy’s prime trade location and could afford to support artists.
Also it was once the center of the Roman empire and many old building and carvings were scattered around the landscape for people to examine and be inspired by. The black death made “commoners” much more valuable, as a result from the population drop.
All this and a dozen other factors like climate, and geography, contributed to make Italy a good place for the renaissance.
Another thing was the Italian city states.
A city-state is a small independently governed state named after it’s governing city which was surrounded by a hinterland, which is a bit of land surrounding it(the city of a city-state) and is important to the city for food, goods, services military, trade, taxes, and that kind of thing.
The Italian city-states avoided capture by employing mercenary soldiers to supplement their own military.
There is a point in fighting for a small piece of easily takeable land, but no point in fighting for a small piece of difficulty taken land, so the city state's small size was to their advantage.
The wealth of city-states meant that people could afford to patronize the arts.
Family
Your family was very important in Italian society, and they were quite large, including aunts and uncles, cousins, and grand parents.
Trades and occupations were commonly inherited and without a families monetary and political backing (which were about the same thing in renaissance Italy) it was almost impossible to get anywhere in life.
A particularly powerful family was the Medicis, who made a fortune as bankers and cloth merchants, and slowly bought political power, eventually becoming rulers.
The Medicis advanced the arts by patronizing promising artists.
Of course, it wasn’t that easy to rise in society, due to the sumptuary laws, which were laws controlling how people spent their money, often aimed at the middle class in order to keep them from growing enormously.
The Humanists
During the renaissance a new way of thinking was developed by a group of people called the humanists. They believed that the goals and dreams of human beings were more important than a bunch of spiritual babble. The humanists were interested, not in people of a specific social class, but in anyone who wanted knowledge and new ideas.
Philosophically that is, in reality they were interested in the upper and middle class as patrons.
According to the humanists the point of education was to become a well rounded individual. This philosophy is still used in today’s education system. Today the studies that come under the humane categories are retorics, grammar, history, and poetry, which are all the schools taught by the Romans*.
The humanists were founded by a man named Petrarch, an immensely froody guy, who even wrote a letter to everyone who would live after him:
I have always possessed extreme contempt for wealth; not that riches are not desirable in themselves, but because I hate the anxiety and care which are associated with them.
I have, on the contrary, led a happier existence with plain living and ordinary fare.
The pleasure of dining with ones friends is so great that nothing has every given me more delight than their unexpected arrival.
I possess a well balanced rather than a keen intellect. Among the many subjects that interest me, I dwell especially upon antiquity, for my own age has always repelled me, so that if it had not been for the love of those dear to me, I should have preferred to have been born into any other time than my own.
I’m not sure if that’s the whole thing though.
Not everyone was as enlightened as the humanists.
Here’s an example of a guy named Machiavelli.
Machiavelli advised rulers to be feared, lie, not trust anybody, reach their goal any way they could, and use a mixture of ruthlessness, cleverness, and diplomacy.
Obviously he was suffering from some past psychological trama that caused him to take the opinion that
“men are wretched creatures”.
Art
Perspective and proportion allowed renaissance artists to paint more 3D looking and realistic pictures.
They were developed respectively by the artists Filippo Brunelleshi and Giotto di Bondone.
The art of the renaissance was different from that of the middle ages because, with tons of wealthy patrons to work for anything that is sellable is makeable, like a painting of a hare some guy did. In medieval times people would be like “you want us to buy a picture of a rabbit? Bwa, ha, ha!
With tons of artists to patronize, the wealthiest patrons will try to choose the best one, creating a drive for the artists to improve themselves by developing new skills, tecnichs, materials, and principals, such as perspective and proportion, which would later get fooled around with by people like M. C. Esher.
The Printing Press, Key to The Renaissance
Johann Guttenberg invented a special metal alloy, good for movable type printing presses, and used it in making a bunch of copies of the bible. Little did he know that the Chinese had invented movable type a lot earlier, and were observed by a sort of ambassador from Europe, unfortunately the idiot dismissed it as unpratical for the roman alphabet in his letters.
The printing press made books cheaper to make and buy and far more copies could be made so ideas, if they were catchy could spread quite fast.
The renaissance couldn’t have developed without the printing press.
The ideas necessary to bring down the “supreme, source of all answers so you don’t have to go looking for them, in fact if you do we’ll kill you” church system of the time could not of happened without the press.
Before that it was easy for “the establishment” to take out any ideas they didn’t like. Now there were books everywhere, and lots of new ideas, some good, some bad.
Even if an offending author was killed, there were already a thousand copies of his book, and even more people who had read it, some of which would write their own books, either conflicting with or building on the original.
All this got people more focused on their goals and wishes, both as individuals and the human race.
Religion
Erasmus was a man who criticized the church that they emphasized pomp and ceremony too much and said that most of their clergy were ignorant. He thought the church should emphasize the teaching of Jesus.
Sarvonarola was a man who said that the country was divided amazingly unequally, and preached against useless luxury.
He also said that the church’s practice of taking money to say that all your sins were revoked was not right.
The church hung, burnt, and threw him in a river.
Eeesh.
Humanist vs. Mideval Scollars
I agree more with the ideas of the renaissance humanists as opposed to the medieval scholars because:
a)the scholars, despite all their reading and writing, were quite ignorant and narrow minded, not to mention unquestioning of the world.
b)what little “knowledge” they did have was unbending and religious, and therefore useless, if not down right detrimental, to the progress of the world.
Now, you can argue that religion can be good if it is used right, but sooner or later some guy is going to end up fighting over it, and besides, anything that claims to have all the answers in a book or two is clearly not accurate at all**.
Please leave all your arguments in the conversation called “theological debate” in My Space, it would help to keep track of them.
*Can you believe the Romans used to have whole buildings for the study of retoric logic? It’s a wonder their empire survived as long as it did!
**Or perhaps I should say that anything that claims that any answers at all even exist is totally wacked.
The term renaissance means rebirth and refers to a period in history when civilization was “reborn”.
The Italian renaissance was caused by the fact that feudalism, which was not a conducive governing system for “renaissance spirit”, had never fully developed in northern Italy, and that Italy’s people were wealthy because of Italy’s prime trade location and could afford to support artists.
Also it was once the center of the Roman empire and many old building and carvings were scattered around the landscape for people to examine and be inspired by. The black death made “commoners” much more valuable, as a result from the population drop.
All this and a dozen other factors like climate, and geography, contributed to make Italy a good place for the renaissance.
Another thing was the Italian city states.
A city-state is a small independently governed state named after it’s governing city which was surrounded by a hinterland, which is a bit of land surrounding it(the city of a city-state) and is important to the city for food, goods, services military, trade, taxes, and that kind of thing.
The Italian city-states avoided capture by employing mercenary soldiers to supplement their own military.
There is a point in fighting for a small piece of easily takeable land, but no point in fighting for a small piece of difficulty taken land, so the city state's small size was to their advantage.
The wealth of city-states meant that people could afford to patronize the arts.
Family
Your family was very important in Italian society, and they were quite large, including aunts and uncles, cousins, and grand parents.
Trades and occupations were commonly inherited and without a families monetary and political backing (which were about the same thing in renaissance Italy) it was almost impossible to get anywhere in life.
A particularly powerful family was the Medicis, who made a fortune as bankers and cloth merchants, and slowly bought political power, eventually becoming rulers.
The Medicis advanced the arts by patronizing promising artists.
Of course, it wasn’t that easy to rise in society, due to the sumptuary laws, which were laws controlling how people spent their money, often aimed at the middle class in order to keep them from growing enormously.
The Humanists
During the renaissance a new way of thinking was developed by a group of people called the humanists. They believed that the goals and dreams of human beings were more important than a bunch of spiritual babble. The humanists were interested, not in people of a specific social class, but in anyone who wanted knowledge and new ideas.
Philosophically that is, in reality they were interested in the upper and middle class as patrons.
According to the humanists the point of education was to become a well rounded individual. This philosophy is still used in today’s education system. Today the studies that come under the humane categories are retorics, grammar, history, and poetry, which are all the schools taught by the Romans*.
The humanists were founded by a man named Petrarch, an immensely froody guy, who even wrote a letter to everyone who would live after him:
I have always possessed extreme contempt for wealth; not that riches are not desirable in themselves, but because I hate the anxiety and care which are associated with them.
I have, on the contrary, led a happier existence with plain living and ordinary fare.
The pleasure of dining with ones friends is so great that nothing has every given me more delight than their unexpected arrival.
I possess a well balanced rather than a keen intellect. Among the many subjects that interest me, I dwell especially upon antiquity, for my own age has always repelled me, so that if it had not been for the love of those dear to me, I should have preferred to have been born into any other time than my own.
I’m not sure if that’s the whole thing though.
Not everyone was as enlightened as the humanists.
Here’s an example of a guy named Machiavelli.
Machiavelli advised rulers to be feared, lie, not trust anybody, reach their goal any way they could, and use a mixture of ruthlessness, cleverness, and diplomacy.
Obviously he was suffering from some past psychological trama that caused him to take the opinion that
“men are wretched creatures”.
Art
Perspective and proportion allowed renaissance artists to paint more 3D looking and realistic pictures.
They were developed respectively by the artists Filippo Brunelleshi and Giotto di Bondone.
The art of the renaissance was different from that of the middle ages because, with tons of wealthy patrons to work for anything that is sellable is makeable, like a painting of a hare some guy did. In medieval times people would be like “you want us to buy a picture of a rabbit? Bwa, ha, ha!
With tons of artists to patronize, the wealthiest patrons will try to choose the best one, creating a drive for the artists to improve themselves by developing new skills, tecnichs, materials, and principals, such as perspective and proportion, which would later get fooled around with by people like M. C. Esher.
The Printing Press, Key to The Renaissance
Johann Guttenberg invented a special metal alloy, good for movable type printing presses, and used it in making a bunch of copies of the bible. Little did he know that the Chinese had invented movable type a lot earlier, and were observed by a sort of ambassador from Europe, unfortunately the idiot dismissed it as unpratical for the roman alphabet in his letters.
The printing press made books cheaper to make and buy and far more copies could be made so ideas, if they were catchy could spread quite fast.
The renaissance couldn’t have developed without the printing press.
The ideas necessary to bring down the “supreme, source of all answers so you don’t have to go looking for them, in fact if you do we’ll kill you” church system of the time could not of happened without the press.
Before that it was easy for “the establishment” to take out any ideas they didn’t like. Now there were books everywhere, and lots of new ideas, some good, some bad.
Even if an offending author was killed, there were already a thousand copies of his book, and even more people who had read it, some of which would write their own books, either conflicting with or building on the original.
All this got people more focused on their goals and wishes, both as individuals and the human race.
Religion
Erasmus was a man who criticized the church that they emphasized pomp and ceremony too much and said that most of their clergy were ignorant. He thought the church should emphasize the teaching of Jesus.
Sarvonarola was a man who said that the country was divided amazingly unequally, and preached against useless luxury.
He also said that the church’s practice of taking money to say that all your sins were revoked was not right.
The church hung, burnt, and threw him in a river.
Eeesh.
Humanist vs. Mideval Scollars
I agree more with the ideas of the renaissance humanists as opposed to the medieval scholars because:
a)the scholars, despite all their reading and writing, were quite ignorant and narrow minded, not to mention unquestioning of the world.
b)what little “knowledge” they did have was unbending and religious, and therefore useless, if not down right detrimental, to the progress of the world.
Now, you can argue that religion can be good if it is used right, but sooner or later some guy is going to end up fighting over it, and besides, anything that claims to have all the answers in a book or two is clearly not accurate at all**.
Please leave all your arguments in the conversation called “theological debate” in My Space, it would help to keep track of them.
*Can you believe the Romans used to have whole buildings for the study of retoric logic? It’s a wonder their empire survived as long as it did!
**Or perhaps I should say that anything that claims that any answers at all even exist is totally wacked.
