If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and reflections on reality and knowledge have menu pages above.
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Masaccio, Trinity, 1426-1428, fresco, Santa Maria Novella, Florence
It makes sense - in the official narrative, the Renaissance is the end of the Dark Age of Superstition and the start of the Be-Lightened Era of
The Band isn't really comfortable with that nomenclature - the problem with period distinctions is that they overstate similarities and differences. But we do need to make generalizations to organize the mass of history. Don't take them for more than they are - too many people want to categorize a historic context as "antique" or "medieval" and then think they know all about it. That's backwards. The category is a general impression - filtered by historians and their interests - based on time and place. It's a starting point for historians, not a conclusion.
The Gothic posts showed how not monolithic the later Middle Ages are. And that's without even getting into the death imagery that fascinated medieval artists.
Master Francois, The Office of the Dead: The Three Quick and the Three Dead from the Wharncliffe Hours, f. 78r, 1475–80, gold paint, gold leaf and brown and red inks on parchment, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
There's a limit to what we can cover in posts. Death imagery is part of the emotion-driven early Gothic religious art we looked at and takes a bunch of different forms. The premise appears to be the same as the Romanesque Last Judgments - to remind people of their mortality and it's consequences. For the Gothic - and other art posts - see the arts of the West link at the top of the page.
It is true that the Band is following the master narrative in a way. It's inevitable in our tag line.
Dismantling postmodernism in all its metastases is responding to master narratives by necessity. And responding to master narratives means following their lead on some level, also by necessity. Even refutation is accepting the terms of an argument.
So the Band is operating on two broad historical levels simultaneously. We'll use Fouquet's magnificent late International Gothic miniatures for a copy of the official chronicle of France to illustrate. It's also an opportunity to share a little more of the amazing variety of late Gothic art. Since we're heading into the Renaissance, it will be a lot easier to see how fake and retarded humanist historiography is when you know what they were lying about.
Jean Fouquet, Coronation of Louis VIII and Blanche of Castile at Reims in 1223, Grandes Chroniques de France, 1455-1460, illumination on parchment, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS Français 6465, f.247
Level 1 -We are reinterpreting the historical patterns to align with the facts that they are supposedly built on.
Things like recognizing the roots of globalism in the Gothic, when secular and sacred collapse in the new monarchies. The coronation ritual is supposed to mean that the king rules with God's grace. But the symbolism is overwhelmingly French. Clergy and court are enveloped in a French world. A world centered on the secular figure wearing the same symbolism.
Jean Fouquet, Edward I Plantagenet pays Homage to Philippe le Bel, 1455-1460, illumination on parchment, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 6465
The same world where the king conducts affairs of state. Like the clergy and court, the visiting Edward wears his colors. But the world is French,
Jean Fouquet, Mariage of Charles IV le Bel and Marie de Luxembourg, 1455-1460, illumination on parchment, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 6465, f.332
Religious and statecraft rituals even combine, as in a royal wedding. Note what never changes - it's all the same world, presided over and embodied by the king.
Jean Fouquet, Banquet of Charles V the Wise, 1455-1460, illumination on parchment, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Français 6465, f.444v.
That Fouquet really did paint this in the 1500s for the French crown. That there was a "France" and a French crown. And that the people and events depicted here were official mythology - at the very least promoted as if true.
That is almost certainly an error, but history is storytelling based on the evidence we have, and that will never be the same as being there. So we work with sources that have a credible evidentary chain but we know that there will be unanswerable questions.
The Band is experienced with archives and artifacts - methods and reliability of historical reckoning. These are a lot less perfect than the narrative engineers would have the public believe, and there are big problems with ineptitude, dishonesty, and general narrative-huffing. But it blows the doors off most bro-science-level analysis of the surviving record that passes for revisionism. We'll miss some things and get others wrong. But we have no agenda other than what what logos tells us is in the record we have. The story we tell is the pattern we see in artifacts and chronicles that pass the eye test - admittedly an impressionistic measure. But because it's not dishonest, new and better information is no threat.
Because everything is so inverted, we need to be systematic. Straighten out the big picture assumptions and the details get manageable. When we see old documents and pictures, we ask what could they mean when they were made?
Fra Angelico and assistants, Meditation on the Passion Italian, 1441-1442, fresco, Florence, Convent of San Marco
So when we see this, we can identify elements of "Renaissance" style in the figures and perspective of the scene. But the disembodied passion references are part of the emotion-driven piety we saw coming out of the Middle Ages in the Gothic posts. Simply being able to identify what the pictures are of is enough to blow up the idea of sudden radical cultural change. The sudden change is the creation of historians, not an account of history.
The larger plan is to rework the historical narrative in a more methodologically responsible way. To be consistent with what we can know and how we can know it. We start by looking at the official narrative and the available information and form impressions. The local and the general are moved by the same forces but have differences. So the pattern reverberates, even if the specific shapes and colors vary at each resolution. The general and local are different levels of abstraction so they will be similar - not identical but clearly of the same world. And the similarities and differences both matter.
It's a shame that one of the ways university dumbed down to accommodate enrollment bloat was to eviscerate the humanities. History is very complex - it requires tracking the contours and interactions of countless threads and forces through time. The moronic binaries and fake theoretical models spoonfed to today's cretins paint as clear a picture of history as black and white for a sunset.
At this point, general historiographic responsibility feels like seeking Xanadu.
Straightening out the details will have to wait.
The Renaissance looms fat on all the timelines - itself a tell of sorts. You might wonder why a localized development in Italian art and letters is somehow a determinant of world history everywhere. That's the storytelling - and it's a real inversion.
We are forgiven the assumption that what's been offered to us as "history" reflects the material record and the basic laws of nature. That's how it was sold. Find evidence and try to connect the dots with as many facts as possible. Only then use the judgment built up through experience to fill the gaps inferentially. Over time, something like a puzzle or mosaic picture takes form.
Words shape thoughts. Signs convey meaning associatively, but there's a lot of room in that adverb. The look and sound of a word calls to mind other associations than the primary one.
How elements of the historical record are framed in narratives and theories determines the associations they will have.
These are the shades or layers of meaning that skilled authors use to enrich your experience. Decievers too - secondary and tertiary associations piggyback onto primary meanings like viruses. The word "history" is mostly "story" - 5/8 story by letter count. By fixating on distinguishing themselves from fiction - our stories are true! - historians forget that they're storytellers. And there is an awful lot more to storytelling than the veracity of the facts.
The problem - all history is storytelling, but when storytellers delude themselves into thinking they speak the voice of Truth, unrealistic expectations follow. And modern history doesn't cumulatively build stories out of facts. It presupposes a "method" then fits the facts to that. Methodology covers everything from handling sources to any number of
The plot will be pieced together from factual elements, but these are selected and arranged to serve the model. Not to understand what happened.
Models and narratives instead of historical complexity serves the dumbing down by being easy to teach and recite. The cretins don't want to do the hard reading - most don't want to do any reading at all. It's not hard to find old syllabi and reading lists for university curricula. See for yourself how much less information the average student today is expected to process. Unfortunately, mass culture may be post-literate, but written text is the densest form of human to human information conveyance we have. It is impossible to train cognitive elite without it.
Credible history requires tremendous reading. Even chronicling events takes a good eye and literacy, but making sense of it needs a larger understanding. And more comprehensive or interpretative history?
There is a reason why the great historians of the 19th and early 20th centuries are so vastly superior than the masturbatory faddishness we get today - they were smarter and better read. And that is a result of the environment that employed them and the standards it demanded.
The Band has refered to the modern carcass as Textbook Learning - the use of nonsensical blurbs from globalist summaries in lieu of learning material. What few facts that do appear are massaged into the "theoretical" or "methodological" perspective of the narrative. And you can literally obtain honors in history knowing less about the past than you did when you started.
Consider Yale University - a once-eminent bastion of higher learning that's degenerated into a skinsuit woven of rotting ivy boughs. It does still have a name among the the morally evacuated and already dead, so take a look at how they see how they define history.
According to their website, history majors have to choose a "pathway" - listed here. This is the specific beast system narrative to be piped in in lieu of study of the past. Note how some look legitimate. This is how what legitimate students that are there are given a semblance of an education while avoiding the most egregious SJW wickedness. "Elite" schools have played the two track game for a while. It's become untenable.
The point - people trust history because they think it's the best possible accounting for the record we have, and that the account changes if the record does. But it isn't. The reality is that the history we are given starts with whatever narrative the system is pushing and the details written to fit. It's historical fiction intended to come between us and our pasts. Otherwise we learn.
Time to put away the storybooks and start learning.
The Band has been thinking a lot about how to deal with the Renaissance. We've seen it coming for a while and it still isn't completely clear how to best to come at it. It's too big a historical presence - the root of so many misconceptions. So we'll take our time, approach patiently, and see what emerges. Start by thinking about the official narrative. How is the Renaissance presented? What distinguishes it as a period?
The art is such a huge factor. The Band has been thinking of it more from the philosophical, occult, and historical angles, but art and Renaissance are almost synonymous. Artists like Michelangelo, Titian, and Leonardo da Vinci are the first to still be household names. And the things they were doing were legitimately groundbreaking.
Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks, 1483-1486, oil on panel transferred to canvas, Louvre, Paris
One of the most famous artists of all time and one of the most important historically. Leonardo changed the history of painting by inventing what would become the main Renaissance style.
The Renaissance was when art got self-conscious and theoretical. The theory was much like the ancient Greeks and Romans - realistic and idealistic at the same time. But that's very general. What does it look like? The International Gothic was doing the same thing. Leonardo shows how in a way that doesn't copy classical art but is complementary. He innovates with oil paint and brings in some innovations of Van Eyck and the Flemish painters. His empirical understanding of light and optics is hard to fathom. And he tied it all together with an air of mystical perfection.
Leonardo was likely the most intelligent artist of all time, in term of raw IQ. One of the great intellects in the historical record, his feats of empirical knowledge gathering are staggering. Art was actually a small part of his activities - his notebooks have fascinated for centuries for their observations. He may need a post.
See how real the hands and body of John the Baptist are. But they're frozen into a timeless formation. The realism and the crystalline feel of geometric perfection are beyond anything we've seen. And they're related. Lots of symbolic geometry in medieval art - it just feels more elevated when applied to something this realistic.
The flow of the hair followed observations of light and water. The smooth texture of the skin harnessed unprecedented understanding of shadows on irregular surfaces to the possibilities of oil paint. The plants are identifiable. But the whole thing has a mystical feeling.
How much of our impression of the period looking back is influenced by this singular creative explosion? Renaissance art obviously reflects Renaissance culture and influences others with that reflection. But it does so differently from humanist writers or occultists. So to talk about Renaissance art we need to understand what the Renaissance is.
Our past engagements indicate it's where the beast system really comes into view and where secular transcendence starts slime-trailing towards center stage. This brings in things from all kinds of posts - the recent art and how things mean posts, the ontological hierarchy, historiography, architecture, occult sprays and inversions, nationalism and globalism. The last few occult posts on Hermeticism have made it look terrible. But it's hard to pull this all together if you've been reading along. So now we need to cycle back around to the idea of the Renaissance in a more systematic way.
Gaspare Romano, illumination from Ovid's Metaporphosis, late 15th century, parchment, Bibliothèque nationale de France MS Latin 8016f.1r
This is further complicated by the fact that - on one level - the Renaissance doesn't exist. Not as it's presented anyhow.
Social historians have pointed out for a long time that the big changes associated with Renaissance don't really register on the general public. Reformation, war, Industrial Revolution - these all impact the people, but translating the plays of Terrence?
But it's more than that. Even the official elite intellectual cultures don't show the same patterns at first. There really is no consistent Renaissance - just a series of related changes in different areas and times grouped together by historians to tell a story. The story of Progress! Where a "Middle Age" of organic culture around faith in God Progress!es into grotesque animal capering for globalist stuff.
St. George's Chapel, 1475-1511, Windsor Castle
Flying buttresses, shallow pointed arches, towers and pinnacles, Perpendicular tracery - it's the late Perpendicular Gothic [click for a post]. Now check the date. Know what it doesn't look like?
Renaissance Italy.
The reality is that what we think of as the Renaissance is a product of humanist self-promotion and institutional discourse. The usual canards - humanist revival of antiquity, the art, etc. - were local Italian developments. The extend uneven influence around the West, but nowhere replicates them fully. Then every other field claims a "Renaissance" sometime around 1500, although the actual dates can be centuries apart and the details totally different.
William Shakespeare, First Folio, 1623, British Library
The "English Renaissance" is mainly an Elizabethan-Jacobean literary phenomenon that comes long after the end of the Renaissance Italy. There is an element of assimilating continental influences, but the reality is that it's a separate timeline with different features. We're not even sure the notion of revival applies.
This is where institutional historiography - discourse - replaces the best possible understanding of the past. Because the Renaissance centers on self-deifying fictions about the 'birth of human spirit', it took on special importance in the meaningless pantomime called academics. Everyone wanted to be part of a Renaissance and no one wanted to be stuck in the Dark Ages.
See how the false ideology of Progess! distorts perception on really fundamental levels? This is something the Band has hammered on because it is such a fundamentally stupid error. "Improvement" requires standards. Technology improves when it does things previous iterations couldn't. Human nature demonstrably doesn't. The basic delusion that measurable technical progress applies to the general human moral and cultural states is our old friend secular transcendence - the collective fantasy that we can see metaphysical absolutes in material things.
Emanuel Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, 1861, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum
Great painting. Aesthetically it holds its own with the Band's 19th-century art posts. But the message? Just more vacuous Enlightenment untruth - this time "the center of civilization" moving ever West. Maybe someone should have asked Ol' Leutzie what happens when the pointing pioneers reach Cali?
Why the Gold Coast! Progress!
Sarcasm is a form of inversion so we try and avoid it - hence the red letters an exclamation points for inverted concepts.
But the built-in terminus should have been obvious to anyone not drunk on solipsism. Manifest Destiny is an awful lot like Secular Transcendence.
Turns out Marx wasn't singularly idiotic when he insisted that material history is teleological. Progress! is the same idiotic claim to reject the supernatural but profess faith that the natural world runs on supernatural properties. Only with international finance replacing the Party and the Constitution guaranteeing endless peace, freedom, and wealth forever. Or something. The whole post-Enlightenment secularist ball of wax - left, right, up, down - opted for the wrong path. Pied Pipers covered greed and vanity with empty ideologies, and the hell-bound of all stripes to preened and postured fake virtue.
And because of this, our history - History! - is an impossible sham. A string of cherry-picked events assessed and arranged for their contributions to a progress that wasn't happening.
Ben Garrison, The Masks Speak
As we teeter on the edge of systemic collapse, hordes of beady-eyed simpletons pant and scurry in their bondage gear. Real progress is empirical. Show me the progress in the character, condition, or morality of modern man.
If you can't but still cling pitifully to the rotting husks of dead myths, then you've earned your final reward. It's that simple.
Because "smart" people were too myopic and masturbatory to notice that open-ended progress is literally impossible in a closed system, an entire theory of "knowledge" grew up around claims to see non-existent milestones along a process that didn't happen.
Read that again. And a third time.
This is why the Band sees little point in analyzing specific academic theories of history. We aren't waiting for weather reports from the Land of Make-Believe either.
So where does the story come from? That the West went into steep decline after the collapse of the Roman Empire until a plucky band of Italians revived classical learning and saved the world. You can see how accurate that is just from our roots of the West posts. It's not like we're pulling on obscure materials either. So how did the Dark Age-Rebirth model get going?
There are two big steps. The first is that Renaissance writers defined themselves that way.
Guglielmo Giraldi, Aeneas Rescues his Father from Troy, for Virgil's Aeneid. 3rd quarter 15th century, Library of Congress
Virgil was a favorite authors of the Italian Renaissance. Finding, collating, translating, copying, and illuminating ancient authors was the foundation of the "revival" of ancient culture. It's a literary revival - note how the painting looks nothing like classical art, the city is medieval, and the structure in the center Renaissance. The decorative border is derived from ancient motifs, but doesn't look like ancient art either.
The revival was adaptive - the literary ideas applied to modern culture. What matters is that they self-consciously claimed to be doing it.
Renaissance is different from historical periods like Gothic or Middle Ages - negative names that were given later. Renaissance humanists invented the decline-rebirth model of history as a way to frame their own activity [click for a post]. The problem is in assessing the reliability of the claim. The Italian Renaissance - which does exist as a blot on the timeline - is incredibly rhetorical. Everything about the movement - the style, the ideas, the presentation, the way the author looked - was about creating impressions over substance. Everything in those contexts was a "work of art". It's no wonder that the actual arts made such a leap in refinement. But how do we take such committed rhetoricians at face value?
Costanzo Felici, Historia de coniuratione Catilinae (History of the Catilinarian Conspiracy), dedication copy for Leo X, early sixteenth century
An example of the High Renaissance Roman literary movement called "Ciceronianism". Acconrding to the link, the idea was to standardize Latin on the model of Cicero. The Roman had been pedastalized since Petrarch's time as linguistically perfect, but Ciceronianism.was like idol worship. The movement was driven by humanists in the court of the Medici Pope Leo X. Papal secretary Pietro Bembo even swore "to use no word that did not appear in Cicero". This book is a re-write of Sallust's Catilinarian Conspiracy with Cicero cast as the hero.
The whole thing is a mass of postures and fronts.
Historians operate by looking at the surviving record. This makes them susceptible to whatever messaging and rhetoric the original writers used. It's why historians are supposed to combine intellectual flexibility and critical judgment.
What they did was cast their utopian antiquarian interests as a universal cultural renewal. Rather than self-indulgent deceivers peddling pagan nonsense for aristocratic table scraps, you get the dawn of human Progress! And with it, the redefinition of Western history from what happened to a new fake model of decline and rebirth. Consider...
Cardinal Bessarion, Orationes et epistolae ad Christianos principes contra Turcos (Orations and letters to Christian princes against the Turks), presentation copy for Edward I of England, Paris: Gering, Crantz and Friberger, 1471, Vat. lat. 3586 f.4r
Bessarion was an Orthodox Christian priest who converted to Catholicism at the Council of Florence in 1438 and was made a cardinal. He was driven by a dream of retaking the Holy Land and a healthy respect of the Ottoman threat. This was a collection of letters he had published to take action against the Turks.
Demosthenes, First Olynthiac Oration, Latin translation by Cardinal Bessarion, third quarter of the fifteenth century, Vat. lat. 5356 f.25v-26r
Bessarion's mastery of Greek made him an important humanist translator. But his activity was driven by contemporary issues. He saw Demosthenes' fourth century BC call for action against Philip of Macedon as the same situation faced by Europe vis a vis the Ottomans.
This is less "revival" than the recognition that material history tends to be cyclical.
You'll notice the one thing that Renaissance apologists can never do is define what it was specifically that was reborn. They'll be vaporing about "classical learning" and the "dignity of man" but nothing that you can point at in the historical record as actual classical culture being revived.
That's Renaissance rhetoric. Lofty, flattering, maleable and ultimately empty.
The second is the 19th-century German academic context where the modern historical notion of Renaissance was invented. 19th-century German academics are curious - they laid out a lot of modern disciplines with rigor and copious writings, but with the intellect and vision of a gimp. The Renaissance was as much a product of Romantic German materialist delusions about nationalism and culture as 15th-century Florentine ones.
Even the idea of hammering a unified "nation" out of disparate states was the German Romantic nationalist dream.
Map of Europe in 1800.
Note how the only area more broken up into mini-states than Italy is Germany. Bringing them together means playing up common characteristics and ignoring centuries of distinct history.
But it's not just that the Germans saw their own situation reflected in Renaissance culture building. They projected the same process - the same sense of what national culture is - onto the past. And that's the notion that the dreams and diversions of the self-declared elites are national culture. Remember - there's no returning to an accurate accounting of epistemology and ontology. Romanticism in the arts is every bit as secular transcendent as Rationalism - it merely substitutes dopamine for faulty logic as the ultimate arbiter of aesthetic value. Click for a post where this is worked out more thoroughly.
One example from that post is a perfect illustration of the kind of national culture fabrication that the Germans projected onto the Renaissance.
Leo von Klenze, Walhalla, 1830- 42, near Regensburg, Germany
We commented on this monument to great figures from German history as an example of Enlightenment proto-globalism. The "rational" Greek model as the standard for all time. But consider the contents. Ludwig I of Bavaria had it made as what Infogalactic calls a monument to ethnic German history. to remind all Germans of their common heritage. This in the build-up to German unification.
The hall is filled with busts of worthies of "German" nationality of "of the German tongue". The roster includes people from Sweden, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, United Kingdom, Belgium, Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland and the Baltic States. Some names - William of Orange, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, Mozart, Jan Van Eyck, Bede, Alaric, Martin Luther, Jacob the Rich, Arminius, and Kant.
The Renaissance is a similar projection - this of "Italian Renaissance-ness" - where elite cultural developments from different regions were lumped together into a single defining identity. This idea then grows into a pivot point in history - the staert of the turn from the Dark Age of Faith to the Light Age of Man. As if we needed more torchbringers.
If there's one guy to point the finger at for the modern historical construct of Renaissance - and there really isn't - it would be German-educated Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897).
First edition of Burckherdt's seminal work and his picture on a Swiss banknote
Burkhardt was in the middle of births of modern History and Art History – two staples in humanities departments all over. History needs no mention – it’s one of the oldest and most established of the arts. It even had a muse. Art History is not that big, but it’s the biggest and best established of the “History of X” disciplines. It also has ancient roots and is studied all over the world.
According to Infogalactic Burkherdt studied under the father of modern history Leopold von Ranke and art history trailblazer Franz Theodor Kugler.
History and Art History were products of mid 19th-century German universities and Burckhardt was a major factor in both. You could go further and say that his concept of the Renaissance was a cornerstone of the two. So he's one of those characters we can use to glimpse a moment in time. What made him so influential and appealing was how his most famous book - The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien) of 1869 - combined art and history. Weaving untraditional sources into a portrait of an era makes him a father of Cultural Studies as well, if we're counting departments. Click for a link to the text. It is a work of authorial art.
Probably not surprising that the Band appreciates how he used art and other cultural forms as historical source material. But his vision is very limited - no social or economic history - and far to monolithic in its assessment. The picture he drew of "the Renaissance" was as if the humanists' self-image was actual history. Only given the air of German institutional culture.
Andrea Mantegna, The Court of Gonzaga, between 1465 and 1474, walnut oil on plaster, detail of a wall painting in the Palazzo Ducale, Mantua
The small courts ruled by aristocratic families were hotbeds of Renaissance humanism. The context was very different from urban Florence, but the ideas spread back and forth. The Gonzaga dominated Mantua in the 15th and 16th centuries, sponsoring writers and artists. These were the settings where the image of the Renaissance courtier formed. Smooth, calculating individuals whose every move was contrived and artful.
This was the vague Renaissance ideal or humanist spirit that became a critical milestone on the fake path of Progress! because Romantic intellectuals thought it was cool.
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And the magical "transformation" of the West was born.
A few things
1. Burkhardt wasn't attempting to understand the past "on its own terms" - as impossible a dream as that may be the best of times. This is because for all his obvious talents, he lacked critical self-awareness. He could look at documents, works of art, and other sources, but couldn't see his own contributions as a story teller. The result? His Renaissance is literary creation that projected Romantic nationalist sentiment onto German intellectuals' vision of cultural nirvana. The problem was that this work of art became confused with what really happened, and the perception of Western history warped.
Joseph von Führich, Madonna and Child with Saints Adelheid and Francis, 1835, oil on canvas, Collection Belvedere
The reason why every generation of academics has "rethought" the Renaissance is because it wasn't what the fake discourse claimed. Not that the things Burkhardt cited didn't happen, but that they didn't form the universal moment of transformation that his snapshot implied.
2. The German interest in Italy was historically bizarre. On the topic of historical methods - the Band is going to step away from specific data points and past authors for a moment and speculate more generally.
The formation of the German national identity is weird - it looks like an almost 2000 year run of toxic friction between collective inferiority and superiority complexes. Starting with their arrival in the West.
They come as conquerors and successors - smoking the Romans in battle after battle, making their emperor a puppet before deposing and killing him, sacking Rome, and replacing the decadent scraps of Imperial society with the foundations of new vital nations.
Karl Bryullov,
Few historical relationships are more humiliatingly one-sided than the Germanic tribes and the late Western empire.
But for all the ass-kicking they deal out, the Germanic invaders internalize a sense of cultural inferiority - on Classical terms - at the same time. The famous kings and emperors are known for their efforts to bring ancient-level "civilization" to their people. Theodoric, Clovis, Charlemagne - the list goes on. The important point is that the Germanic European national identity was born in the conflict between beliefs in material superiority and cultural inferiority. And that that inferiority was measured in relation to an imagined antique ideal. A Roman ideal.
Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, begun 505, Ravenna, Italy
From the start, Rome is the pole star for German letters.
This Roman basilica was built as a palace chapel by the Ostrogothic King Theodoric the Great. The mosaics show his classical-styled palace and figures dressed like Roman nobility. This compulsion to bootstrap up to Roman culture happens over and over.
Charlemagne's project of cultural enrichment - the Carolingian Renaissance.
Germanic history is filled with contortions to look more "civilized". Importing Renaissance humanism, ditching their alphabet, complicating their language, developing Classical studies - history, philology, arts and letters, archaeology - into systematic forms, and generally obsessing over antiquity with a myopic intensity. Intensity that in hindsight would have been better spent on their own reality.
Which is how you get Walhalla as a monument to the Germanic peoples.
Made it ma! Top of the world
By the time we get to von Kleze, Renaissance Classicism has become Neoclassicism and the Roman replaced with the Greek.
But that's ok. The Germans are there too!
The idea of a Swiss dude spending a few years in Italy, then declaring a slice of its history the template for universal history is painfully Germanic. Complete authoritative mastery and complete submission to the myth of Classical supremacy. In this case - Classical and Renaissance become interchangeable.
Sandro Botticelli, Madonna Adoring the Child with Five Angels, 1485-1490, tempera and oil on panel, Baltimore Museum of Art
Like one of the most famous masters of the late 15th century. With lots of linear grace and symbolic plants, Botticelli has Gothic qualities. But he doesn't look ancient at all
The classical influences that we do see fall so far short of humanist rhetoric of ancient glory that it's disconcerting. Yet somehow, the historians looking back focus on the literary accounts of the humanists and not what the classically-flavored late medieval cultures of Renaissance Italy really looked like.
For those tracing the pre-history of Postmodernism, this is an embryonic form of
Remember - the big Postmodern lie is that discourse is what reality really is. Discourse is just webs and layers of representations, texts, audio-video, beliefs, impressions and other signs. Hence the whole there's no reality nonsense. The truth is that academia started pretending highly rhetorical literary constructs were material historical reality and passing them off as such. Then the following generations built, critiqued, problematized, masticated this starting point into History!
Postmoderns thought they were showing reality was just discourse, but all they were deconstructing was a fake construct built by earlier academics. One that never did have more than a tangential relationship to reality. Discourse wasn't reality - but it was the reality of academic bubble world. And in their reality, confusing the Renaissance and the Classical was a cornerstone.
Think how influential the Dark Age-Rebirth model of the Renaissance has been.
It's taught in grade school. Literally. This is a resource for teachers aimed at 9-10 year olds that's sold out at Barnes and Noble. Probably because of homeschooling and Fake Plague. So the myth keeps perpetuating.
Yet the Band is not as vitriolic towards Burckhardt as we are to some because he didn't pedestalize his own brilliance over the truth. He seems to have really believed the Romantic projections of his historical fantasies. Bringing us to...
...the naturalness and naivete of organic culture. What we can see as self-evident intellectual blindness in hindsight was simple cultural assumption. The basic unquestioned common sense of the time. It's self-evident that Progress! and secular transcendence are ontologically confused when you see it, but you do have to look. The Band only noticed this because we were deliberately examining the relationship between signs, meaning and truth. And the only reason we even thought of doing that was because what had been a seamless, connected cultural heritage has been under massive sustained attack. But when you live in an organic culture - where people share and enforce communal values and experiences – you aren’t forced to address these questions.
Petrus van Schendel, A Market at Dusk, 19th century, oil on canvas
You don’t have to waste time parsing out what and or how we can know because you don’t have waves of malevolent a-holes spewing degenerative lies to contend with. This isn’t Burckhardt’s fault – beyond not being one of those epochal intellects that thinks past the limits of his time. He’s not retarded, but his unawareness of what his claims can and can’t support softened him intellectually. And lack of strength in the foundations means the whole house is shaky.
So the idea of Renaissance as transformative moment of rebirth on the way to Enlightenment is humanist rhetoric worked up by German Romantics. And yes, Burkhardt was Swiss and chose to live and teach in Switzerland, but the intellectual culture was common. We can see the limits of his vision in two hugely influential admirers – younger colleague at Basel
the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and his student and successor the Swiss father of Art History Heinrich
Wölfflin.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musk. Leipzig E. W. Fritzsch 1872
Neitzsche needs no introduction. He had a long correspondence with Burkhardt after attending some of his lectures and his art theory in The Birth of Tragedy probably relates. It's definitely intellectually compatable.
This is the idea that there are two fundamental human impulses that are ideally expressed in art. He called these Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies, but they correspond to the old logic/emotion, dialectic/rhetoric, Classicism/Romanticism split.
Note his use of Greek terms. It's the culture.
Nietasche's pairing lets us see how binaries work. None of the list are the same - logic/emotion are modes of sentience, dialectic/rhetoric are types of argument, Classicism/Romanticism are art and culture movements, and so forth. And the most primary of these - logic/emotion or logos/pathos - aren't opposite at all. They're different, but what makes them "opposite" other than being two tendencies in human cognition? That's an opposition of sorts, but no more than knife and fork. And don't forget ethos - that would be the spoon. They're different, not opposite. Otherwise you couldn't blend them.
And Romanticism is just a cluster of artistic reactions.
J. M. W. Turner, Ovid Banished from Rome, 1838, oil on canvas, private collection
Turner is Romantic for his light over form and line
Joseph Nikolaus Bütler, A View of Lauterbrunnen with the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau mountains in the distance, 1865, oil on canvas, private collection
Bütler is Romantic for the dramatic landscape.
Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830, oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris
Delacroix is Romantic for the militant nationalism.
The thing with art traits is that they are always relative and partial. There is always an emotional aspect - art is rhetorical by nature. There is always a logical aspect - a picture has to have an internal logic to make sense. Modern art doesn't, but it doesn't make sense either. The most Classical and most Romantic paintings require the same disciplined application of techne. The style is different but the art is the same. So logic and emotion aren't opposite states in painting - they're qualities all pictures have to differing degrees. Romanticism simply refers to the interests and priorities of the creators.
In other words, they're only opposites in an arbitrary theoretical system of classifying paintings.
Nietzsche simplifies it into two poles - midwits love their pendulums - that way they can elevate them to the all-explaining universal status of Hermetic opposites while accounting for reality's shades of gray. Don't want things to get too complicated or else they get befuddled.
Look: they're opposites! But connected! It's a universal theory of art!!!
So it's inane and self-fluffing. Why do we care?
We have no idea how directly influential Nietzsche was on the development of History! but his structure is indicative of the Germanic academic mindset we've been looking at. That is, simplifying historical complexity into absurdly reductive patterns by universalizing local tendencies and projecting institutional discourse backwards. Burckhardt gives us "the Renaissance" as an internally-consistent work of art. Nietzsche shows how easy it is to take that structure and hang it between binary poles. It looks like this.
The real historical kernel of the Renaissance were the localized Italian humanist writings and art that Buerkardt extrapolated into his micro-spirit of the age. This material was classically-oriented like his and Nietzsche's German academy. That's what made it so easy for the Germans to fixate on the Renaissance - both the Humanists and the Germanic Romantics had inferiority complexes that they tried to fill with phantasies of antiquity. They weren't the same - hence the German repackaging of the Renaissance. Antiquarian knowledge had advanced over the centuries in-between - Greece had been opened up to Western archaeologists and replaced Rome as the pinnacle of antique culture. The German preference for Greek antiquity came with all the Enlightenment symbolism connected to that Neoclassicism [click for a link]. But they treated the Renaissance - Florence in particular, but also Venice and Rome - like a sort of reborn Athens. Modern beacosn of classicism.
Anonymous German painter, Raphael and Margarita Luti with the Castel Sant'Angelo in the Background, 1813-1814, oil on canvas,
The painter Raphael was the paragon of this modern Classic.
Painting had presented a problem for the revival crowd. Lots of ancient sculpture and architecture survived for artists to copy, but there was no painting to see. So Raphael and other High Renaissance painters became the standards of excellence.
With this came the Romantic mythologizing of Raphael. Biographic details like his long and intense affair with his mistress Luti became the seeds for countless stories.
At the center of this love of Raphael was his masterpiece - the Sistine Madonna. This wonder was bought by King Augustus III of Poland - based - for what was the highest price ever paid for a painting. Imagine - the highest price for the highest perceived quality. It was hung in Dresden where it still remains today, mercifully having survived the war. This meant that the Burckhardts of the world were able to look at one of the supreme examples of Western Classicism while absorbing Renaissance writing on art and culture.
This is the painting. We won't say much about it now - Raphael is difficult to get a handle on. He looks like the most intuitively gifted artist the Band has ever seen. Look at the date on this painting. Put the level of techne up against the International Gothic we were looking at - this shouldn't be possible at this point. Oh, and Luti was the model for the Madonna.
Raphael, 1512, Sistine Madonna, oil on canvas, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
The Band's impression is that Raphael's artistic genius surpasses our our perspicacity. We can't see the boundaries of his talent, so he's inscrutable. We are going to post on him at some point, but he and the High Renaissance need more reflection. They clearly kick off the path to artistic secular transcendence. But they are so talented. And they create haunting beauty. Italian Renaissance art lives up to the reputation. The challenge for us is to try and use these guys to trace out the logos/genius relationship in their Christian and Classical senses. We're just not quite there yet.
For now - just admire the vision like the German Romantics did and you'll see why Raphael became the honorary Apelles, antiquity reborn.
KPM (Royal Porcelain Factory, Berlin), The Sistine Madonna, late 19th-early 20th century
Here's the Sistine Madonna having an impact. It shows the transformation of history into a story into a universal ideal. Raphael was a real painter - it's the scale of his achievements in a pretty short life that we're struggling to wrap our heads around. But his art changes a lot. The creativity and growth curve is part of what makes him so inexplicable. He isn't static. The Sistine Madonna is him at his most Classical - his art before and after is different. And even it has a sensuousness and mystical glow that is more Romantic in it's emotionalism. That's totally lost in the porcelain.
But they didn't have to look for latent romanticism in Raphael - there were literal bacchanals to fill Nietzsche's Dionysian shoes. The Renaissance brought secular art into prominence - one place where we do see signs of classical revival is in the subjects of paintings. Raphael was the symbol of another Renaissance binary opposition - between "logical" Florentine and Roman art and "emotional" painting from Venice.
There's some truth to this. Venetian Renaissance painting was a distinct tradition. It's basis in light and color is more rhetorical than the carefully designed Florentine style. Like any of these generalizations, it's a localized truth stretched into distorted fake abstract. By this account, the Venetian counterpart to Raphael is Titian. Painting a bacchanal doesn't hurt the 'more emotional' reputation. Pay attention to the colors, and luxe smooth textures.
Titian, The Bacchanal of the Andrians, 1523–1526, oil on canvas, Museo del Prado, Madrid
Note how the figures don't have Raphael's exquisite finished design or perfect arrangement. That's the Florence-Venice opposition in a nutshell. Note that the composite Renaissance-Classical construct invented by Germans and embodied by Raphael wasn't even the universal standard for early 16th-century Italy. It would be more accurate to call it a short-lived Renaissance-Roman construct. But that doesn't matter when extrapolating a snapshot of a local moment in time into an all-time standard. You could be working off a one-picture construct and still pretend its the spirit of the age and hinge of human history.
Defining the Renaissance as Classical creates a goldmine of binaries and fake opposites. We just saw Florence-Venice - it was a big one because it encompassed the line and color debate in art theory, dialectic and rhetoric in humanist theory, and other reason and emotion stuff.
Raphael, The Triumph of Galatea, 1514, fresco, Villa Farnesina, Rome
Titian, Bacchus and Ariadne, 1520-1523, oil on canvas, National Gallery
Mythological comparison - Raphael's figure design and flawless integration and Titian's color, texture, and energy.
Making the Renaissance the Classical also sets up a binary to take care of what comes immediately afterwards. To repeat - the perfect Classic moment doesn't last very long. Raphael himself moves on in new directions. And as Art History becomes a "discipline", the gap between the spirit of the age ideal and the historical reality becomes a problem. The problem with academia is that when one story fails, the inevitably replace it with another.
The frozen moment is really fleeting? That's ok - there's a binary for that. This one's Renaissance/Mannerism.
Michelangelo, David, 1501–1504, marble, Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence
Giambologna, Rape of the Sabine Women, marble, Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence
The David is Renaissance classicism. Michelangelo did have ancient statues to learn from - hence the contrapposto pose, the heroic nude anatomy, and the realism.
Mannerism is hard to define - it seems like putting personal style and complexity over classical clarity. Giambologna's figures are inspired by ancient statues but they twist and spiral so you don't get one clear lucid viewpoint. It's a celebration of ingenuity over clarity.
If Classic/Mannerism is a minor pair, Classic/Gothic is the biggie. Or Renaissance/Dark Ages. We've spent a lot of posts on the later Gothic - it's not hard to find a perfect snapshot for the comparison. How about high-end housing. A Flamboyant city palace and one of Palladio's Classical villas from about 50 years later.
Hôtel de Sens, 1475-1507, Paris; Palladio, Villa Cornaro, 1553, Piombino Dese
It's not hard to mine through this material and find "opposites" to build around. The problem is when you want your history to best account for what happened rather than project vaporous ideals. To really get it, try and take one of these binary models of culture and apply it to your world today. Try and imagine fitting a single spirit of the age or pair of all-determining perspectives to actual lived reality. It's utterly retarded. Metaphysically, there is one binary - one choice - that matters. But in material reality? Doesn't work that way.
See what we mean when we say History!'s not about recreating the past?
Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, Uses of History: Marxism, Postmodernism, and the Renaissance, Manchester University Press, 1991
An example chosen because it popped up first, not because it's egregious or unusual. We're blending the idea of history as storytelling and academic nonsense "models" - they're different, but both are fictional constructs interposed between us and the past. Both are also inevitable to a degree - history is storytelling and historiography a theoretical accommodation. The difference is whether these are unavoidable "necessary evils" or the point of the whole exercise. Academic history - intellectual hubs - went all-in on the latter.
The subjects of this book are Marxism and Postmodernism, not expanding or clarifying the historical record. The Renaissance is a prop - a figment of discourse constructed by earlier academics. As an unreal thing, it can be repackaged infinitely - there's nothing actual to measure the book against. Which is why these word salads are instantly forgotten. Their only purpose is to count as "publications" on the career latter.
Thomas L Martin and Duke Pesta, The Renaissance and the Postmodern: A Study in Comparative Critical Values, Routledge, 2016
And it doesn't really stop. Here is a pairing of Renaissance and postmodern writers or "voices on both sides of the historical divide". What "historical divide"? See how it works? Shift focus to what's implicit in the understanding of history being offered.
History isn't thought of as a best accounting of what happened in the past. It's something that differs with theoretical perspective. It's just discourse. What "the Renaissance" said, what "postmoderns" said... There's no logos. The implicit claim is the standard academic luciferianism about truth being relative. Truth being out of our grasp in its fullness is totally different from it depending on perspective. If these fabulists wanted to actually improve their understanding of the past, attempting an epistemological and ontological defense of any of their fake starting points would have proved far more educational.
Once you understand that academic "disciplines" don't mean the same thing as what you'd assume from the standard definition of the names, things get clearer. History isn't about amassing empirical knowledge of the past, any more than English is about mastering the language and amassing knowledge of literature, or anthropology is about amassing empirical knowledge of human behavior. It's all just discourse for its own sake, pretending to be what people think it really is.
Mihály Munkácsy, Apotheosis of the Renaissance, 1888, fresco, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
It wasn't always this bad. Someone like Burckhardt was very knowledgeable and well-read - he imposed his fake models on real data. But as academia has degraded, mastery of the data - the hard, objective part - has been phased out for the fake models.
Like this painting - splendid at a glance, but on closer inspection, crude proto-modernism trumpeting a fake, self-aggrandizing image of the past.
And here's the insight - you can see the genealogy of the absurd political idiocy of academics today. People wonder how "smart" people are so easily fooled and made to dance. Keep in mind that their entire professional cache - their "brains" and expertise - are based on mastering discourse. But discourse is made of reductive models and binaries with tangential relationships to existence at best. Academic intelligence is therefore based on pretending simplistic formations are complex realities and collecting check marks. What sort of political leanings would you expect when such creatures turn their candlepower to current events?
If Nietzsche sets up the the binary, Heinrich Wölfflin drives it home. If you haven't heard of him - don't worry - he's an early art historian who we wouldn't bother with if art weren't so important to the historical construct of the Renaissance. Wölfflin is most famous for being the first to really systematize formal analysis of art. That's looking at the visual qualities - the forms - rather than the subject, symbolism, object history, etc. If this sounds like a huge step on the road to Modernism...
Edwin Scharff, Bust of Heinrich Wölfflin, Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich
Wölfflin invented a method of Art History known as Formalism that analyzes works based on certain visual characteristics and not what they mean or the context they appeared in. You know, their actual "history". This is like formalism in literature that led to the no outside the text nonsense of deconstruction. It lets the
Here's a bio of Wölfflin from an academic source.
The big picture problem with Formalism is that it's childishly reductive. It reduces art to visual arrangements and banishes the whole world of meaning that drove the creation of art from the dawn of humanity. Everything we've explored in these posts is out because a myopic Swiss gamma declared it so.
If you've wondered how the institutional world of art could have accepted the retarded essentialisms of Modernism - painting is just marks on surfaces, sculpture shapes in space, etc. - consider...
Their saintly founder declared that the fundamental basis of the history of art!
Wölfflin's most influential book - Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem Der Stilentwicklung in Der Neueren Kunst (Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art) came out in 1915 and has been translated into many languages. Click for a link to the text. Despite the title, he was analyzing art from the Renaissance and 17th century - showing how intimately connected the Renaissance and the foundations these disciplines were.
Wölfflin differentiates Renaissance/classical from Baroque/non-classical on five areas. Click for an good summary of the five principles.
This is also the first appearance of "Baroque" as an art movement. Note that it is defined as the debased inverse of a Renaissance ideal. Like the Gothic, but later. Another sign of how intimately connected the Renaissance and the foundations these disciplines were.
Wölfflin followed Nietzsche in defining art as existing between binary impulses - but way more systematically. He also brings the focus squarely onto the Renaissance - his Classic and Baroque pair build formal analysis around the Renaissance as the positive model. The way Neoclassicism pretended that the art of Ancient Greece - a period - was an all-time standard. As a construct, it built binary thinking and Renaissance supremacy into the foundations of Art History. Intellectually, Wölfflin collapses on any scrutiny at all.
But his universal structure let his posture all-knowingly.
Ladies and gentlemen, the fathers of modern academia...
It's not just Burkhardt and his circle. Other Germans push the same ideas in other venues. Like Georg Voigt - a more traditional philologist who limited his studies to early Italian humanism, but whose impact on history was Burkhardtesque. He's the one who set the divide between Dante and Petrarch as spanning the transition from medieval to Renaissance. The Band has taken Petrarch as a symbolic starting point for Renaissance humanism. When we do, we are showing how influential the formations of Voigt were.
Giovanni dal Ponte, Dante and Petrarch, 14th-15th century, tempera on panel, Fogg Museum
Take Dante (1265-1321) and Petrarch (1304-1374). To this medieval painter, the two writers are giants of the Tuscan literary tradition. Dante was a friend of Petrarch's father, and the poets met in real life, when Petrarch was seven. The relation between them is as complex as that between any two literary giants - Dante is the greatest writer in the Italian tradition and Petrarch a first-ballot hall of famer. Shakespeare and Milton makes a good English analogy.
There are real differences in their attitudes, but they aren't archetypes of different ages. Here's a long, well-researched article comparing their attitudes to the ancient past - the crux of the Renaissance/medieval divide. It shows more realistic differences within a common frame of reference. Worth a read if you're really into late medieval literary culture.
But Voigt and his generation transform them from real people we can try and understand into symbols of rigid historical periods that are themselves abstracted to the point of fakeness.
We've mentioned this before, but it bears repeating - this is a necessary evil. If you read the Petrarch and Dante article linked in the picture text right above, you see how much work and thought can go into trying to clarify one small point. And there's no guarantee that this is even the best reading. The full reality of what happened is so endlessly vast that there is no way for modern people to get a clear picture of it all. So abstract period structures are necessary to organize the volume of the information. It also gives us places to look - there are cultural changes that show up in the cultural record and historians can try and decode how these happened. The problem is when the abstractions are used to determine what the the specifics mean.
Smart boys and textbook learners like to reduce complexity to labels. Petrarch is "Renaissance" and Dante is "medieval". Because you have to pretend history is a series of fake spirits of ages or frozen period structures if you're going to pretend fake stable binaries determine material culture.
Burkhardt's foundational notion of the Renaissance as a unified cultural snapshot is one of the sources of what academics like to call "interdisciplinarity". This is one of those bits of jargon that sound like common sense on the surface but mean something very different in reality. The simple meaning is to approach a complex problem by combining disciplines. That's what Burckhardt did when he mixed history, literature, art history, etc. into a more rounded grasp of the period. If the Band cared about the nonsense silos of discourse, it would be very interdisciplinary. We pull on sources from all over the place because we're trying to understand the world we exist in. And the world is enormously complex - neat division into "disciplines" is a move away from the truth.
See the problem? The academy is divided arbirrarily into disciplines. Each has it's own rules, methodologies, heroes, authorized questions - discourse. It's the wall of discourse around each discipline that makes academic study so myopic to outsiders. The discourse becomes the point - you master the discipline to make tangential filtered comments about reality.
From the jump, something like Burckhardt's Renaissance couldn't fit in one discipline. Understanding it needed multiple disciplines - it is an inherently interdisciplinary subject. And this just happened to mirror the Renaissance ideal of broad humanistic knowledge - studying the Renaissance made you a Renaissance man. See how rhetorical it all is?
In reality, interdisciplinarity just stacks discourses - ususally with some flaccid "theory" as connective tissue. Because the problem is the starting material. Generalizing, but disciplines replaced knowledge of reality with fake discourses that were based on real things but took on lives of their own. Over time, the weight of discourse bloat, problematizings, rethinkings, etc. diverges further and further from reality and the illusion gets harder to maintain. Interdisciplinarity is the irrational hope that adding these divergent discourses will boomerang around towards truth.
Like adding negative numbers in the hope of reaching plus one.
The idea that the Renaissance exists across disciplines was baked into the origins and became the template for period and area studies to come. Consider the Warburg Institute - the life project of a banking scion who was infatuated with the Classical dreamworld version of this romantic German Renaissance. This place was founded to research and preserve the classical legacy in European culture with a focus on the Renaissance and remains a leading research institute.
Aby Warburg is a fascinating character. At the time of his death in 1929 he was working on his enormous and unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas that he had started five years earlier. This series of 63 panels with almost 1000 images were an effort to trace the “afterlife of antiquity” - how symbolic images passed through history from ancient times. Not hard to see why the Band might find this guy interesting.
Here's a close-up of panel 45 - Superlatives of the language of gestures. It traces the development of classical expressive gestures into signs of individuality in the Renaissance. It helps see the ambitions and limits of Warburg's vision. The Mnemosyne Atlas is an impressive web of connections over time. Like the ultimate evidence diagram. But it is also woefully inadequate for the goal of fully mapping the classical legacy. That's more of those open-ended institutional missions that never ends, not one guy's - no matter how learned - picture collection.
The value of Warburg's example is to call attention to the smallness of the academic vision. For all the mountains of "publications", the discursive construct "The Renaissance" is so much smaller than the real historical record, let alone what really happened.
The website also notes Warburg hoped that the Mnemosyne Atlas would let the viewers see "polarities" between reason and unreason. We can rephrase that as 'binaries between Apollonian and Dionysian or dialectic and rhetoric'. For all his knowledge and passion, Warburg simply accepted the old binary structures without question. Renaissance rebirth, historical binaries, abstract structures replacing reality... discourse is like sediment - it builds into disciplines in layers.
Interdisciplinarity means that multiple disciplines got to claim a piece of the rebirth of human learning, culture, and spirit after a long dark age of superstition. The Band is convinced that Renaissance envy at least partly drove the expansion of The Renaissance® into universal status. But to do so, the original model had to be stretched into meaninglessness. What does any of the Burkhardt-Nietzsche-Wolfflin-Warburg origins have to do with...
...the International Gothic stylings of Northern "Renaissance" painters?
Rogier van der Weyden, Crucifixion Triptych, 1443-1445, oil on panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum
Emotion-driven piety from a follower and rival of Van Eyck and fellow initiator of the Northern Renaissance. Note the expressions of feeling from Mary and John, the inclusion of devout patrons in the main picture, and St. Veronica with the Holy Face in the wing. Dark angels mourn. The realism is new, but what is "Renaissance" about this besides the date?
...the English "Renaissance" allegorical epic of Spenser?
Walter Crane, Holiness defeats Error, Book I, Part l, before page 5 of the 1895-1897 edition of Edmond Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Folger Shakespeare Library
Spenser was writing near the end of the 1500s, and while there are classical allusions in his sprawling allegory, it reads more like the medieval Romance of the Rose than Virgil.
How is this "Renaissance" other than the date?
...the Plateresque architecture of "Renaissance" Spain?
Facade of the University of Salamanca, 1529
The Plateresque has Gothic, Italian Renaissance, and Moorish elements. It's a product of Spain's history. It has nothing to do with cultural revival and everything to do with a nation forming out of a complex history.
Why is this "Renaissance" other than the date?
Everyone wanted a Renaissance. So everyone got one. The snapshot of art and humanism is Italy became the end of the Age of Faith and the universal pivot to modernity. Crazy, isn't it? But also annoying in ways, because the volume of discourse has reached a point where the size alone gives credibility. The NPC retort comes built in - you can't just say over a century and a half of historiography is wrong! Academics are always problematizing and rethinking things. Any major errors would be worked out by now. And there is actually an element of truth to that. In discourse.
But dicourse isn't reality. Never will be, no matter how many internal reshufflings take place. The problem is structural and there invisible from the inside. It's why when deconstruction showed discourse to be nonsense within the system it was such an existential crisis. Because it was within the system and discourse is meaningless, it could be assimilated. But the insolvable problem of discourse's unreality remains.
Analogy - you can play a million games of soccer without anyone just picking up the ball and running it into the goal. Even though it's a vastly more efficient way of getting it there. Why? Because there are rules to the game and failure to comply means expulsion. Getting the ball into the end isn't the first priority in reality - only in the game. So doing so outside the rules of the game doesn't count - no point is awarded and for all practical purposes, it's as if it never happened.
Now replace the game with discourse. Academics dither forever over minutia within the rules without anyone even thinking of picking up the ball.
The difference? The soccer game is honest about being structured entertainment. It doesn't pretend to be reality.
If anything, the scale of the discourse is why it can be so wrong. Generations trained in the proper "methodologies" press endless projections from data points and binary filtered complexities into a vast mess that's too big to question.
The thing is, there are legitimate methodological requirements for history. Handling evidence, critical analysis, logical conclusions - ways to restrict your storytelling to what can be supported and being honest when you can't. But academic "methodology" is just shorthand for the presuming the conclusions. It's cherry-picking facts for whatever theoretical perspective is trendy, making it easy to spin up studies. There's also endless opportunity for churn. The discourse needs rethinking with every change in the nonsense barometer.
Arkose "flat irons" of the Fountain Formation at Roxborough State Park near Denver, CO
Like in geology - pile enough sediment under enough pressure and you can make mountains. And mountains are hard to move.
The Band is going to deal with the Renaissance by looking at what the patterns on the historical record really tells us. What happened, what assumptions are projected vanity, where the secular transcendence comes in, and what we can learn for the future. It will take a couple of posts so this is a good place to wind up.
We'll close with some realities - inconvenient truths for the rebirth of humanity model.
First of all, Giotto preceded Petrarch.
Gustave Dore, The Souls Of The Prideful, Bearing Heavy Stones, engraving for Dante's Purgatorio 11.73
Dante and Virgil encounter souls working off the sin of pride with grueling labor that forces their eyes downward. This is where Giotto and Cimabue are used as examples of fame being fleeting - Cimabue was a big deal but now Giotto is the new hotness. A reminder that Dante was a prominent late 13th century Florentine and certainly knew both of them personally. It's a small world.
See the passage below...
Priamo della Quercia, Dante's dream of the eagle; Gates of Purgatory; Punishment of the Proud, 1444-1452, from the British Library's Yates Thompson 36 f. 84
The picture is from a magnificent manuscript of Dante's Divine Commedy. The idea is what was considered great is always replaced by something new, so don't get caught up in pride.
Note how "medieval archetype" Dante is aware of the "Renaissance" notion of artistic fame. As if the Renaissance was a gradual development in Florentine culture rather than an epoch-shifting culture quake...
We've seen that in the Gothic posts - when you pay attention, it's clear boundaries were blurring and logos slipping for a while. Remember, Renaissance humanism appears in the same unique socio-economic environment that we saw supported the new art of the late 1200s. But when humanism was getting going in letters in the later 1300s, the International Gothic was just taking off in the visual arts and Giotto's example lying fallow. When what's considered the Renaissance in Italian art kicks off, Petrarch is long dead and little evidence of the humanists' main interests are visible.
When Renaissance culture spreads - both humanist and artistic - the form it takes is different wherever it goes. As you'd expect with different national cultures with different attitudes towards the past.
Apothekenbau (pharmacy building) facade, 1522, Lemgo, Germany
Somehow the Renaissance manages to keep the revival of antiquity credibility while changing its definition to be more "pan-European." This Wesser Renaissance facade looks nothing like the University of Salamanca despite being built at the same time.
There are classical elements, but it's a local aesthetic - not the revival of the past. We could ask what makes it a Renaissance, but you know the answer now.
The Renaissance didn't replace medieval superstition with modern science. This one's a flat out lie. Empiricism was on the rise in the Middle Ages, Renaissance thought was a Hermetic mess of non-empirical credulity, and the empiricism of the Scientific Revolution is what separated it from the Renaissance.
Anonymous, Ugo da San Caro, 1352, fresco in a series of forty famous Dominicans in the Sala del Capitolo, Convent of San Niccolò, Treviso, 1352
One of the earliest pictures of someone wearing glasses. Any humanists who made their Classical manuscript study easier with glasses can thank the Middle Ages for one of a number of inventions that the ancients didn't have.
So what's the big change to everything that really does happen? On an international level, it looks like nothing more than self-conscious solipsism becoming a high culture obsession. Obviously Petrarch becomes famous for his confessional letters to ancient figures and for climbing a mountain just to see the view. These are taking as signs of elevating his own personal experience over the customs of his time. But look at all the big "European Renaissance" landmarks. The fence-sitting special boy-isms of Erasmus. The self-indulgent irrelevancies of Montaigne. The demoralized relativism of Cervantes.
Title page of the first edition of Michel de Montaigne's Essais, 1580, The Newberry Library
"The Renaissance" is where we see high culture turn away from ontological coherence, epistemological responsibility, and a general orientation towards truth. Instead we're to believe that the inner thoughts of dead non-entities can take their place because they're artfully worded and self-idolators see themselves reflected in them. No wonder the beast system placed it as an inflection point in history.
We can't look at every "Renaissance" culture - it's too much. Which is fine. Renaissance is a macro pattern based on a micro localized application projected to other micros. What we can do understand what made micro so influential and appealing then look at patterns of spread.
The next post will start with the elite culture and art production in early Renaissance Italy to get a handle on what really happened. We've passed over this territory in architecture posts but it needs a closer look. This is where ideas about antique cultural supremacy and the Dark Ages get started and the arts of the West take form.
Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, The Adoration of the Magi, 1440 - 1460, tempera on panel, National Gallery of Art
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