Paul Johnson's View on Renaissance - Essay Example

Paul Johnson captivates his serious readings regarding the Renaissance and the forgotten glorious yester-years in his epoch-making document bearing the testimony of the movement and the development of art and culture during the time in his book, “The Renaissance: A Short History”. The enlightening book, “The Renaissance: A Short History” is undoubtedly one of the very brief historical presentations of the most elaborate period of human history. The enlightening 208 pages of this terse volume enable the readers to look upon the movement and the period from a different dimension which was never dealt before in the historical canon.

As the Romantic period in English literature was much influenced by the precursors of the period, like-wise Johnson’s main contention regarding the movement and precisely the cultural evolvement during the period, concerned the pertinent influence of the post-Greco-Roman and post-Roman European works. Johnson repeatedly drew upon these influences and tried to analyse their effect on the works that evolved during the Renaissance period. Johnson contended that Renaissance was a term of “common usage” and looked upon the movement as a mass protest or petition keeping it far away from the general contention of cultural movement from the cradle of academia and elitists.

Johnson also viewed the movement essentially as a socio-economic reform and in the first section of the book, thoroughly assessed the social and economic background against which the movement surged up, “Most generations, of all human societies, have a propensities to look back on golden ages and seek to restore them” (Johnson, “The Renaissance: A Short History”, Pg - 5). Very systematically, Johnson then started examining the Renaissance literature and sculptor by drawing large inferences from the anatomy of the Renaissance art, architecture and sculptors and trying to trace the Greco-Roman and European influences amid them.

To support this fact in the very third page of the book Johnson mentions, “they were conscious that a cultural rebirth of a kind was taking place, and that some of the literary , philosophical and artistic grandeur of ancient Greece and Rome was being re-created” (Johnson, “The Renaissance: A Short History”, Pg - 3). Very significantly, he also tried to put the chronological order of the creations and creative canon of the period along with his clear view on the number of controversial books that were printed in and across Europe during the period including the evolution of the polyphonic music of the 16th century.

Johnson, in a very terse way, projects the biographies of many prominent creative artists of the period. At the same time, he also draws inferences on the relationships and exchanges between these prominent aesthetic canons during the time. Renaissance is largely viewed from the perspective of the artistic, religious and economic trends. Johnson’s repetition of the fact that a large number of influences in the Renaissance period were drawn from the