The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Burckhardt - Essay Example

The Renaissance is a complicated and multi-faceted period. True, one important characteristic feature of the Renaissance was an interest in the ical cultures of Greece and Rome. The Greeks and Romans provided models or ideals of what could be achieved in art, architecture, politics, mathematics, rhetoric, philosophy and so on. However, one of the striking features about this period is that while Europe was searching its roots in the classical models, it was also making new discoveries of its own. It was as much a rediscovery or revival of lost ancient knowledge and technical knowledge as it was a movement to know themselves. Interestingly, it was the journey into their souls, if we may call it, which made them believe and adore the concept of the dignity of man. The dignity of man attained its greatest prominence and was given its characteristic meaning in the Italian Renaissance. Though as an idea it is usually ill defined and tends to express a complex of notions, classical and Christian, which writers of the period desired to assert, this interest into the importance of manhood brought about important paradigmatic shifts in the European society. It is important to realise that this idea of the Renaissance was first coined in 1867 by Jakob Burckhardt in his book, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The term has come to dominate our consciousness of what the historical experience of this period was. The Renaissance, as far as this book is concerned, is conceived as a departure from the Middle Ages, a fracture point where European culture suddenly changed into a new and different culture. It was a term that was formulated to stress the uniqueness of modern European culture, as something new on the face of human culture. Interestingly, in formulating a beginning for modern culture, the idea of the Renaissance also created the idea of the "middle ages," a period between the classical period and the Renaissance. Thinking of a period that is perhaps best exemplified by Leonardo Da Vinci's famous painting Vitruvian Man, we realise that the historical sense, which pervaded Europe during the renaissance, was one of pride at new-found knowledge as well as a sense of suspicion. If on one hand, Baconian reasoning, as propounded in his Novum Organum, or 'New Instrument', tried to replace the methods put forward in Aristotle's Organon, on the other hand, we find that ideas such as Metacognition began to gain ground. If travellers and discovers like Magellan were finding new lands, there were people like John Milton who were still trying to trace the result of "Man's first Disobedience" so as to chart the Euro-centric God's "justification of the ways of men". If we look back and try to analyse what actually happened during the renaissance, we can perhaps find the reasons why Europe soon began to have colonies and how imperialism became rampant. It is to be kept in mind that where as the Europeans in the fifteenth century, thought they understood the universe pretty well, the discoveries of Columbus and other explorers had left them deeply shocked. Here was a civilisation which was based on the concepts of rationality, goodness, whiteness, and logic who were suddenly confronted by people who were not white, who were "uncivilised" and went about the places doing mysterious deeds and prayed to evil looking gods and goddesses. Put shortly, the New World that they discovered did not fit easily into the European scheme of things. So, what would they do They took it upon themselves to "civilise and educate" these beasts, something which is mocked today in postcolonial studies as the "White Man's Burden". It was this racial sense of the renaissance supremacy, added with their vigour for educating the uncivilised which found a race armed with Descartian rationalism to colonise the entire world. If there was anything that made renaissance what it is, it is the idea called Humanism. The attitude of Humanism emphasised the dignity and worth of the individual and held the basic premise of human beings as rational creatures endowed with the capacity for truth and goodness. As a result, Renaissance humanists believed that it was possible to improve human society through classical education. This education relied on teachings from ancient texts and emphasised a range of disciplines, including poetry, history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy. Humanism also brought about the concept of individualism: a movement which saw much attention been given to the development of an individual's potential: and which gave a new emphasis on education. The goal of education was to develop the individual's talents in all intellectual and physical areas, from scholarship and the writing of sonnets to swordsmanship and wrestling. It was believed that the ideal person should not be bound to one specific discipline, such as that of scholar, priest, or warrior. This was in stark contrast to the Middle Ages, when specialisation had been encouraged. Pico della Mirandola's "Oration on the dignity of man", which glorifies humanity and praises the human ability to reason, offers the opposing view to Shakespeare's Hamlet and Montaigne's essay "Man's presumption and Littleness" which both suggest that humans are no higher in the universal order of things than any other of God's creatures. Interestingly, if we happen to read the Aztec Account of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, we would find a remarkable "other-ed" depiction of the European renaissance. Where as, the version of truth as given by Bernal Diaz del Castillo in his book called True History of the Conquest of Mexico was always looked upon as the official version, the version given by the Aztec accounts prove it otherwise. The Indian chroniclers describe the beginning of the terrible slaughter perpetrated by Pedro de Alvarado in the patio of the main temple in Tenochtitlan. After mentioning the first rituals of the fiesta that was being celebrated-a fiesta in which "song was linked to song"- they tell how the Spaniards entered the sacred patio: They ran in among the dancers, forcing their way to the place where the drums were played. They attacked the man who was drumming and cut off his arms. Then they cut off his head, and it rolled across the floor. They attacked all the celebrants, stabbing them, spearing them, striking them with their swords. They attacked some of them from behind, and these fell instantly to the ground with their entrails hanging out. Others they beheaded: they cut off their heads, or split their heads to pieces. They struck others in the shoulders, and their arms were torn from their bodies. They wounded some in the thigh and some in the calf. They slashed others in the abdomen, and their entrails all spilled to the ground. Some attempted to run away, but their intestines dragged as they ran; they seemed to tangle their feet in their own entrails. No matter how they tried to save themselves, they could find no escape. These accounts make us ponder about the misadventures and the sense of supremacy that was fostered into the systems of Europe by the effects of renaissance. The Europeans, armed with their sense of different skin colour and historical enlightenment that had been ushered by the renaissance, reasoned that these creatures in the grey zones, were not people at all! And if they were humans, they possessed no souls. Thus, the Europeans took it upon themselves to colonise the population with the marketable idea of making them educated and making them like "us". Thus, the entire period of renaissance history is filled with instances of encounters and the gradual rise of Europe, as what historians describe, as the first global super power in the world. In 1492, it was the sense of this 'otherness" which became instrumental for the happening of the Reconquista: the effort to drive the Moors, the rapidly rising tide of Islam, out of Spain, and which came to its successful conclusion with the surrender of the Alhambra, the last Moorish fortress on Spanish soil. Interestingly, it was the sense of supremacy and the discourse of the Christian canon that pervades the first reason of the anti- Islam movement in Spain, which finally culminated to the January of 1492 with the surrender of the Alhambra. 1492 is also the year in which Ferdinand and Isabella issued an edict expelling the Jews from Spain. Most other European cultures had done this earlier. These events may in part explain the way in which the Spaniards acted when they reached the New World. In a sense, the Reconquista just continued. Soldiers who had fought in the wars in Spain could now be conveniently sent far off to a place where they would not cause trouble in Spain. The attitudes toward the Jews and the Moors could be projected onto the Indians. In Richard Popkin's article called "The Philosophical Basis of Modern Racism", Popkin claims that modern racism began in Spain in 1492. It was the ideology of power, what Foucault calls as the power of knowledge, coupled with their superior technology, that the Spanish and later other Europeans and their descendants proceeded to commit genocide on the native peoples of the Americas and elsewhere. The history of the European renaissance is the history of the discovery of Europe. All during the classical period, Europe was a heterogenous, multicultural society with all the trappings of that multiculturalism: conflicting cultural notions of power, gender, ethnicity, religion, language, and so on; negative definitions of other cultures; ethnic rather than regional self-definition, and many more. During renaissance, the Europeans in trying to define the uniqueness of themselves, landed up defining the "other". The concept of the Ethnic comes to the fore and begins to include self-definition against non-Europeans, such as Muslims, Byzantines, and North Africans, many of them cultures that the classical world saw itself as continuous with. Thus, the process, of the discovery of Europe, provides a distinct historical character: the final construction of an idea of Europe. For the culture, literature, and arts of the Renaissance gave Europe a set of practices that it could identify as uniquely its own. Works Cited Mirandola, Pico della. "Oration on the Dignity of Man." The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. Ed.Cassirer, Kristeller, & Randall. 1948. 223-35 Montaigne, Michel de. "Man's Presumption and Littleness." The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Ed. Maynard Mack. New York: W.W. Norton &Company, 1992. 1808-16 Read More