Humanism

Florence and Venice in the Renaissance

The Development of Humanism

• Thriving northern towns eg. Padua, Florence

• notaries

• evolving notion of studia humanitatis

• restore and emulate culture of antiquity

• “For the humanists, the way forward was to go back, to follow the example of the best writers and thinkers in a culture which they considered superior to their own.” [Peter Burke]

• humanism mostly grew up outside universities

Andrea del Castagno, Portrait of Francesco Petrarca (from the cycle of famous men

and women), c. 1450

• Return to original texts

• connection to ancient authors

• new sense of confidence

• search for lost works

• copy, preserve, disseminate

• revive perfect Latin style

• imitate literary forms

• emulate handwriting

Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459)

Poggio Bracciolini’s handwriting

Carolingian miniscule

• primarily an educational movement?

• from C15th new schools focus on studia humanitatis

• ethics, poetry, history, rhetoric, grammar

• skills to be a good citizen

• not un-Christian

• Christian humanism

Sandro Botticelli, The Seven Liberal Arts

(c. 1484)

Humanist education

Hans Holbein the younger, Erasmus of Rotterdam (1523)

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (1486)

• high literacy rates

• vernacular literary culture

• a Republic

• Rome as a model

• chancellor from 1375

• 1396 hires Manuel Chrysoloras to teach Greek

• encouraged young humanists like Bruni, Bracciolini

Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406)

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43BC)

• Florentine humanism shaped by political context

• ‘crisis’ around 1400

• republican ‘liberty’ versus despotic ‘tyranny’

• “an affirmation of worldly values”

• the root of modern civilisation?

1955

Hans Baron (1900-1988) and Civic Humanism

Ghiberti’s winning entry for the “Gates of Paradise” of the Florentine Baptistery (1401)

Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455)

• patron of humanists

• Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), head of Platonic Academy

• public library at San Marco

• civic humanism: “the ideological and intellectual underpinning to [the Medici] seizure of power”?

Cosimo de’ Medici (1389-1464) ‘Pater patriae’

• Relationship to Rome and Byzantium

• Small and stable patrician ruling class

• Patrician humanists eg. Francesco Barbaro (1390-1454)

• work in chancellery restricted to citizens

• university at Padua

• Giovanni Caldiera (1395-1474)

• 1446 founded San Marco school

Venetian patricians (detail from Giovanni and Gentile Bellini, Sermon of St. Mark in Alexandria

(1504-7))

Humanism in Venice

Cardinal Bessarion (1403-72), whose

manuscripts became the nucleus of the

Biblioteca Marciana

Edition of Lactantius, Sweyheym and Pannartz, Subiaco, 1465

• a ‘second-rank’ humanist

• chose Venice c. 1490

• aim to make Greek and Roman classics available in print

• network of humanist contacts

• Venice as centre of humanist ‘Republic of Letters’The house of Aldus Manutius (c. 1450 – 1515) at San

Stae

Aldus’ octavo edition of Catullus (1501)

Agnolo Bronzino, Portrait of a

Young Man, 1530s

•vernac translation

Vernacular translation of a classical text (Venice,1518)

Pedro Berruguete, Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and His Son Guidobaldo (c. 1475)

Raphael, The

School of Athens (Vatican, 1510-11)

“[humanism] persuaded Italian and ultimately European society that without its

lessons no one was fit to rule or lead”, that “classical learning was an essential

ingredient of gentility, a necessary qualification for membership of the social elite”

[Robert Black, Renaissance Thought, 93-4]