Minor Assignment - The Early Renaissance (13 min 24 sec)

Watch the three videos below then take the quiz.

VIDEO 1

The key to understanding the Renaissance is understanding the concept of Humanism. Watch the video below to learn how the reintroduction of Ancient Greek and Roman Humanist ideas created deep and significant changes throughout Europe and helped lay down the foundations of the Modern World. After watch, take the quiz.

Transcript:

Hi, my name is Paul Sergeant. Welcome once again to AP Euro bit-by-bit, in which I'm taking modern European history and breaking it down into small pieces so that you can better understand it. Today's question: What was humanism? Let's take a look.

So, to begin with, what was humanism? Humanism was an intellectual movement. That's why there's an 'ism' on the end. Those three letters signify belief in something, and throughout European history, we were overloaded with 'isms'. Why? Well, Europe is a land of ideas in action. Generally speaking, ideas are formulated before actions are taken, and that's going to be a constant theme throughout the modern age.

So, humanism, or Renaissance humanism as it's also referred to, was the renewed belief in the value and power of the individual. Throughout the Middle Ages, the general concept of man's place in the universe was one of obedience. People were expected to live their lives to worship God, and they were asked by the church to earn their way into heaven by following the sacraments and through good works.

In the 14th century, intellectuals began to question this purely religious view of life on Earth. They studied the classical languages of Greek and Latin in order to read the wisdom of writers from the ancient world. When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, many of those ancient texts and the scholars who kept them made their way to Italy, which reintroduced a treasure trove of writings to Western Europe. So suddenly, the ideas of ancient writers became available to a whole new audience. Ancient values such as civic virtue became subjects of conversation, and as more people started reading these texts, the demand for layin schools, you know, for schools run outside the realm of monastic communities and outside of the church, increased.

Wealthy families began to support the schools and send their children to the schools to learn Greek and Latin and gain access to ancient ideas. The problem was that some of those ideas came into conflict with the teaching and doctrine of the Catholic Church. Humanism had at its core the belief in two things: individualism and secularism, that is a departure from religion. However, it's important to understand that humanists didn't really reject Catholicism and they didn't reject religion. What they wanted to do is they wanted to take the ideas of the Ancients and use education to better understand the world while still retaining their Catholic beliefs.

Now maybe what I said just doesn't make sense, but if you bear with me, I think it'll all kind of come together. What we need to do now that we understand what humanism is is to take a look at four of the most influential humanist thinkers.

Petrarch is generally regarded as the father of the Renaissance. Writing in the 14th century, he was the first guy who looked at the Middle Ages as a period of darkness and promoted the belief that medieval culture was ignorant of classical ideals. He was totally wrong about this, and every medieval scholar today can come up with a long list of reasons why he was wrong. But Petrarch understood that new movements need to set themselves apart from the current society, so he might have overstated things a little bit. He scoured the monasteries of Europe for ancient texts and promoted the study of classical Latin. We're talking about the time of Julius Caesar, that sort of period. He also promoted the use of something called the vernacular, those are the spoken languages throughout Europe. In his case, it was Italian. He promoted these in writing instead of the medieval Latin that monks and church scholars were using at the time.

By the 15th century, writers began identifying themselves as humanists. Lorenzo Valla from Rome dedicated his adult life to use his humanist education to help the church. He even tried to get the job of papal secretary but was unsuccessful. So he set off around Europe, intensely studying Greek and Latin, finding every text he possibly could, and he pushed the concept that classical Latin, especially that of about the two hundred years surrounding the birth of Christ, was the purest, most beautiful form of Latin in history. Now, we all know that languages change over time, and he wanted to restore Latin to its rightful position over the vernacular. Now, Valla's deep understanding of Latin and its development over time led to some trouble. His studies brought to his attention a thing called the Donation of Constantinople. This is a document in which the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century gave vast amounts of land to the Catholic Church. What Valla found was that the Latin used in the document didn't match the Latin being used during Constantine's time, but it was actually a form of language being used around four hundred years later. In other words, he proved through linguistic analysis that the document was a fraud. Now, that didn't make his beloved Catholic Church happy, but ironically, after many years of criticism, he was named papal secretary in 1447, proving that humanism had won over tradition and orthodoxy.

In Neoplatonism, in the later 15th century, scholarly interests in the works of Plato surged, and the major figure in promoting Plato was the Florentine Marsilio Ficino. Under the patronage of Cosimo de' Medici, Ficino created and promoted the movement known as Neoplatonism. Neo, you may know, means new, so whenever you encounter movements whose name starts with neo, understand that means a revival of an old idea. But anyway, so Ficino's Neoplatonism attempted to take Plato's ideas and join them with Catholicism. It had two major components: the world was organized hierarchically, with plants at the bottom and God at the top. Man was in the middle, and man represented the link between the material realm and the spiritual realm. Second, he had this theory of platonic love, and it held that just as all people are connected in their humanity through love, so too all parts of the universe are connected through love.

Okay, so that's three writers, just one more to go. By the late 15th century, humanism had been developing for almost 100 years. It was then that Pico della Mirandola wrote one of the most famous humanist pieces of all time. It was titled "Oration on the Dignity of Man," and in it, Mirandola combined nuggets of what he called universal truth from many writers to come up with God's message to all of mankind. He believed that God had created unlimited potential in people, or as he put it, "To him it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills." In other words, God gave us all the potential to become whatever we want.

Mirandola had successfully achieved the goals of humanism. He had reconciled the pagan ideas of ancient writers with the revelations of Catholicism. But that didn't mean that humanism was finished. It would spread in northern Europe and find new scholars with new ideas. More on that another time.

So, to review, humanism was the revival of interest in the classical ideals of Greece and Rome. Humanists used their education to translate the works of classical writers and use them to better understand the universe and man's place in it. Humanism gave us the foundation for most of modern Western thought. And so, on that note, we've come to the end of the video. I hope that you've understood the concept of Renaissance humanism. And please subscribe so you get notified whenever I post new videos. Thanks for watching AP Euro bit by bit. My name is Paul Sergeant. Thanks for watching.

VIDEO 2

Transcript:

Speaker 1: We're in the Bargello, in Florence, and we're looking at the so-called "competition panels."

Speaker 2: Art historians often see these as the beginning of the Renaissance.

Speaker 1: In 1401, the Cloth Guild of Florence decided to commission a second set of doors for the Baptistry of Florence.

Speaker 2: There are three doorways in the Baptistry: the first set of doors had been made by Andrea Pisano in the 14th century, and the Cloth Guild wanted to create a second set of doors. These were enormous bronze doors, and this was a huge civic undertaking and extremely expensive.

Speaker 1: The Baptistry is historically the most important building in Florence, and in an effort to find the best sculptor, the Cloth Guild held a competition.

Speaker 2: The only two that survive of the seven entries are by Brunelleschi and Ghiberti.

Speaker 1: The Cloth Guild, when they held this competition, were very specific about what they wanted. They allocated a certain amount of bronze, they told the sculptors, they imparted to sculpt the Old Testament subject of the Sacrifice of Isaac, they dictated the number of figures and what should be included.

Speaker 2: The only other thing that I remember is that the Cloth Guild actually dictated was that all the panels had to be contained within a quatrefoil, that is this Gothic shape.

Speaker 1: To really fun to look at both of these panels and think about why the Guild chose the one ... and which one was better and for what reasons.

Speaker 2: In this story, God commands Abraham to kill his only son Isaac, to sacrifice Isaac.

Speaker 1: They have to remember that Abraham went for a very long time in his life with no children and so his son meant everything to him. His son was a miracle. Now God is commanding him to murder his son, and Abraham is taking God's words very seriously. This is a moment of crisis, a moment of faith. Will he allow everything in his life to be subserving to God's will?

Speaker 2: So, Abraham takes Isaac to the mountain where God has told him to go and takes a knife to Isaac's throat, and is about to kill his son when an Angel appears and stops him.

Speaker 1: God provides a ram instead for Abraham to sacrifice, so Isaac is spared, and Abraham is spared this terrible fate of having to slay his only son.

Speaker 2: I'm particularly fond of the way the Angel flies in in both panels to save the day. In the Ghiberti, it's far less dramatic. We have an Angel... but in Brunelleschi's version, the Angel is grasping Abraham's hand and literally stops him in the very moment when the knife meets Isaac's throat.

Speaker 1: It's also a kind of intensity with Isaac's head pushed back by Abraham, and there is also a kind of violence that seems to be in process.

Speaker 2: In the Ghiberti's, it's interesting; the Angel is separated, there isn't the same continuity of form.

Speaker 1: I think there's more complexity in Ghiberti's, emotionally: Abraham looks reluctant, this isn't something he wants to do, pulled the knife back, is looking at Isaac, but there is a sense of unwillingness, it's like a second of pausing because of this terrible thing that he has been commanded to do.

Speaker 2: It's interesting that the Ghiberti up shows us a form nude and presents that nude us in the most direct way, whereas the Brunelleschi is upon one knee has a ...cloth and is twisted and stirred ... that we see in the Ghiberti the direct perform into Greek and Roman sculpture and it is really very beautifully done.

Speaker 1: This also an interesting quarrel ...in both panels... the physical relationship of the father and the son.

Speaker 2: In the Ghiberti, you have the gentle arching, whereas in the Brunelleschi, you have a diagonal which is more energized and more violent, as well.

Speaker 1: To me, the Brunelleschi is a little scarier.

Speaker 2: It is scary!

Speaker 1: Well, apparently the Guild agreed.

Speaker 2: There's no written record of why they chose what they get.

Speaker 1: That's right, but... automatically was the Ghiberti that got the commission all those sum accounts say that they both won, but Ghiberti actually was chosen to carry out the commission.

Speaker 2: In the Ghiberti, you have that rocky mountain that unifies he scene. It seems ...flood down almost like water from the...

Speaker 1: There's a sense in the Brunelleschi more of separate parts being...

Speaker 2: In fact, Brunelleschi cast many of the ... separately and then put them together, and the Ghiberti's is casted only from two pieces of bronze.

Speaker 1: There may be one other element that helped to sway at the decision and that is the Ghiberti used less bronze than Brunelleschi.

Speaker 2: And remember bronze is extremely expensive, and when you multiply this to all of the panels of the door that would have been significant. In any case, in the end, Ghiberti gets the commission, produces the doors and they are such a triumph that he is automatically commissioned to produce a third set of doors.

Speaker 1: And Brunelleschi will take this opportunity to move beyond sculpture, go for Rome and study ancient Roman architecture and ancient Roman sculpture. He, of course, came back to Florence, triumphing ultimately with major commissions like the Dome.

VIDEO 3

Watch the following video then take the quiz.

Transcription:

Through your book and through some other videos, you haven't been introduced to some of the reasons for the Italian Renaissance. You know these concepts of humanism and how it has been sort of brought back, this revival of classical Greek and Roman thought, Greek and Roman culture. But what causes proliferation of Renaissance ideas in the arts? Well, there are several major factors here. One of them is economic prosperity. There is more money, especially at this point in history in Italy. There are a lot of factors contributing to this, but one of the major factors is exploration and colonization, and just in general, an increase in trade. This is creating an economic boom, especially in Italy and especially in Florence, Italy, which is really the birthplace of the Renaissance.

Another major factor is the rise of merchants and banking families within Florence. These families, very powerful families like the Medici family, for instance, are hiring many artists to decorate their homes and their palaces and their villas. This is giving Renaissance artists a lot more freedom because when you're only patronized by the Catholic Church, well, there are limitations to the kinds of experimentations that artists could do within a church. But if you are a private homeowner, you're a wealthy family like the Medici family, then your artists are given a lot more room to experiment, a lot more room to try things.

Another major change in Renaissance art is the way artists perceive themselves and the way other people perceive artists. Before the Renaissance, artists are primarily seen as craftspeople. You hire an artist to do a certain job, and you may hire that artist based on their skill and also how much they're going to charge you, kind of the typical things that we hire any sort of craft person for. But something begins to change in the Renaissance that is significant. The idea is that only God can make a tree, but an artist can make a copy of that tree, and that makes that artist special, that gives them a touch of the divine.

Couple that with this idea of Renaissance individualism, this Renaissance concept of self-improvement, and what you get is this idea of the superstar artist. A hundred years before, in the Middle Ages, the idea of a famous artist would have been absurd. It would have been ridiculous; there would have been no such thing as a famous artist. But because of this idea that the artists have the touch of the divine, that changes that. Also, this idea that self-improvement is important because part of Renaissance humanism is this idea that not only can man improve himself, but man should improve himself. Man has a moral obligation to God to improve himself. God gave us a brain; God gave us these hands to make things, to build things with. If we don't use these gifts that God has given to us, then we are sort of morally at fault. That is almost an affront to God.

So how do these changes manifest themselves in art? Well, there are several different identifying factors of Renaissance art, but what it boils down to is there's an increase in realism, there is an interest in the human anatomy, there is a development of the technique of chiaroscuro, which uses value and shading to create the illusion of a three-dimensional object, and there is the development of a technique that you guys should already be familiar with, called linear perspective.

Linear perspective and realism kind of go hand in hand. The Middle Ages rejected realism because they associated it with paganism. There was also the fear that realism could lead to idol worship, so in the Middle Ages, art became more abstract, and realism sort of went away, and eventually, artists lost the ability to create realistic-looking works of art because the skills weren't needed. But in the Renaissance, that realism comes back, and one of the ways that realism manifests itself is through linear perspective, this very mathematically precise way of visualizing three-dimensional space.

The third major factor of Renaissance art is the interest in the human body, especially in the nude form. In the Renaissance, we see the reintroduction of nudity, primarily through Donatello's sculpture of David for the Medici family. There's that very powerful family again, but this is the first monumental nude created since classical antiquity, since the age of the Roman Empire.

So what we're seeing here in the Renaissance is a tremendous change in the arts because humanism brings in a whole new way of looking at the role of the artist and what art should look like. It's going to eventually trickle out of Italy and influence the rest of Europe and then eventually will become the foundation of how artists are perceived and what art is supposed to look like, well up until the modern day.