At the time when he attended the council, he was in the service of the papacy. From Constance he made several manuscript-hunting expeditions into parts of Switzerland, France and Germany. His discoveries included a number of Cicero's orations, a complete copy of Quintilian's Institutio oratoria The education of an orator and the poem of Lucretius, De rerum natura On the nature of things. Four of Cicero's orations that he found are not known to exist in any other copies; he may, therefore, have preserved them from being lost forever.
By the main body of the surviving Latin classics had been made available. In the meantime the recovery of classical Greek literature in the original language had begun.
From to , in Florence, a learned Greek, Manuel Chrysoloras, taught the language to some of the most brilliant and promising scholars in the city. One of them was Leonardo Bruni , who used his knowledge of Greek to translate books by several authors, including Demosthenes, Plutarch, Xenophon, and especially Plato and Aristotle.
Another distinguished pupil of Chrysoloras was Guarino Guarini, or Guarino da Verona, who later became one of the most distinguished humanist teachers. He lived from to in the household of Chrysoloras in Constantinople, mastering Greek and acquiring Greek manuscripts.
Something will be said later about his work as an educator. The spreading knowledge of the Greek language in Italy stimulated a search for Greek manuscripts. Before the coming of Chrysoloras, very few such manuscripts had existed in Italy, but during the fifteenth century this deficiency was made up, until all the principal poets and prose writers, and many minor authors, were represented. Italians went to the East, where such manuscripts were available, and brought them back.
Guarino collected more than fifty during his stay in Constantinople. The greatest collector of Greek works was Giovanni Aurispa, who, in , on his return from Constantinople to Italy, possessed a library of manuscripts, most of which were classical Greek works. With the invention of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century, it became possible to turn out in large quantities texts of classical writings. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the great bulk of all known classical literature, both Greek and Roman, came from the press.
Although printing was not an Italian invention, most of the first editions of the classics were printed in Italy until about the time of the Sack of Rome. The greatest of the early Italian printers was Aldo Manuzio of Venice, whose work will be more fully discussed in Chapter 9. However, it became clear that, in recovering the knowledge of antiquity, books were not the only source of information; knowledge could also be gained from coins, inscriptions, and the monuments and other physical remains of the ancient world.
Thus a beginning was made in the studies of numismatics, epigraphy and archaeology. Cola di Rienzo and Petrarch had glimpsed the historical importance of the ruins of ancient Rome and deplored the way that they had been neglected and pillaged. Poggio Bracciolini collected inscriptions in Rome, and in one of his books described the ancient ruins. Cyriacus of Ancona c. The humanists came to enjoy a considerable prestige.
One sign of this is that they were employed for important public offices, such as chancellor of Florence. The Florentine chancellor was in charge of the city's correspondence with other states, and the position came to he held by leading humanists. The first of these was Coluccio Salutati , who held the post from until his death. He was also the center of the Florentine humanistic circle and in that capacity exerted considerable influence on some of the leading intellectuals of the time.
He was largely responsible for the invitation to Chrysoloras to come to Florence. Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini, both future Florentine chancellors and leaders of the humanistic movement, were in their youth disciples of his, as were many others who attained scholarly distinction.
Salutati was a conscious and active promoter and member of the humanistic movement. In a letter he wrote when very young to a friend of Petrarch, Francesco Nelli, he makes the claim that through the efforts of Petrarch and Nelli, the Muses are returning to their songs and the springs of inspiration are gushing once more.
This is one of the earliest references to a revival of letters, which helped to establish the idea of a rebirth or Renaissance. When the new learning, or humanism, was attacked, he came to its defense. On several occasions he wrote defenses of poetry against its detractors basing his justification partly on moral grounds by the assertion that the poet's task is to praise virtue and attack vice. He also asserted that poetry should be interpreted allegorically, a doctrine that had been held by Petrarch, in whose opinion poetry was to teach important truths indirectly.
The idea was a familiar one; in the Divine Comedy , Dante expected the reader to dig beneath the surface for the deeper meanings. At the time of his death, Salutati was working on a defense of poetry; in the part that he finished, he declared poetry to be the greatest of all the arts and sciences, and the summation of them. Salutati was religious and patriotic, and the two things went hand-in-hand for him.
He believed that man best served God in active participation in public life rather than in solitary contemplation. In accordance with his combination of civic activism and religious and moral earnestness, he felt, like Petrarch, that the only valuable branch of philosophy was moral philosophy, and he helped to establish this as the standard humanist position.
Salutati was a devout Christian. In spite of his admiration for the classical authors, he condemned their philosophy when it contradicted Christian doctrine. The ancients, according to him, went astray with their erroneous belief that a virtuous life was possible without God. In spite of his devotion to the active life, he also wrote of the joys of monasticism. I n the hands of a genius, humanism could become a powerful force. Its critical method and outlook, when applied to the ancient writings, meant a return to the original texts, stripped of errors of transmission and of the traditional interpretations or misinterpretations that had developed over centuries.
This method could be extended beyond classical scholarship and applied to a wide range of institutions and ideas. This is all exemplified in the work of Lorenzo Valla , possibly the most brilliant Italian humanist.
Valla was born in Rome and spent his last years there as a papal secretary and professor at the university. He also taught at Padua and served Alfonso the Magnanimous of Naples. Though he was a priest, the boldness and independence of his thought brought upon him accusations of heresy. He never denied the doctrines of the church, and in one respect may seem more narrowly orthodox than some of the other humanists; for, while they often sought to reconcile Christian teachings with the ideas of ancient philosophers, Valla rejected this endeavor.
He consistently asserted that there could be no reconciliation between pagan and Christian thought, and his works contain condemnations of philosophy. In it three speakers, a Stoic, an Epicurean, and a Christian, discuss the nature of the true good.
His Christian speaker regards the Epicurean position as closer to the Christian than the Stoic position, and some of Valla's critics accused him of really favoring the Epicurean view over the Christian.
This is probably untrue, and the Christian point of view is no doubt Valla's own. Between and he wrote a dialogue On Free Will , in which he tackled the old problem of reconciling man's freedom with God's omnipotence.
If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, then how does man have any choice between good and evil? And, if man has no capacity to make such moral choices, is it fair to punish him for choosing wrongly? Another way of putting the problem is to say that there seems to be a conflict between God's power and His goodness. If He could have saved man from sin and did not, then His goodness is in question; if He wanted to save man and could not, then it is His power that seems to be called into doubt.
One of Valla's solutions to the problem is to make a distinction between God's foreknowledge and his will. The fact that God knows what will happen does not cause it to happen. This distinction is offered as a way of saving man's freedom of will as well as the divine justice.
However, the dialogue goes on to declare that God has given to men and animals certain natures, and that they will act according to those natures; this has the effect of restricting the freedom of the will he has previously claimed. Apparently Valla was aware of his failure to solve the problem, because at the end he urges trust in God rather than reliance on reason; what we need is faith, humility, and charity. For Valla, language was supremely important, and rhetoric was the most important study.
He referred to Latin as a sacrament, as something having a divine character. He was a profound student of the language, and realized that words had been twisted out of their original meanings and that it was essential to strip off the accretions to find out what the classical writers had really said. Thus he saw the importance of philology as a tool for understanding the past. One of his most influential works was his Elegantiae linguae latinae Elegances of the Latin Language , which was first printed in and by had appeared in over sixty editions.
His purpose was to teach a correct understanding of classical usage, partly to enable his contemporaries to write correctly but chiefly to aid in the understanding of the classical authors. He applied his critical faculties beyond linguistics in a book on the monastic life De professione religiosorum written in Here he concluded that there is only one level of moral perfection for Christians, and that the monastic life cannot improve on this.
Many criticisms were leveled at monks for not living up to their rules; Valla goes much further, and takes a more radical stand, in attacking the whole monastic idea, not merely the abuse of it. Not published in Valla's lifetime, it was later found and published by Erasmus, and was based on a comparison of the received text of the New Testament, the Latin Vulgate, with the original Greek. Valla used at least three Greek manuscripts for his notes, which were grammatical rather than theological, and he found in the Latin text a number of faulty renderings of the original.
He insisted theologians must start with the grammatical sense of a Biblical passage in interpreting its meaning a radical departure from the highly figurative readings of the Bible that were standard in the Middle Ages. This approach entitles him to be considered one of the founders of modern Biblical scholarship. He had only contempt for scholastics who wrote on the New Testament without knowing Greek.
Valla also cast doubt on, or denied altogether, the authenticity of certain writings that had been long accepted by Christians, for example, the supposed correspondence between St. Paul and Seneca. Probably his most famous work today is his treatise on the Donation of Constantine , which he produced in in the service of Alfonso the Magnanimous of Naples, who was at the time in conflict with the pope.
The Donation is a document that purported to come from the hand of the emperor Constantine in the fourth century. Constantine, having been healed of leprosy by Pope Sylvester, grants to the papacy what amounts to dominion over the western half of the Roman Empire. Actually, it was an eighth-century forgery, but it had been accepted into the canon law and served as one of the bases for papal claims to temporal dominion. Valla was not the first to question it; several others, including Dante, had done so.
Valla's attack is the most famous, and made impossible any further defense of the Donation. He uses a number of different types of argument to show up the falsity of the document: arguments based on common sense, on historical analysis, and on the actual wording of the Donation. There are no records of the gift in the histories of the time, for example; this is one of his historical arguments. But the most striking line of reasoning, and the one that most effectively shows the practical importance of humanistic method, is his examination of the language in which the Donation is written.
Because of his thorough knowledge of classical Latin, he shows through numerous examples and not without sarcasm that nobody writing Latin in Constantine's time would have written that way. It was, therefore, done much later, and in barbarous Latin. Thus humanism and scholarship become weapons in the search for truth, and an important contribution is made to the methods of modern historical research.
T he humanists made great contributions to the writing of history in the modern sense. Valla, as we have seen, did much to establish critical methods for the study of the past. He studied it from the sources and without the religious preconceptions that had dominated historical writing for centuries. The most important influences on the writing of history in Christian Europe were probably the Bible and Augustine's City of God.
From these arose the conception of human history as the unfolding of the divine purpose in human affairs. Medieval chroniclers sometimes accepted uncritically into their works miraculous events, as was also true of lives of the saints, a popular form of biographical literature.
This is not to deny that valuable historical writing was done in the Middle Ages, or that there is anything inherently wrong with the interpretation of history from the Christian point of view; many distinguished scholars today present forceful arguments in favor of such an interpretation. However, it remained for the Renaissance to establish modern canons of critical investigation of the past. The Italian humanists were first in this field.
In entering the new world of historical thought, the Renaissance writers were assisted by the example of the ancients, whom they took as their models.
Of the great ancient historians, it was probably Livy who meant the most to them Livy, the patriotic Roman, holding up to his fellow countrymen the virtues of their ancestors in order to inspire them to emulation, to help them cherish their heritage and learn from the past. He accumulated an enormous library, which he made freely available to others and used himself in an effort to secure reliable texts of ancient authors. He is of special interest as a humanist who also had a serious commitment to the church and as one of the key figures in the spread of Italian humanism into eastern and central Europe.
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Please feel welcome to email Ben Leonard , our subject editor, with comments, suggestions, or questions about Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation. Not a member? Sign up for My OBO. Already a member? Donatello became renowned as the greatest sculptor of the Early Renaissance, known especially for his classical, and unusually erotic, statue of David, which became one of the icons of the Florentine republic.
Humanism affected the artistic community and how artists were perceived. While medieval society viewed artists as servants and craftspeople, Renaissance artists were trained intellectuals, and their art reflected this newfound point of view. Patronage of the arts became an important activity, and commissions included secular subject matter as well as religious. In painting, the treatment of the elements of perspective and light became of particular concern. He used perspective in order to create a feeling of depth in his paintings.
In addition, the use of oil paint had its beginnings in the early part of the 16th century, and its use continued to be explored extensively throughout the High Renaissance. Some of the first Humanists were great collectors of antique manuscripts, including Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Coluccio Salutati, and Poggio Bracciolini.
In Italy, the Humanist educational program won rapid acceptance and, by the midth century, many of the upper classes had received Humanist educations, possibly in addition to traditional scholastic ones.
Some of the highest officials of the church were Humanists with the resources to amass important libraries. Such was Cardinal Basilios Bessarion, a convert to the Latin church from Greek Orthodoxy, who was considered for the papacy and was one of the most learned scholars of his time. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. The Italian Renaissance. Search for:. Learning Objectives Describe the art and periodization of the Italian Renaissance. Renaissance artworks depicted more secular subject matter than previous artistic movements.
Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Rafael are among the best known painters of the High Renaissance. The High Renaissance was followed by the Mannerist movement, known for elongated figures. Key Terms fresco : A type of wall painting in which color pigments are mixed with water and applied to wet plaster.
As the plaster and pigments dry, they fuse together and the painting becomes a part of the wall itself. Mannerism : A style of art developed at the end of the High Renaissance, characterized by the deliberate distortion and exaggeration of perspective, especially the elongation of figures.
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