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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Kenneth Clark's Civilisation
Chapter 4
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The men who had made Florence the richest city in Europe, the bankers and wool-merchants, the pious realists, lived in grim defensive houses strong enough to withstand party feuds and popular riots.
They don't foreshadow in any way the extraordinary episode in the history of civilisation known as the Renaissance. There seems to be no reason why suddenly out of the dark, narrow streets there arose these light, sunny arcades with their round arches 'running races in their mirth' under their straight cornices... they totally contradict the dark Gothic style that preceded, and, to some extent, still surrounds them.
What has happened?
The Pazzi Chapel, built by the great Florentine Brunellesco in about 1430, is in a style that has been called
His friend and fellow-architect, Leon Battista Alberti, addressed man in these words:
'To you is given a body more graceful than other animals, to you power of apt and various movements, to you most sharp and delicate senses, to you wit, reason, memory like an immortal god.'
Well, it is certainly incorrect to say that we are more graceful than other animals, and we don't feel much like immortal gods at the moment. But in 1400 the Florentines did.
For thirty years the fortunes of the republic, which in a material sense had declined, were directed by a group of the most intelligent individuals who have ever been elected to power by a democratic government. From Salutati onwards the Florentine chancellors were scholars, believers in the studia humanitatis, in which learning could be used to achieve a happy life, believers in the application of free intelligence to public affairs, and believers, above all, in Florence...
The dignity of man. Today those words die on our lips. But in fifteenth-century Florence their meaning was still a fresh and invigorating belief.
Gianozzo Manetti, a humanist man of action, who had seen the seamy side of politics, nevertheless wrote a book entitled On the Dignity and Excellence of Man. And this is the concept that Brunellesco's friends were making visible.
Round the merchants' church of Orsanmichele are life-size figures of the saints... They show the ideal of humanity that presided over these mundane activities. The grandest of all testimonies to the dignity of man is by another member of the same group, Masaccio, in the series of frescoes he painted in the church of the Carmine. What characters they are: morally and intellectually men of weight, the least frivolous of men, infinitely remote from the gay courtiers of Jean de Berry -- who were only thirty years older. They have the air of contained vitality and confidence that one often sees in the founding fathers of a civilisation -- the ones that come first to my mind are the Egyptians of the first four dynasties...
... But has [perspective in painting] anything to do with civilisation? When it was first invented I think it had. The belief that one could represent a man in a real setting and calculate his position and arrange figures in a demonstrably harmonious order, expressed symbolically a new idea about man's place in the scheme of things and man's control over his own destiny...
... Alberti, the quintessential early Renaissance man, left us his self-portrait on two bronze reliefs. What a face! Proud and alert, like a wilful, intelligent race-horse. Alberti also wrote an autobiography and, as we should expect, he is not inhibited by false modesty. He tells us how the strongest horses trembled under him, how he could throw further, and jump higher, and work harder than any man.
... 'A man can do all things if he will.' How naive Alberti's statement seems when one thinks of that great bundle of fears and memories that every individual carries around with him; to say nothing of the external forces which are totally beyond his control.
Giorgione, the passionate lover of physical beauty, painted a picture of an old woman and called it col tempo -- 'with time'... It is one of the first masterpieces of the new pessimism -- new, because without the comfort of religion -- that was to be given final expression by Hamlet.
The few had gone too far away from the many, not only in knowledge and intelligence -- this they always do -- but in basic assumptions.
When the first two generations of humanists were dead their movement had no real weight behind it, and there was a reaction away from the human scale of values.
Fortunately, they left in sculpture, painting, architecture, a message to every generation that values reason, clarity and harmonious proportion, and believes in the individual.
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