4.2 Religion and Philosophy
Humanism
Humanism was the educational and intellectual program of the Renaissance. Grounded in Latin and Greek literature, it developed first in Italy in the middle of the fourteenth century and then spread to the rest of Europe by the late fifteenth century. This program, called the studia humanitatis, or the humanities, was thought to teach citizens the morals necessary to lead an active, virtuous life, which its proponents contrasted with the contemplative life of ascetic monks and scholars. As a product of the Italian city-state republics, humanism was a system born in the city and made for the citizen. Although scholars in earlier centuries had embraced classical learning, humanists rediscovered many lost texts, read them with a critical and secular eye, and, through them, forged a new mentality that shaped Italian and European society from from approximately the mid-14th to the mid-17th centuries.
Origins
Although humanist ideas had circulated in Italy since the late twelfth century, their main proponent was the Florentine poet, Francesco Petrarch. Born into an exiled family, Petrarch grew up in the French city of Avignon and attended law school in Bologna. Inspired by his love of antiquity and the Latin writings of Cicero, Petrarch rejected the legal profession to pursue the life of a poet and collector of ancient texts. He spent much of his free time hunting for lost and neglected works of classical authors and twice found major caches of Cicero’s writing, most notably an unknown collection of Cicero’s letters, the Epistolae ad Atticum, in the chapter library of the Verona Cathedral in 1345. He copied the manuscript in the library and soon circulated it among his friends and associates. By the fifteenth century, through the efforts of Petrarch and his followers, Cicero’s taut, philosophical style of writing became the standard in Latin prose.
Through these letters and other ancient texts, Petrarch was able to enter the Roman world so distant to him. Petrarch was the first scholar to recognize the cultural gap between his own age and Cicero’s. Of course, previous scholars throughout the middle ages made use of classical literature, but they read these texts through strict religious lenses and saw themselves inhabiting the same culture as Julius Caesar and emperor Augustus. It was just a world grown old and ruined by time. Petrarch, with his historical consciousness, recognized that he and his fellow Italians were living in a world starkly different from their Roman ancestors with a different set of values. Petrarch advocated reading Cicero and other Roman authors as a means of finding models for eloquence and exemplary comportment.
To highlight this cultural gap between ancient Rome and fourteenth-century Italy, Petrarch envisioned a new way of conceptualizing the past. He portrayed antiquity as a golden age, replete with virtuous men, great deeds, and good morals. It was the period from the fall of Rome right up to his own age that was, to his thinking, the dark age. Indeed, Petrarch coined the term “medio evo” (middle ages) to connote the decline of Roman values, letters, and arts. Petrarch greatly exaggerated the decline of culture in the middle ages with its towering cathedrals and innovations in trade, science, and theology. Regardless, Petrarch pictured his age as a rinascita (rebirth) of classical learning and culture, and created an image of the middle ages as dark and ignorant—an idea that still persists (problematically) to this day.
Petrarch’s tolling of the bell to revive Roman antiquity reached appreciative ears. By the early fifteenth century, humanists actively scoured dusty monastic libraries in Italy, France, and Germany, finding more letters of Cicero, Lucretius’s Epicurean poem, On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura), and a host of other ancient texts. Greek scholars, fleeing from the Ottoman attacks on the Byzantine Empire, brought Homer, Plato, Sophocles, and other Greek manuscripts to Italy, as well as taught ancient Greek to a generation of humanists, hungry for learning and for a connection with antiquity.
Who Were the Humanists?
Humanists were a diverse group as individuals but shared a common passion for antiquity and for Latin prose and rhetoric. Most humanists came from relatively well-heeled backgrounds—they were sons of noblemen, patricians, merchants, and notaries. Many patrician women, like Laura Cereta and Isotta Nogarola, were able to acquire a humanist education and take part in the intellectual life of the renaissance, but moralists frequently discouraged them from pursuing the active life of a teacher, professor, or writer. Nogarola, a writer from Verona, had acquired an education in the studia humanitatis and entered into debates on the role of women in Renaissance society with male humanists. Due to the hostile reception of her activity in humanist circles that questioned her chastity, she retired from the public, never married, and concentrated on sacred literature rather than secular writings. Patrician and noble women, however, often expressed their humanist interests by commissioning works of arts inspired by the classical tradition. Isabella d’Este, the Marquise of Mantua, gained fame as a patron of such Renaissance painters as Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Mantegna, and Pietro Perugino.
However, many humanists came from humbler backgrounds but managed to obtain their education through patronage, natural talent, and hard work. Indeed, humanists were the first western scholars to argue for a nobility of spirit, based on merit and skill, rather than a nobility of blood, based on lineage and ancestry. Most humanists found work as professors, librarians, and secretaries for princes and state chanceries. The prime goal of most humanists was to find a patron willing to support their intellectual activities. Petrarch was able to retire in a villa in the Euganean Hills thanks to patronage from the Carrara despots of Padua. Cosimo de’ Medici allowed Marsilio Ficino the use of his villa in Careggi as a writing retreat. With secure positions, humanists could complete their work in exchange for writing poems, orations, and histories that extolled the virtue, power, and magnanimity of their patrons. For every Petrarch and Ficino, whose fame and learning attracted patrons, there were probably ten humanists who had to scrape by as tutors or secondary-school teachers.
The Humanist Agenda
Humanists sought to rediscover lost and forgotten texts, purge them of mistakes made by monastic scribes through a rigorous philological analysis, and circulate them in handwritten copies (later, with the advent of the printing press, humanists began to publish printed versions of these texts). In the mid-fifteenth century, after the introduction of Greek texts into Italy due to Ottoman attacks on the Byzantine Empire, humanists translated these texts into Latin, making them more accessible to those who could not read Greek. They often made copious annotations in these manuscripts to help the reader understand them. Moreover, they often published their own works which consciously emulated the style and substance of the ancient authors.
At their core, humanists were educators. They devised their educational program, the studia humanitatis, in complete opposition to the Scholastic tradition (based on logic and theology) that had gained prominence in the middle ages. Humanists wanted a curriculum that would not make theologians but make citizens useful to governments and society. They placed five disciplines in the curriculum of the studia humanitatis: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy, and history. Each of these disciplines served a specific purpose in fostering virtuous, active citizens of the city-states. These subjects, based on reading Latin (and, later, Greek) authors was to arm citizens with the eloquence, morality, and examples of virtuous behavior of the ancients. The values of the ancient Romans and Greeks would perfect citizens and help them realize their potential as individuals endowed with free will to know the good and to act on it.
Like Plato and other ancient philosophers that preceded them, the humanists aspired to have princes implement their ideas of moral reform. Many, like Leon Battista Alberti, had grand visions of city-planning, which only a prince or a government could execute. Humanists also sought to change Italian society at the individual level by creating uomini universali—well-rounded men who could be useful to society.
Although having diverse views on philosophical matters, humanists were united by a secular view of humanity’s place in the world. They gave orations on and debated the idea of the dignity of man. This concept gained momentum with the revival of Neoplatonism after Marsilio Ficino’s translation of the entire corpus of Plato’s extant works in 1469 and his harmonizing of Christian theology with Platonic ideas.
Ficino’s pupil, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, took this idea further in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, written in 1486. Pico argued that in the chain of being humans occupied a privileged space due their capacity to learn and grow as individuals. They were the median between God and animal and plant life; and they could become “terrestrial gods” due to this thirst for knowledge or stagnate from ignorance. Human dignity lay in this free will—humans could choose where they stood in the chain of being and played a role in shaping themselves and the world.
Moreover, humanists not only praised human dignity but also the human body. Rather than being something to hide and be ashamed of, humanists and artists of the renaissance began to depict for the first time since antiquity favorable images of the nude human body, and on a large scale not seen since antiquity. For instance, Venus was portrayed in her classical pose, the Venus pudica—naked but modestly covering her nudity with her arms and long hair rather than as a fully clothed aristocratic woman, as medieval artists had portrayed the goddess. The motif of the Venus pudica is best represented by Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, commissioned by the Medici family in the early 1480s. Even biblical figures could be portrayed in their human nakedness. Nothing like this was possible before 1400 since medieval moralists had nothing but contempt for the human body, seeing it as a receptacle of sin and generally depicted it negatively.
Copyright: Dr. John M. Hunt, “Humanism in renaissance Italy,” in Smarthistory, August 1, 2021, accessed June 13, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/humanism-renaissance-italy/.