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History and Evolution:
By William E. Steinman:
Part 53, Renaissance Men 4:
March 29, 2004:
In this essay I continue with the study of Renaissance men.
One influential English educator was William of Waynflete (1395-1486). He was a scholar who made the rounds so to speak. He was master of Winchester College, a fellow and provost at Eton, and a bishop of Winchester in 1447, thanks to King Henry VI. He founded what later became Magdalen college at the University of Oxford. He suppressed a few monasteries to get the funding for his good works. On the up side, Magdalen became a center for Renaissance studies in England. Waynflete was also the lord chancellor of England from 1456 to 1460. At this time, the War of Roses was in progress and things took a bad turn for the house of Lancaster in 1460 when the Yorkshiremen creamed them at Northampton. Even though a favorite of the mad King Henry, Waynflete suffered no harm. He did resign his post as chancellor but remained on good terms with the succeeding monarchs.
Now, back to Italy. One thing we cannot help but notice is the ongoing influence of the Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire) on the European renaissance. This Eastern Empire began when Constantine I established his capital at Constantinople. Recall that the Roman Empire split into the Eastern and Western Empires in 395. The Western Empire fell in the 5th century, but the Eastern half continued for several more centuries.
This Byzantine empire was the home of the Eastern Orthodox Church which had also split from the Roman Church. That schism began in 1054. The Byzantine empire included the Balkan Peninsula which for sure included Greece. Thus the Graeco-Roman civilization was harbored and continued to thrive even as the Western world degenerated into chaos. It was from this core of Greek and Roman scholarship that the renaissance rediscovered the classic literature and values of the ancient world.
One of these Byzantine scholars was George of Trebizond (1396-1486) George was a humanist, Greek scholar, and Aristotelian debate wiz. When he was a youngster, Italy was becoming the place to be, so he went there. He quickly excelled and became a professor of Greek at Vicenza and later at Venice. He became the best of the best in scholarship to the extent that Pope Eugenius IV took him on as private secretary where he joined the faculty at Sapienza academy. He did a great deal of writing and though criticized by some for carelessness, he did contribute appreciably to Italian humanism and the Renaissance.
Now we get to Gutenberg (1400-1468) and his printing press. I have covered this in the History and Evolution essay 46. Let's just take a brief review. In about 1455, according to most accounts, Gutenberg invented the movable type press and printed the Mazarin Bible, the first book ever printed in Europe using movable type. We could make a case for this being the most important development of the renaissance. For the first time, the power of written communication was taken from the popes and princes and became the property of everyman. It took a while, but, in time, anyone who could pay the printer could have his own voice in the affairs of man. Come the enlightenment, that voice proved to be too much for some kings. The tide was turned forever by a handful of thoughtful philosophers using the printed word.
One major characterize of the renaissance was the ongoing struggle to reconcile what was going on intellectually with the Christian theology. One of the men who joined that struggle was Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464). This guy was a German prelate, scientist, and philosopher who later became a Cardinal. That puts him in the court of the Neoplatonists. Neoplatonism combines some elements of Platonism with mysticism and some of the classic Judaic/Christian concepts.
Nicholas stressed the incompleteness of our knowledge of God and nature. He insisted that God alone is absolute and infinite. He eschewed the Aristotelian principles of contradictions arguing that God is infinite wherein opposites coincide. It's all quite metaphysical, but then so is God. So man must be satisfied with his approximations of truth. The absolute truth will always escape man and his only respectable attitude is one of learned ignorance. Okay! That has always worked for me, but someone ought to explain it to Falwell and his band of bible thumpers. They claim to know the truth.
At this time of the renaissance, Many other thinkers were also abandoning Aristotelianism and turning to Neoplatonism. The Platonism of the Renaissance was a continuation of the Platonism of the Middle Ages. This was the new direction of Christian philosophers. Nicholas also had an interesting theory about celestial bodies. He claimed the universe reflects God's perfection and is relatively infinite. It has no circumference for it is limited by nothing outside itself. Furthermore Earth is not at the center of the universe and it is not at rest. Place and motion are not absolute, but relative to the observer. Think Albert Einstein.
Born in the same year as NIcholas was the great Italian painter, Masaccio, AKA Tommaso Guidi (1401-1428). As you can see, his life was cut very short. There is not much information about his training or his death. He simply died in Rome of some unknown cause. What we have remaining are paintings done by him and that's about all. Artistic historians are intrigued by the fact that there is no record of his training in art. It's as though he just magically became a full blown accomplished artist.
Looking at his work, however, the experts find that Masaccio followed the style of Giotti and carried it to its logical conclusion. His treatment of space, light, and the human figure show a clear Giotti influence. So, how did he become such a great painter. I can dismiss, as professional arrogance, the notion of the painter historians that some other painter must have taught him. Until someone shows me otherwise, I will assume he was a genius who taught himself. There is plenty of precedent for that in history. Perhaps he studied Giotti's work and simply carried it on.
However he managed it, he did produce outstanding works of art. Immediately his work influenced many of his contemporaries. It was to later influence the work of such greats as Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. He helped to initiate many of the conceptual foundations of Western Painting.
Let's take one more Italian Painter, Leone Battista, Alberti (1404-1472). Alberti was also an architect, musician, and humanist. He was formally educated in humanist principles and Latin, at a boarding school in Padua. Then he studied law at the University of Bologna where he receive a doctorate in canon law. He was clever and rose to be a secretary in the Papal Chancery in Rome. The Papal Chancery supported a number of humanist philosophers. In Rome, he received a commission to rewrite the lives of saints and martyrs in classical Latin. He also took holy orders and rose in the church to some level of power.
Although a churchman his interest turned more to secular activities. He wrote a number of dialogues on moral philosophy. This established his reputation as an ethical thinker and literary stylist. Though he based them on the styles of classical works, he wrote the dialogues in the vernacular of his time, Italian. Thus he reached a broad urban public. He wrote on issues pertinent to the concerns of the middle class such as education and obligation to the community. There were no ivory tower ideals. His morality stressed the ethics of work, striving, and producing.
His work was ever practical in nature. for example he wrote the first work on geography since the beginning of the dark ages. He laid out the rules for surveying and mapping a land area. It seems this work influenced the surveying work of future centuries. Later he wrote a monumental theoretical work on architecture called "The Ten Books on Architecture." This made his reputation in yet another field. The study became the primary text of Renaissance architecture. Not satisfied with just writing about it, he designed and built several outstanding examples.
Back in Rome, Alberti wrote the first grammar book ever and
showed Italian to be every bit as regular as Latin and suitable
for literary work. Then he wrote a primer on a somewhat related
subject, cryptography. His final work was the dialog "On
the Man of Excellence and Ruler of His Family." It was a
powerful work expressing the complete ideals of public-spirited
Humanism. To say that Alberti was the perfect personification
of the renaissance man may be an understatement.
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