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The Renaissance today...
What does the word "Renaissance" mean to you? In my book Botticelli's Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance, I tried to show that the Renaissance was a living concept, not merely some subject of academic study. My book was motivated by the believe that when we look at breathtaking works like Botticelli's Primavera and The Birth of Venus – and of course his Dante illustrations – we are given access to a worldview that emphasized human ingenuity's ability to solve any problem and the power of the ancient past to shape our lives in the present. It was exactly this combination of faith in the capacity of human creativity and the life-giving force of Greco-Roman antiquity that enabled Filippo Brunelleschi to design Florence's Duomo, still the world's largest brick dome, with no formal schooling in engineering. And it was this Renaissance vision that inspired Leonardo to conceive of his flying machine centuries before the first plane took flight and Michelangelo, a sculptor by training, to paint the wonder that is the Sistine Chapel.
Please enjoy this following excerpt from Botticelli's Secret on what the word Renaissance has meant in the past – and, more important, what it can continue to mean in the present...
The word Renaissance is by now so familiar that its actual meaning can become lost. It might invoke traveling bards singing of courtly love and damsels trailing ribbons from conical hats. Or it might suggest a dry subject debated over by academics who live more comfortably with the settled truths of the past than the uncertainties of the present. Whatever the word evokes, it tends to be located in what the Italians call the passato remoto—literally the remote past, but technically the past perfect: something over and done with, a matter of history and a wager with time that has been resolved. From this perspective, the Renaissance becomes merely part of what one of its most acid detractors, the great Victorian critic John Ruskin, used as the title for his autobiography: Praeterita, Latin for past tense. But to think of the Renaissance as belonging to some lost kingdom buried in the recesses of memory is a mistake. For in truth, it was only around Lippmann’s time, about a hundred and fifty years ago, that the term began to make any sense. Crucially, the word was not coined in the place and time with which it has become synonymous: fourteenth- to sixteenth-century Italy in general and Florence in particular, the epoch of artistic colossi like Leonardo and the site of such groundbreaking works as Brunelleschi’s Duomo and Michelangelo’s David. [excerpt from Botticelli's Secret]
A SMALL FAVOR TO ASK...
If you enjoyed this excerpt and Botticelli's Secret, I would greatly appreciate a brief review on Amazon at this link. The number of reviews a book receives each day helps new readers find my book – and, more important, helps me spread the word about great art like Botticelli's – grazie e buona lettura / thank you & happy reading!
Joseph
P.S. Signed copies of Botticelli's Secret are available here.
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