Renaissance And Renascences In Western Art

Erwin Panofsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429977329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art spans the period from the 10th to the 15th century, including discussion of the Carolingian renaissance and the 12th century proto-renaissance. Erwin Panofsky posits that there were "reanscences" prior to the widely known Renaissance that began in Italy in the 14th century. Whereas earlier renascences can be classified as revivals, the Renaissance was a unique instance that led to a wider cultural transformation.

Chapter 1
"Renaissance"—Self-Definition or Self-Deception?

I

MODERN SCHOLARSHIP has become increasingly skeptical of periodization, that is to say, of the division of history in general, and individual historical processes in particular, into what the Oxford Dictionary defines as "distinguishable portions".¹

On the one hand, there are those who hold that "human nature tends to remain much the same in all times",² so that a search for essential and definable differences between succeeding generations or groups of generations would be futile on principle. On the other, there are those who hold that human nature changes so unremittingly and, at the same time, so individually, that no attempt can and should be made to reduce such differences to a common denominator. According to this view, they are due "not so much to a general spirit of the age but rather to an individual's solution of ... problems". "What we call 'periods' are simply the names of the influential innovations which have occurred constantly in ... history", and it would therefore be more reasonable to name periods of history after individuals ("the Age of Beethoven") than to attempt their definition and characterization in general terms.³

The first, or monistic, argument can be dismissed for the simple reason that, if it were true, everything would be possible everywhere at every moment, which would make the writing of history ("a written narrative constituting a continuous methodical record, in order of time, of important events")⁴ impossible by definition. The second, or atomistic, argument—reducing periods ' to the names of influential innovations", and the "names of influential innovations" to the achievements of "individuals"—con-fronts us with the question how the historian may be able to determine whether and when an innovation, let alone an influential one, has taken place.

An innovation—the alteration of what is established"¹—necessarily presupposes that which is established (whether we call it a tradition, a convention, a style, or a mode of thought) as a constant in relation to which the innovation is a variable. In order to decide whether or not an "individual's solution" represents an "innovation" we must accept the existence of this constant and attempt to define its direction. In order to decide whether or not the innovation is "influential" we must attempt to decide whether or not the direction of the constant has changed in response to the variable. And the trouble is that both the original direction of the constant and its subsequent deflection by an innovation—not difficult to detect as long as our interests do not reach farther than, as Aristotle would say, "the voice of a herald can be heard"—may take place within territorial and chronological boundaries limited only by the observability of cultural interaction (so that a history of Europe in the age of Louis XIV, though not a history of Europe in the age of the Crusades, would legitimately include what happened in America "at the same time").

If we are concerned with the history of book printing in Augsburg at the time of Emperor Maximilian, we shall find it easy to set down the invention of detachable flourishes as an "influential innovation" attributable to Jost de Negker—though even this very specific statement presupposes some investigation of the general state of affairs in Augsburg book printing before as well as after Jost de Negker's appearance on the local scene. And if we are concerned with the history of German music from ca. 1800 to ca. 1830, we may well decide to call this period the "Age of Beethoven"²—though, in order to justify this decision, we must be able to show that the works not only of Haydn, Mozart and Gluck but also of many other German composers now nearly forgotten have so many significant features in common that they may be considered as manifestations of an "established style"; that Beethoven introduced significant features absent from this established style; and that precisely these innovations came to be emulated by a majority of such composers as had occasion to become familiar with his works.

If, on the other hand, we are concerned with the history of Italian painting in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, we shall find it very hard to designate this period by proper names. Even were we to limit ourselves to the three great centers of Florence, Rome and Venice, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giorgione, and Titian would have legitimate claims to recognition as godfathers, and we should have to contrast them with so many predecessors and followers—and, again, to point out so many characteristics in which the innovators differ from the predecessors but agree with the followers—that we might find it more convenient (and, given the existence of such marginal yet indispensable figures as Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Fiorentino, Pontormo, Sebastiano del Piombo, Dosso Dossi, or Correggio, more appropriate) to resort to generic terms and to distinguish between an "Early Renaissance" and a "High Renaissance" phase of Italian painting. And if we are concerned with the history of Western European art (or literature, or music, or religion) in its entirety, we cannot help widening—or, rather, lengthening—these generic terms into such notions as "Mycenean", "Hellenistic", "Garolingian", "Gothic"—and, ultimately, "classical", "mediaeval", "Renaissance", and "modern".

Needless to say, such "megaperiods"—as they may be called in contradistinction to the shorter ones—must not be erected into "explanatory principles"¹ or even hypostatized into quasi-metaphysical entities. Their characterization must be carefully qualified according to time and place and must be constantly redefined according to the progress of scholarship. We shall probably never agree—and, in fact, should not even try to agree in a number of cases—as to precisely when and where one period or "megaperiod" stopped and another started. In history as well as in physics time is a function of space,² and the very definition of a period as a phase marked by a "change of direction" implies continuity as well as dissociation. We should, moreover, not forget that such a change of direction may come about, not only through the impact of one revolutionary achievement which may transform certain aspects of cultural activity as suddently and thoroughly as did, for example, the Copernican system in astronomy or the theory of relativity in physics but also through the cumulative and, therefore, gradual effect of such numerous and comparatively minor, yet influential, modifications as determined, for example, the evolution of the Gothic cathedral from Saint-Denis and Sens to Amiens. A change of direction may even result from negative rather than positive innovations: just as more and more people may accept and develop an idea or device previously unknown, so may more and more people cease to develop and ultimately abandon an idea or device previously familiar; one may cite, for example, the gradual disappearance of the Greek language, the drama and the perspective representation of space from the Western scene after the downfall of the Roman Empire, the gradual disappearance of the devil from the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or the gradual disappearance of burin engraving from that of the nineteenth.

In spite of all this, however, a period—and this applies to "megaperiods" as well as to the shorter ones—may be said to possess a "physiognomy" no less definite, though no less difficult to describe in satisfactory manner, than a human individual. There can be legitimate disagreement as to when a human individual comes into being (at the moment of conception? with the first heartbeat? with the severance of the umbilical cord?); when he comes to an end (with the last breath? with the last pulse? with the cessation of metabolism? with the complete decomposition of the body?); when he begins to be a boy rather than an infant, an adult rather than a boy, an old man rather than an adult; how many of his characteristics he may owe to his father, his mother, his grandparents, or any of his ancestors. Yet, when we meet him at a given moment within a given group, we shall not fail to distinguish him from his companions; to put him down as young or old or middle-aged, tail or short, intelligent or stupid, jovial or saturnine; and ultimately to form an impression of his total and unique personality.¹

II

THE chief target of what may be called, by way of returning a compliment, the "deperiodizers" is the Renaissance—which bears a French designation in English as well as in the Germanic languages because it was in France that the meaning of the word renaissance changed from the limited but unspecific (the revival of something at any given time) to the specific but comprehensive (the revival of everything in the particular period supposed to usher in the modern age).¹

This period was confidently defined, as late as 1933, as "the great revival of arts and letters, under the influence of classical models, which began in Italy in the fourteenth century and continued during the fifteenth and sixteenth".² But there is no denying that it is particularly vulnerable to what may be called the "objection of indeterminacy" ("historians neither agree on what its essential character was nor even on when it began to show itself and when it stopped");³ and during the last forty or fifty years the "Renaissance problem" has become one of the most hotly debated issues in modern historiography.⁴

It is no longer necessary to dwell on what may be called a "Renaissance Romanticism in reverse": that twentieth-century reaction against the glorification of the Renaissance which, based on nationalistic or religious prejudice, deplored the intrusion of Mediterranean Diesseitigkeit upon "Nordic" or Christian transcendentalism in much the same way as the humanists of old had deplored the overthrow of Greek and Roman culture by ecclesiastical bigotry or "Gothic" barbarism, and which occasionally extended its hostility to classical antiquity itself.¹ Nor shall we waste any time on those ludicrous racial theories which acclaim the work of Dante, Raphael and Michelangelo as a triumph of the German blood and spirit.² Suffice it to acknowledge the fact, established by many decades of serious and fruitful research, that the Renaissance was linked to the Middle Ages by a thousand ties; that the heritage of classical antiquity, even though the threads of tradition had become very thin at times, had never been lost beyond recuperation; and that there had been vigorous minor revivals before the "great revival" culminating in the Medicean age. It has been questioned whether the role of Italy in this "great revival" was really as important as claimed by the Italians themselves, and the contribution of the North has been stressed and analyzed not only with respect to sculpture and painting but also with respect to music and poetry. It has been debated whether the Renaissance includes or excludes the fourteenth century in Italy and the fifteenth in the Northern countries; and whether the seventeenth should be interpreted as its continuation or rather (as I am inclined to believe) as the beginning of a new, fourth era of history.

Of late, however, the discussion has taken a new turn. There is a growing tendency, not so much to revise as to eliminate the concept of the Renaissance—to contest not only its uniqueness but its very e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• AUTHOR'S PREFACE
• CHAPTER I "Renaissance"—Self-Definition or Self-Deception?
• CHAPTER II Renaissance and Renascences
• CHAPTER III I Primi Lumi: Italian Trecento Painting and Its Impact on the Rest of Europe
• CHAPTER IV Rinascimento dell' Antichità: The Fifteenth Century
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX