Atlas of the Renaissance [antikvár]

FOREWORD Among the many value-laden terms that historians use to segment and to describe the past, "Renaissance" is perhaps the most powerful, and the most evocative. For the concept of rebirth applied to a civilization implies both a prior death and a prospective growth; it carries within it both the notion of dependence upon a pagan past and, in accordance with the potent Christian myth, the promise of a better life to come. That the beginnings of the modern world should now be characterized not just as a renaissance - for there had been others - but as the Renaissance, attests to a striking, and perhaps undue, optimism on the part of posterity as to the permanent potential of human society for self-improvement. Yet this Renaissance is not purely the invention of modern historians, even if the term itself was not used in English until the early 19th century: 14th- and 15th-century Italians were already alert to changes in their society, and most especially in their culture, that they were anxious to promote as a bringing back to the light, or to life, of the values of an earlier age. They themselves believed that something was indeed being reborn. At the same time, and as a consequence of their determination to proclaim their own progress, they came slowly to view the past in unfavorable terms anticipating that other fundamental concept of modern historiography, the Middle Ages: a fallow period (which of course it was not) of perhaps a thousand years that lay between their own age and the glories of classical antiquity. The 500th anniversaries celebrated in 1992 -of Columbus's voyage and the death of Lorenzo de' Medici - have tended to concentrate attention on two particular aspects of the Renaissance: exploration and the expansion of the known world, and the role of powerful statesmen not merely as politicians but also as patrons, or at least as focal points of cultural activity. But the widening horizons did not necessarily betoken a brave new Renaissance world across the seas, nor were all despots enlightened patrons of the arts and sciences. Fifteenth-century Florence was indeed a brilliant center for new developments in Europe in 1993 Geography played an imponant role in determining the location and spread of the Renaissance, focused as it was initially in the trading cities of the Mediterranean and only later spreading north of the Alps. Yei the Renaissance also determined the geography of Europe in a very real sense. This was the great age of discovery and cartography, which literally put Europe "on the map"; and, equally imponant. Renaissance ideas were criricai to the consolidation of some of Europe's most enduring France and Spain. Even Germany and Italy, which were not unified politically until the late 19th centuries, acquired a decisive national consciousness during the years of the Renaissance. i'-' - b I'- . V 'rnSA^^ I' I'l ¦ , V' i'rf M- •VfV«, m^Mm