Renaissance [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Nowadays historians habitually break history into ages or periods—the Homeric Age; the Periclean Age; the Middle Ages; the Renaissance; the Enlightenment; and others. Among all these ages the Renaissance in Italy holds a special place. First, it is the subject of the most famous of histories of a civilization, Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, written a century ago. Because Burckhardt's book has been so long preeminent and because it focused on Italy in the 15th Century, it made the history of that place and time the forum in which the general problems of the history of civilization were earliest discussed and have been most vigorously dealt with. Thus for a long while the Renaissance was, and perhaps it still remains, the best laboratory for the study of a historical period. Moreover, the Renaissance era in Italy is the first age in the history of civilization to discover itself as an age. The Egyptians of the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and the New Empire, and the Europeans of the Middle Ages did not think of themselves as living in those particular epochs. But many of the leading men of the age of the Renaissance were acutely conscious of living in a new era of human history, an era marked primarily not by its political organization or its religion, but by its civilization. In Renaissance, Professor John Hale has performed a remarkable and admirable threefold feat of history writing. In the first place he has captured and transmitted the sense of excitement with which Italians of the Renaissance greeted their two great discoveries—their discovery of classical antiquity and their correlative discovery of themselves. These two produced a burst of achievement in scholarship, literature and especially in architecture, sculpture and painting, that has ever since remained a wonder of the world. As his story gradually comes to a brilliant focus on the living center of the Renaissance, the city of Florence in the 15th Century, Professor Hale dispels the miasma of myth that for some has concealed rather than disclosed the age of the Renaissance—a spurious compound of frivolity, swagger, unrestrained violence, uninhibited lechery and unlimited assassination. The creators of Renaissance Florence were sober men, mostly businessmen, family men, and in an unspectacular way religious men; and they built a soberly beautiful city whose great monuments are its magnificent religious buildings and its great private houses and the paintings and sculptures with which its citizens adorned them. Secondly, having engaged his readers with the spirit of the Renaissance, Professor Hale stands back from the spectacle and seeks the peculiar conjuncture of circumstances that fostered that extraordinary flowering of genius, 500 years ago, which had as its center a city a good bit smaller than Trenton, New Jersey. Employing the best and newest historical investigations, he relates the geography of Italy, the economic and social characteristics of the life of its cities, its eccentric political development, and the intellectual labors of its scholars to the achievements of the Renaissance. Finally he adapts his prose style to his purpose; for he writes like what he writes about. His style is clear, vigorous and sober, yet illuminated with flashes of wit and sharpened by shrewd, hard-headed observations. In this he writes in a way that harmonizes elegantly with the way the Florentines, who above all made the Renaissance, lived. J. H. HEXTER Yale University