How Shall We Then Live 3, “The Renaissance”

The Beauty of Renaissance Art and the Rise of Humanism

It's one of the great periods of the history of man. And as far as its artworks are concerned, it's one of mankind's glories. Anyone who can walk through the museums and not be overwhelmed with the beauty of the work of its art in many, many different mediums really is a very poor man indeed.

And yet at the same time, we have to keep in mind that in the flow of the thought of man, it opens the door for humanist man in a new way. It carries this further and throws the doors wide open for all those problems that bring us right up into the period of modern man.

Through history, the artists have done two things. They have reflected their culture, sometimes much more accurately than the writers, even the philosophers. And secondly, often they provide the way for the next step that's coming in culture.

So sometimes they're a prophet, but always they're exhibiting that which is the culture of that day. The change that came with the Renaissance can clearly be observed in art. Up to that time, Florentine painting had been like Byzantine art, but even less polished, flat and without depth.

And people were not portrayed realistically as real people. Then came Giotto, and with him, radical change. He was commissioned to paint The Last Judgment. And in it, he did a realistic portrait of his patron, Enrico Scrovegni, a man who paid for the work.

Nature was given its proper place. Proper because nature is important as God made the world, and proper in the sense that nature is portrayed as it really is. On the other hand, his people are much too large for the scale of the world around them.

Look at this bridge.

How could this man fit into this observation platform, or aim a bow and arrow out of this window? The same man who painted this designed the beautiful bell tower, the Campanile, next to the cathedral in Florence.

A painter who creates buildings. We now come to a great breakthrough in Renaissance art. Masaccio, a friend of Brunelleschi, used real live faces in his work,.

Which gave a lifelike quality to it,.

Which was unique in his day. The painters who preceded Masaccio, including his own teacher, Masolino, painted their figures seemingly on tiptoe. Masaccio had the feet of his people planted firmly on the ground.

Masaccio was first to consistently use central perspective. This was a clear step ahead of the Romans, who only knew a different kind of perspective. By painting in the round, and by the use of the new perspective, his people were in the midst of realized space.

There was actually space around the people. But for the men of the Renaissance, it was something more. It placed man in the center of that space. A space subordinated to the mathematical principles that came out from the mind of man.

In Northern Europe, Jan van Eyck wrestled with the same problems in art. We're in St. Bavo Cathedral in Ghent, in Belgium. The rich, the poor, all classes and kinds of people. The people from all kinds of backgrounds are coming to Christ.

The artists appreciated and understood the biblical emphasis on Christ. He painted Christ as the Lamb of God, upright and alive upon the altar, symbolizing that he died as a substitute, a sacrifice, but that he is not now dead.

According to Jesus' own words, I am the living one who became dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, amen. Van Eyck mastered light and air and was the first grade master of landscape painting. Here is a true portrait of nature.

Nature has its proper place in the world which God has made. The writers wrote the way the painters painted. Dante, in whose house I am at Florence, was an early and ideal example of this. His work was genius at its highest level.

And the good master studying that train said, look there at that great soul that approaches and seems to shed no tears for all his pain. What kingliness moves with him even in hell? It is Jason, who by courage and good advice made off with a Colchian ram.

He made more room for nature, but following the influence of Thomas Aquinas, he mixed the Christian and the classical world. In his divine comedy, the greatest sinners were Judas, who betrayed Jesus, and Brutus and Cassius, who betrayed Caesar.

In his own life, the problem of individual things versus meaning and values was clearly demonstrated.

He loved Beatrice,.

Whom he actually only saw a couple of times in his life, and held up their love as the romantic ideal.

Seeing her face that is so fair to see, love shed such perfect sweetness over me.

But he married quite a different woman, who never had any place in his poetry. Her business was to rear his children and to cook. Although the writers of the time understood that sensual love required the spiritual, if it was to be more than merely a physical response of the passing moment.

Yet nevertheless, they allowed these two to be divided into two parts. The physical love and the idealized spiritual love. For Dante and the other writers of his time, they had two views of love. One, the idealized spiritual love directed toward a disembodied phantom.

And the other, a drey horse of a woman who kept her man's house and shared his bed. This produced not beauty, but ugliness. The Dome of Florence. Brunelleschi designed and built it. It brought together great artistic triumph with an overwhelming feat of engineering.

What is especially overwhelming is that Brunelleschi was trained not as an architect, but as a goldsmith. This building, the founding hospital, which you are now looking at, was also designed by Brunelleschi, and was the first Renaissance building.

Our emphasis was placed upon man. We know very little about those who built the Gothic cathedrals, who wrote the Gregorian chants. But now the artist himself became important. Here is a biography of Brunelleschi.

And some of his contemporaries wrote autobiographies. Sculptures, portraits, and even self-portraits of the artists began to be made. At the beginning of the Renaissance, it could have gone either way.

Nature could have had its proper place. Man could have been in his proper place and would have been absolutely beautiful. But at a certain point along in the Renaissance, the scales tipped and man put himself at the center absolutely.

And this opened the door completely to the whole destructive force of humanism that followed down through the Enlightenment and into our own day. Music was another large and important area in the time of the Renaissance.

The composers of the Renaissance invented the art of orchestration. Not only did each instrument play a different voice, but a different melody line. The North influenced the South not only in painting, but in music.

String instruments of the Renaissance were built in match sets, so that the timber was uniform from bass right through the soprano instrument. Music was printed with movable type for the first time. This is the lute, the most popular solo instrument of the Renaissance.

The sackbut, like our trombone. The vial, ancestor of our viola. The crumhorn and the spinet. Up to this time, things could have gone in one of two ways. There could have been an emphasis on real people living in a real world which God had made.

In which all individual things had importance because God had made the whole world. Or humanism could have taken over with its emphasis on the individual things.

Being autonomous.

But the die was cast. Man made himself increasingly independent. He made himself his own measure. He tried to make himself autonomous. The humanistic man of the Renaissance thought of the time before him as something unsavory.

Something to be forgotten. To him, it was the dark ages. And he thought of his own age as a great leap forward into his own period of rebirth. Or Renaissance. A rebirth of the pre-Christian golden age of ancient Greece and Rome.

Thomas Aquinas had opened the door for this with his emphasis upon the teaching of Aristotle. This is a fresco painted by Raphael in the Vatican. It is called The School of Athens. The central figures in this fresco are Plato and Aristotle.

Raphael painted the hands of these two men to represent their philosophic emphases. Plato, with his finger pointing upward, emphasized absolutes, ideals, meaning, value. But Aristotle, with his hand spread downward, emphasized the individual things.

The particulars.

Nature.

Man.

But what is the meaning of particulars, including me and you, if they have no final thing to be related to so that they have meaning? And how do we know concerning our individual acts whether they're right or wrong if there is no absolute to give us certainty?

The dilemma between any form of humanism and biblical Christianity, it really rests at the question of whether we have to begin from man alone as autonomous and then build everything from that, or whether there's truth from another source which is an absolute truth and which, therefore, is not relative.

Now, if we begin from the humanist truth, the view of truth, rather, they don't have truth, all it ends with is a matter of statistical averages. And then it leads to the place where humanism has brought us in our own generation.

Here is one example of this dilemma. Fouquet's Red Virgin. Fouquet's model was Agnes Sorel, who was the mistress of Charles VII, King of France. Was this the Madonna about to feed her baby?

No.

It might have had the title The Red Virgin, but those who looked at the painting at that time knew who the woman was. She was the king's mistress. Prior to this, Mary was considered high and holy. Even earlier, she was thought of as so different from normal people that she was painted merely as a symbol.

Painting Mary as a real person was an advance over the earlier paintings because the Bible tells us that Mary was a real girl and the baby Jesus was a real baby. This was the good side. Nature was given its proper place.

On the other hand, the king's mistress could now be painted as Mary and meaning was being destroyed. At first, it might seem that only religious values were being threatened, but gradually the threat spread to all of knowledge and all of life.

All meaning for all the individual things, the particulars, was removed. The individual things were made independent, autonomous, with nothing ultimately to relate them to, to give them meaning. We are now in the academy in Florence in a room given to Michelangelo's work.

On either side, we see Michelangelo's statues called the captives. These used to be called unfinished statues, but now many scholars agree.

That they were left to say.

What Michelangelo wanted them to say. Man is tearing himself out of the rock. Mankind will be victorious. As one passes these statues, we come to the focal point of the room, the magnificent statue of David.

Out of a flawed piece of marble, Michelangelo, with all his genius, carved his David, a piece of art with few equals in the world. But this isn't the biblical David, but rather the personification of the humanist ideal, the greatness of man.

But toward the end of his life, there were signs that Michelangelo saw that humanism was not enough. There was and there is no man like David. It is thought that in the Pietà in the cathedral in Florence, he put his own face on Nicodemus as he was bending over Christ.

Humanistic pride seems lessened, if not absent. We now come to another great giant of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci. He was the first modern mathematician and he was a chemist, physicist, musician, architect, anatomist, botanist, mechanical engineer, and artist.

He did studies of the human anatomy. Some could still be used in today's textbooks. He was the embodiment of the true Renaissance man. He could do almost everything and do it well. He designed war machines of savage atrocity.

He designed the ball bearing. Leonardo really understood the problem of modern man. In his genius, he anticipated where humanism would end. He understood that humanistic man, beginning only with individual things,.

That is the particulars,.

Had no unity by which to give them meaning. He understood that beginning humanistically with mathematics, one is left with individual things. And having only individual things, one could never come to universals or to meaning.

Instead, one is left with mechanics. And in this, he saw a head to our own day, where even man is viewed as a machine. Then Leonardo thought that perhaps the painter, the sensitive man, could come to meaning.

So he tried and tried to portray the soul. This is not a soul in the Christian sense. Rather, he was trying to capture visually the universals from the particulars he observed.

He failed.

We're back to Raphael's School of Athens. Aquinas' teaching led to man trying to be independent, autonomous. And this led to Renaissance humanism. Leonardo, in all his brilliance, felt the problem and struggled to find universals.

Leonardo, in all of humanism, had been so sure that man beginning only from himself could solve every problem. Its cry was, I can do what I will, just give me till tomorrow. But in his old age, Leonardo, in his brilliancy, saw the coming defeat of humanism.

As a man thinketh, so is he. And humanism had already begun to show its natural conclusion was pessimism. When Francis I, King of France, took Leonardo to France, we find Leonardo in despondency. Anybody who doesn't feel the beauty of the Renaissance as he walks through Florence, I feel is a poor man.

And I love to go to Florence and walk through the museums and just walk through the streets. But on the other hand, one who only sees the beauty and the glory of the Renaissance, in which man was increasingly making himself autonomous, if you don't feel the weakness of this, you also don't understand the Renaissance.

Humanism invariably ends in despair. If you begin with that which is finite, no matter how far you project it, you can never come to an absolute, never. In the light of the humanist dilemma, there is only one real solution.

To turn to this book as truth, turn to the Bible, not just as an abstract religious thing, but as truth. It doesn't change. It speaks to the culture of that particular day. It's never old fashioned. It speaks to the most current topics.

And yet it is always rooted in the same thing, the existence of this infinite personal God and his having spoken. And then of course, for man's personal need in the death of Christ for him.