9 ms·

A Darker View of the Renaissance

41 points by Thevet 6y ago

throwaway894345 6y ago
> Fletcher’s more substantive aim of exhibiting the “terror” lying behind the “beauty” of the Italian Renaissance is in my view less successful. First of all, although awestruck tourists might marvel at the beauty of Italy’s art and architecture without much sense of the blood and suffering that accompanied it (unless, of course, they watched Showtime’s series The Borgias, in which case they would have a sensationalized view), no scholar of the period would be surprised. In this regard, Fletcher is jousting with something of a strawman, or at least a largely mid-19th-century gossamer version of the Renaissance. Straw man indeed. As a layperson, I didn’t imagine Renaissance Europe to be an abrupt transition from medieval to 21st century living standards or political stability. Of course there were atrocities and quality of life was dramatically poorer and more brutish than it is today. What would be remarkable to my lay mind is some interpretation of that brutishness as a development or consequence of enlightenment developments (as opposed to an extension of medieval conditions); however, I doubt such a case can credibly be made.
- api 6y ago
  I think that is the point even if it's overdone. Many people do think the renaissance and enlightenment were smooth upward transitions when in reality they were periods of profound political and social turmoil. While I do think the enlightenment was mostly a step forward, it wasn't all light any more than the dark ages were all dark. This is something we should keep in mind as we enter the real information age whose transformations and upheavals we have barely started to feel. We haven't seen anything yet.
  - alentist 6y ago
    The “Dark Ages” does not mean what most laypeople think it means. Most historians don’t use the term anymore, because it’s too difficult to shake off the misleading connotations it has to the public.
    - pmontra 6y ago
      Nobody ever used that name in Italy, it's Middle Ages here (Medioevo) which started with the fall of the Roman Empire and barbaric invasions (and the settlement of many of the people that eventually became modern Italians.) Anyway we had invasions as long as the 19th century, maybe the 20th as well if you think about WW2, so it's a kind of normal business here and in most of Europe. We also had a constant improvement of arts and technology after the first few bad centuries. Not very dark at all.
tus88 6y ago
Yeah what a pity the dark ages came to and end. /s
- xnyan 6y ago
  The term “dark ages” is a periodization popularized in the mid 19h century. It’s not commonly used in academic discourse because it is nonspecific and subjective in its definition.
  - zabana 6y ago
    and on top of that, that period was only dark for northern and western europe, the rest of the world (including southern europe though its connections with north africa and the middle east) was doing pretty good.
- voldacar 6y ago
  read a book
seiferteric 6y ago
I've been kind of wondering if we will start to see an increase in anti-enlightenment arguments given the issues we face with no clear way out. Given climate change for example, was the industrial revolution a mistake? If it was an inevitable consequence of the enlightenment era, then was that a mistake? Too early to tell, but if we end up destroying ourselves I guess the answer would have to be "yes", but it's a hard pill to swallow.
- dantheman 6y ago
  I'll take climate change for modern medicine and technology. I think any anti-enlightment thinkers are really need to understand what life was like before that.
  - schemy 6y ago
    But that would mean they believe in history. It's after all just dead white men.
  - CalRobert 6y ago
    The concern is that climate change will also remove modern medicine and technology (and food, and water) for a huge number of people.
    - maxerickson 6y ago
      That's kind of a rough calculation when you look at how many people there were in 1950 and why so many more are alive today. Pick your path of suffering or something. Which I guess is why the other poster winds the clock back before the industrial revolution.
- krapp 6y ago
  That's been happening for a while, but mostly as a techno-utopian reskin of last century's racist and fascist ideologies[0]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment
throw0101a 6y ago
There's a line I ran across from the movie The Third Man where the character Harry Lime says: > In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man
- dbtc 6y ago
  And then Italy had Roman Catholics, Spanish, Austrian, and French occupations, fascists, a civil war, neofascists... While Switzerland has become quite good at making clocks.
- recursivedoubts 6y ago
  I have always found this a nearly unassailable argument in favour of the swiss model.
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
    Yeah it's really strong. The only viable assault is that its premise ("Switzerland had 500 years of peace") isn't true (as siblings have noted).
- dumbfoundded 6y ago
  Italy is also a lot bigger.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  A line of great rhetorical effect but not necessarily great logical worth. First of all if he is correct that the Swiss had 500 years of democracy and peace then it follows that they produced a working democratic model which at the time was pretty remarkable. However being Harry Lime it is no surprise that he is not correct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Switzerland Second of all I don't know what population size of Switzerland and Italy was during the Renaissance but nowadays Italy is about 7 times bigger, so let's assume they had approximately the same difference. Italy of course also has more land area etc. etc. Given these differences I might expect some more impressive people to be drawn from the larger, richer population. And there is of course another differentiator of wealth which is that Italy at the time was the center of European religion, meaning that a lot of wealth was naturally drawn there. Finally Switzerland, although small, has like every nation had notable personalities as well https://www.houseofswitzerland.org/swissstories/history/7-swiss-works-have-left-their-mark-art-history https://www.houseofswitzerland.org/swissstories/history/7-sw... on edit: when I say Harry Lime is not correct I mean that Switzerland did not have 500 years of peace and democracy.
schemy 6y ago
>the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was married to a slave trader; one possible model for Titian’s Venus of Urbino, a famous Venetian courtesan, was gang-raped; and the Florentine Republic symbolized by Michelangelo’s David came to an end in 1530 with the sack of the city and ensuing slaughter of thousands. This is as jarring as listing the injuries during a riot: two paper cuts, one beheading, a sprained ankle. Who cares about a gang rape when a sack involved a few hundred of them at the same time?
sqrt 6y ago
I found Ada Palmer's post on the Renaissance a couple months ago to be a good read, though it's a bit long for one sitting and there are a few tangents: https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-telling-the-myth-of-a-renaissance-golden-age-and-bad-middle-ages/ https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-tel... A taste of what you might get out of it, from the preface: > This post is for you if you’ve been wondering whether Black Death => Renaissance means COVID => Golden Age, and you want a more robust answer than, “No no no no no!” > This post is for you if you’re tired of screaming The Middle Ages weren’t dark and bad! and want somewhere to link people to, to show them how the myth began. > This post is for you if you want to understand how an age whose relics make it look golden in retrospect can also be a terrible age to live in. > And this post is for you if want to ask what history can tell us about 2020 and come away with hope. Because comparing 2020 to the Renaissance does give me hope, but it’s not the hope of sitting back expecting the gears of history to grind on toward prosperity, and it’s not the hope for something like the Renaissance—it’s hope for something much, much better, but a thing we have to work for, all of us, and hard.
seebetter 6y ago
“Mona Lisa was married to a slave trader” —- wasn’t exactly what I was thinking. How about the modern press where the elite members have ‘Au Pairs’ or underpay both legal citizens & undocumented workers to take care of their homes? There are even true indentured servants in the US and all around the world. Yet let’s ‘contextualize’ the darkness of the Renaissance.
InfiniteRand 6y ago
I think having a lot of small but wealthy states, competing for prestige is a big factor for the art side of the Renaissance as well as for the heavy warfare part

41 points by Thevet 6y ago

> Fletcher’s more substantive aim of exhibiting the “terror” lying behind the “beauty” of the Italian Renaissance is in my view less successful. First of all, although awestruck tourists might marvel at the beauty of Italy’s art and architecture without much sense of the blood and suffering that accompanied it (unless, of course, they watched Showtime’s series The Borgias, in which case they would have a sensationalized view), no scholar of the period would be surprised. In this regard, Fletcher is jousting with something of a strawman, or at least a largely mid-19th-century gossamer version of the Renaissance. Straw man indeed. As a layperson, I didn’t imagine Renaissance Europe to be an abrupt transition from medieval to 21st century living standards or political stability. Of course there were atrocities and quality of life was dramatically poorer and more brutish than it is today. What would be remarkable to my lay mind is some interpretation of that brutishness as a development or consequence of enlightenment developments (as opposed to an extension of medieval conditions); however, I doubt such a case can credibly be made.

api 6y ago
I think that is the point even if it's overdone. Many people do think the renaissance and enlightenment were smooth upward transitions when in reality they were periods of profound political and social turmoil. While I do think the enlightenment was mostly a step forward, it wasn't all light any more than the dark ages were all dark. This is something we should keep in mind as we enter the real information age whose transformations and upheavals we have barely started to feel. We haven't seen anything yet.
- alentist 6y ago
  The “Dark Ages” does not mean what most laypeople think it means. Most historians don’t use the term anymore, because it’s too difficult to shake off the misleading connotations it has to the public.
  - pmontra 6y ago
    Nobody ever used that name in Italy, it's Middle Ages here (Medioevo) which started with the fall of the Roman Empire and barbaric invasions (and the settlement of many of the people that eventually became modern Italians.) Anyway we had invasions as long as the 19th century, maybe the 20th as well if you think about WW2, so it's a kind of normal business here and in most of Europe. We also had a constant improvement of arts and technology after the first few bad centuries. Not very dark at all.

tus88 6y ago

Yeah what a pity the dark ages came to and end. /s

xnyan 6y ago
The term “dark ages” is a periodization popularized in the mid 19h century. It’s not commonly used in academic discourse because it is nonspecific and subjective in its definition.
- zabana 6y ago
  and on top of that, that period was only dark for northern and western europe, the rest of the world (including southern europe though its connections with north africa and the middle east) was doing pretty good.
voldacar 6y ago
read a book

seiferteric 6y ago

I've been kind of wondering if we will start to see an increase in anti-enlightenment arguments given the issues we face with no clear way out. Given climate change for example, was the industrial revolution a mistake? If it was an inevitable consequence of the enlightenment era, then was that a mistake? Too early to tell, but if we end up destroying ourselves I guess the answer would have to be "yes", but it's a hard pill to swallow.

dantheman 6y ago
I'll take climate change for modern medicine and technology. I think any anti-enlightment thinkers are really need to understand what life was like before that.
- schemy 6y ago
  But that would mean they believe in history. It's after all just dead white men.
- CalRobert 6y ago
  The concern is that climate change will also remove modern medicine and technology (and food, and water) for a huge number of people.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    That's kind of a rough calculation when you look at how many people there were in 1950 and why so many more are alive today. Pick your path of suffering or something. Which I guess is why the other poster winds the clock back before the industrial revolution.
krapp 6y ago
That's been happening for a while, but mostly as a techno-utopian reskin of last century's racist and fascist ideologies[0]. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

throw0101a 6y ago

There's a line I ran across from the movie The Third Man where the character Harry Lime says: > In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man

dbtc 6y ago
And then Italy had Roman Catholics, Spanish, Austrian, and French occupations, fascists, a civil war, neofascists... While Switzerland has become quite good at making clocks.
recursivedoubts 6y ago
I have always found this a nearly unassailable argument in favour of the swiss model.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  Yeah it's really strong. The only viable assault is that its premise ("Switzerland had 500 years of peace") isn't true (as siblings have noted).
dumbfoundded 6y ago
Italy is also a lot bigger.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
A line of great rhetorical effect but not necessarily great logical worth. First of all if he is correct that the Swiss had 500 years of democracy and peace then it follows that they produced a working democratic model which at the time was pretty remarkable. However being Harry Lime it is no surprise that he is not correct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Switzerland Second of all I don't know what population size of Switzerland and Italy was during the Renaissance but nowadays Italy is about 7 times bigger, so let's assume they had approximately the same difference. Italy of course also has more land area etc. etc. Given these differences I might expect some more impressive people to be drawn from the larger, richer population. And there is of course another differentiator of wealth which is that Italy at the time was the center of European religion, meaning that a lot of wealth was naturally drawn there. Finally Switzerland, although small, has like every nation had notable personalities as well https://www.houseofswitzerland.org/swissstories/history/7-swiss-works-have-left-their-mark-art-history https://www.houseofswitzerland.org/swissstories/history/7-sw... on edit: when I say Harry Lime is not correct I mean that Switzerland did not have 500 years of peace and democracy.

schemy 6y ago

>the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was married to a slave trader; one possible model for Titian’s Venus of Urbino, a famous Venetian courtesan, was gang-raped; and the Florentine Republic symbolized by Michelangelo’s David came to an end in 1530 with the sack of the city and ensuing slaughter of thousands. This is as jarring as listing the injuries during a riot: two paper cuts, one beheading, a sprained ankle. Who cares about a gang rape when a sack involved a few hundred of them at the same time?

sqrt 6y ago

I found Ada Palmer's post on the Renaissance a couple months ago to be a good read, though it's a bit long for one sitting and there are a few tangents: https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-telling-the-myth-of-a-renaissance-golden-age-and-bad-middle-ages/ https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-tel... A taste of what you might get out of it, from the preface: > This post is for you if you’ve been wondering whether Black Death => Renaissance means COVID => Golden Age, and you want a more robust answer than, “No no no no no!” > This post is for you if you’re tired of screaming The Middle Ages weren’t dark and bad! and want somewhere to link people to, to show them how the myth began. > This post is for you if you want to understand how an age whose relics make it look golden in retrospect can also be a terrible age to live in. > And this post is for you if want to ask what history can tell us about 2020 and come away with hope. Because comparing 2020 to the Renaissance does give me hope, but it’s not the hope of sitting back expecting the gears of history to grind on toward prosperity, and it’s not the hope for something like the Renaissance—it’s hope for something much, much better, but a thing we have to work for, all of us, and hard.

seebetter 6y ago

“Mona Lisa was married to a slave trader” —- wasn’t exactly what I was thinking. How about the modern press where the elite members have ‘Au Pairs’ or underpay both legal citizens & undocumented workers to take care of their homes? There are even true indentured servants in the US and all around the world. Yet let’s ‘contextualize’ the darkness of the Renaissance.

InfiniteRand 6y ago

I think having a lot of small but wealthy states, competing for prestige is a big factor for the art side of the Renaissance as well as for the heavy warfare part