Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In many ways the Renaissance was always a fantasy, a dream. Even before it gained the name “renaissance,” intellectuals from the fourteenth century on dreamed that they were giving birth anew to the glories of ancient civilization and rediscovering lost worlds and peoples on the borders of their known world, even if they tended to call the age in which they lived, when they called it anything at all, “modern.” In itself their idea that an ancient world could be recreated was little more than a fantasy, a dream that we can smile at from the perspective of our newer and even more hubristic dreams of being at the end of time or being postmodern. But for all the unlikelihood of that dream it struck a deep and resonant chord, which was so powerful that it was replayed with interesting variations in the societies and cultures that followed, gaining ever more power. The term “renaissance” was used only occasionally at the time; the sixteenth-century artist and famous biographer of artists, Giorgio Vasari, was most notable for using the Italian rinascita (“rebirth” or “renaissance”) to describe the rebirth of ancient art in Italy in the period. But it was the Enlightenment and the French who popularized the term “renaissance” ( renaître , renaissance ), reflecting the French origin of the word and concept. In that French Enlightenment dreaming, the Renaissance became an Apollonian age ... log in or subscribe to read full text