Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

This essay takes its point of departure from a simple assumption. To understand human productions, it is necessary to employ three kinds of analysis, which might be described as three dimensions: the chronological, the social, and the geographical. In the case of the Renaissance, the chronological approach is traditional. The social approach established itself in the 1930s and 1940s with the work of scholars such as Alfred von Martin (whose historical sociology of the Renaissance appeared in German in 1932), Martin Wackernagel, and Frederick Antal, the last two scholars both focusing attention on the artistic milieu of fifteenth-century Florence. The geographical approach, on the other hand, remains relatively neglected, a striking example of what has been described as the “devaluation of place” in social studies. In the following pages, I shall try to compensate for this neglect by approaching the Renaissance from the point of view of a cultural geographer (more exactly, from what a cultural historian imagines to be the view of a cultural geographer), setting out a program – which it would take a large book to put into practice – and illustrating what may be learned from this approach.The influence of place on culture is obvious enough, leading the German geographer Rudolf Haussherr to translate the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin's famous formula, “Not everything is possible at ... log in or subscribe to read full text