Renaissance Aesthetics

 (1400 - 1600 C.E.)

 

In the Renaissance, an increasing emphasis on experience, artistic expression and individual achievement and skill shifted aesthetics away from beauty as a divine harmony toward beauty as a felt, sensual first step toward a higher consciousness. The aesthetic payoff of art was something that an individual could feel rather than an intellectual union of individual minds with the divine mind. Changes in the philosophy of beauty paralleled a changing status and function of art. No matter how skilled, medieval artists were largely anonymous conduits for a divine inspiration. As first Aristotleianism and then a revised neo-Platonism took hold, artists appeared as individuals whose skill exhibited their own perceptions as well as those communicated to them. Most of the elements remained the same, but artists now produced individual works about individual objects for individual consumers. Aesthetics in its modern sense - a science of feeling - became possible.

Based on its strong sense of individualism and humanism, Renaissance art rejected medieval scholasticism. The Aristolelian-Thomist model for philosophy had emphasized logical deduction and an otherworldly subordination of the individual to God’s plan. Renaissance writers tended to reject that model (though generalization is suspect in a period of such cultural diversity), but they continued to rely on its more neo-Platonic elements. What was to be put in place of the medieval models was less clear. Many Renaissance theorists and artists thought themselves as returning to the clarity of classical models, even if their understanding of those models was much different from that of their originators. One of the intramural battles in this struggle for new forms was between the ancients and the moderns. Defenders of the ancients looked back to Greece and Rome for the models of culture. Defenders of the moderns pointed to the new achievements in science and art improvements on the antique world. One side thought everything new was a descent from the standards of a golden age. The other saw itself standing on the shoulders of giants, reaching higher and higher. Writers on art entered into this battle with vigor, but the battle was largely intramural. The aesthetics principles applied by both sides were drawn from classical and medieval sources. Then and now, artistic practice often runs ahead of theory.

Neo-Platonism provided an essential element in the early Renaissance poetics and art theory. In some fundamental ways, however, the influence of Aristotle changed neo-Platonism so that the version developed by the Renaissance differed from the medieval version. Renaissance aesthetics is thoroughly neo-Platonic, but it is a new neo-Platonism transformed by the more concrete metaphysics of Aristotle and Aquinas. For Renaissance poets, the soul must undertake a journey, and to reach its goal of purification. Neo-Platonism had always used metaphor, and it is prominent in medieval mysticism. The difference in the Renaissance is that the individual soul must make the journey by itself and remain itself throughout. As aesthetics philosophy became more and more concrete and individualistic in the Renaissance, it became more important to understand allegorical meaning. Allegorical theory is a staple of biblical interpretation throughout the late classical and medieval periods. But there allegory is essentially a way of understanding what God had already done.  

Dante’s allegory retains the same structure. The literal meaning of a text is "what happens," and the allegorical meaning is its significance. Significance can be broken down into symbolic, moral, and finally universal or "anagogical" meaning. But Dante’s allegory works differently from the medieval allegory of Bonaventure less than a hundred years earlier. It is an historical allegory. Real people and real political events are figured in the Divine Comedy. Instead of turning history back into a single divine plan, Dante turns the divine plan into a way of understanding history. In the process, art becomes individual expression. It depends on individual emotions. Medieval allegory led to contemplation that dissolved the individual into the universal form of God. But Dante’s beatific vision is specifically of Beatrice. This new concreteness and individuality exploded into a fascination with perspective, color, and individuality for their own sakes in the painting and sculpture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Art and aesthetics were redirected toward the individual, toward feeling and emotion, and toward personal expression, Dante, who still belonged to the medieval world, can be regarded as the first step in that new aesthetics. Dante shows how a transformation already had begun to take place by the beginning of the fourteenth century even though medieval philosophy continued to shape his literary form. 

The moving spirit of Renaissance Neo-Platonism was Marsilio Ficino, the first translator of Plotinus into Latin and the complete works of Plato. He founded the new academy in 1462, when Cosimo de’ Medici set him up in a villa with some Greek manuscripts to interpret and teach the Platonic philosophy. For this reason the selections start with Commentary on Plato’s Symposium by Marsilio Ficino. The next selection is The Heroic Enthusiasts by Giordano Bruno. The next two selections are on painting. The first is On Painting by Leon Battista Alberti and the second is Treatise on Painting by Leonardo de Vinci. The last section is Literary Remains of Albrecht Durer by Albrecht Durer (work by Conway).