Resumo de The Renaissance In Italy

THE RENAISSANCE
IN ITALY:

In order to understand the Italian sensibility you have to
look at what happened during the years of the Italian Renaissance. Also, it is in
understanding the nature and purpose of the idea of renaissance that we find of
the greatest of all cultural powers that can be applied to our own lives. First
of all, why a renaissance? Because, when the time is ripe for renovation, that
which is needed will arise from the past or the future to supply it. Perhaps is
during Renaissance times that we may actually be seeing the Mind of the Maker
determining that the times is ripe for a major jump in culture and
consciousness and inserting social and psychic enzymes to help effect these
transitions. People grow laconic, bored, driven to outrage and hysteria if the
impetus to newness and renewal goes too long wanting, too long waiting.
Cultures fall into chaos--economic and psychological depression as well as
violence rule the day. But a renaissance, a re-naissance, is a rebirth out of an
outmoded, dying or impossible situation. Sometimes they say that
genius
the way that some people find their away out of particularly desperate
situations. When you consider what had gone before with what happened
in
the15th through the early 17th Centuries it is well nigh miraculous.
From the
dregs of history of the 14th Century arose an age in which within the
span or single
generation Leonardo de Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael produced their
masterworks,
Columbus, Magellan, Vasco de Gama discovered new worlds, Luther began
the
reformation, Copernicus changed the way we look at the cosmos,
centering
ourselves on the sun and began the scientific revolution. As Rick
Tarnas says
in his wonderful book on THE PASSION OF THE WESTERN MIND, Compared with
his
medieval predecessors, Renaissance Man appeared to have suddenly
vaulted into
superhuman status. Man was now capable of penetrating and reflecting
nature's secrets, in art as well as science, with unparalleled
mathematical sophistication,
empirical precision, and numinous aesthetic power. He had immensely
expanded
the known world, discovered new continents, and rounded the globe. He
could
defy traditional authorities and assert a truth based on his own
judgment. He
could appreciate the riches of classical culture and yet also feel
himself
breaking beyond the ancient boundaries to reveal entirely new realms.
Polyphonic music, tragedy and comedy, poetry, painting, architecture,
and
sculpture all achieved new levels of complexity and beauty. Individual
genius
and independence were widely in evidence. No domain of knowledge,
creativity, or exploration seemed beyond man's reach. (Tarnas, pg. 224)
With the
Renaissance, human life in this world seemed to hold an immediate
inherent value,
an excitement and existential significance, that balanced or even
displaced the
medieval focus on an afterlife spiritual destiny. So humans no longer
appeared
inconsequential with regard to God, church or nature. And there was an
extraordinary proclamation of human dignity. On many fronts, in diverse
realms
of human activity Pico's (Pico della Mirandola) proclamation of man's
dignity
seemed fulfilled. From its beginning in Italy
with Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bruno and Alberti, through Erasmus, Thomas More,
Machiavelli and Montaigne, to its final expressions in Shakespeare, Cervantes,
Bacon, and Galileo, the Renaissance did not cease producing new paragons of
human achievement. In fact, you would not find, at least in the West, anything
with regard to such a rapid development of culture and consciousness, not since
the Ancient Greek miracle at the birth of Western civilization. It was a true
rebirth. And above all else it involved a change in perspective from everything that had gone before. Is it
not interesting that it essentially began in Tuscany,
a land of phenomenal perspectives ?mountains and hills and valleys?the eye takon arney as you gaze over the bright tiles of village roofs toward a distant castle.

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