Story of Civilization ~ Will & Ariel Durant

[Justin]

"I want to know what were the steps by which
man passed from barbarism to civilization (Voltaire)"

What are our origins? Where are we now? Where are we headed? Share your thoughts with us!

   Volume Five (The Renaissance)

       
"Four elements constitute Civilization -- economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. "
 
"I shall proceed as rapidly as time and circumstances will permit, hoping that a few of my contemporaries will care to grow old with me while learning. "
       
"These volumes may help some of our children to understand and enjoy the infinite riches of their inheritance."
       
"Civilization begins where chaos and insecurity ends."

SAVONAROLA AND THE REPUBLIC

The Prophet
The Statesman
Literature: The Martyr
Architecture and Sculpture: The Republic and the Medici
Art Under the Revolution

In this volume the  term "Renaissance" refers only to Italy. Will Durant studies the growth of industry, the rise of banking families like the Medici, the conflicts of labor and capital and considers the reasons why Italy was the first nation, and Florence the first city in Italy, to feel the awakening of the modern mind. He follows the cultural flowering from Florence to Milan, Mantua, Ferrata, Verona and Venice, Padua and Parma, Bologna, Rimini, Urbino, Perugia, Siena, and Naples. 

In each city of Italy we witness a colorful pageant of princes, queeens, dukes, or doges -- of poets, historians, scientists, and philosophers -- of painters, sculptors, engravers, illuminators, potters, and architects -- of industry, education, manners, morals, crime, and dress -- of women and love and marriage -- of epidemics, famines, earthquakes, and death.

Dr. Durant draws vivid vignettes -- of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Cosimo de' Medici, Fra Angelico, Donatello, Beatrice and Isabella d'Este, Leonardo da Vinci, Piero della Francesca, Signorelli, Perugino, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Aldus Manutius, Correggio, Alexander VI, Caesar and Lucrezia Borgia, Julius II, Leo X, Raphael, and Michelangelo.

The Renaissance, by recalling classic culture, ended the thousand year rule of the Oriental mind in Europe.

This volume, then, is about YOU. Join our group daily and listen to what Durant and the rest of us are saying. Better yet, share with us your opinions.

Discussion Leader: robby

Andy: I don't recall any dome work by Rubens. He did do a ceiling at Whitehall but no dome. There also was much ceiling work done in the Jesuit Church in Antwerp but that all burned down. I don't think anything was left of it. Rubens was a guy who tried many topics in many places in Europe so you may find something somewhere that he did on a ceiling dome. I just can't recall any. If you find something I'd be happy to hear of it.

[ALF43]

My knowledge of art and artists is slim to none, Justin.  I thought that Reubens painted the Assumption.  Thanks, I should have googled it first before displaying my ignorance.

[Justin]

Ah! Yes,, Andy. He did do an Assumption. Now, the question is, where is it? It's probably in Antwerp, maybe in Venice. Perhaps, some one can find it on the internet somewhere. It is significant for us because Rubens was influenced by the work of Correggio as well as that of Titian and Tintoretto. They all liked substantial women as models but more importantly they derived from Correggio a sense of scale. 

[Brian]

Raphael's Assumption was an altar piece and not a dome.

It is here :  http://www.artist-biography.info/gallery/raphael/241/

Brian.

[Justin]

Brian: It was wonderful of you to bring up Raphael's Assumption. It too is interesting to talk about. However, Andy has  Rubens of Antwerp in mind. At least, I think that's the case.  It is a jump ahead for us but Rubens was one the many who were influenced by the work of Correggio.

Andy, is it possible you were thinking of Raphael and not Rubens (Reubens)?

[Brian]

Now we are talking about an oil painting ?



Is this the one you are referring to? Or as Winston Churchill would have said, "the one to which you are referring".  He was famously quoted as saying,  "A preposition is a poor word with which to end a sentence" - - - (or something like that).

Brian.

[ALF43]

Thank you gentlemen.  Yes, that is the one i was referring TO.

uh!  I mean that was the correct reference.

[Robby]

Some one sent Churchill a note chiding him for ending a sentence with a preposition and he answered: "That is the nonsence up with which I shall not put."

Robby

[Justin]

Yes, that is the one I thought you had in mind, Andy- lots of putti, plenty of bewildered bystanders and the Mother of God going home. She rises out of the sarcophagus in a burst of glory so quickly there are some onlookers who seem to say "where did she go". Others look up and see the Ascension. The painting is an altar decoration. It rises behind an altar to a height of about ten feet giving one a sense of monumental and majestic power.

...and yes, Andy. The Putti come from the dome work of Correggio. You were right on the money.

[Robby]

About 1523 a series of commissions from Federigo II Gonzaga invited the full expression of the pagan element in his art.

    Wishing to court the favor of Charles V, the Marquis ordered picture after picture, sent them as gifts to the Emperor and received his coveted bauble, the title of duke.  For him, schooled in the paganism of Rome, Correggio painted a succession of mythological subjects, commemorating Olympian triumphs of love or desire.

     In The Education of Eros Venus blindfolds Cupid (lest the human race should die.)

     In Jupiter and Antiope the god, disguised as a satyr, advances upon the lady as she lies in naked slumber on the grass.

     In Danae a winged herald prepares for Jupiter's coming by undraping the fair maid while beside her bed two putti play in happy indifferences to the morality of the gods.

     In Io Jupiter descends from his  boredom in a concealing cloud and clasps with omnipotent hand a plump lady who hesitates gracefully and ends by yielding to the compliment of desire.

     In the Rape of Ganymede a pretty boy is flown to heaven by an eagle in haste to meet the needs of the ambidextrous god of gods.

     In Leda and the Swan the lover is a swan but the motive is the same.

     Even in The Virgin and St. George two naked Cupids romp before the Virgin and St. George, in his flashing mail, is the physical ideal of Renaissance youth. {/i]

     So this is what Renaissance means?

Robby

[Justin]

Yes, it means a return to the ideas and concepts of the classical world- a world that was buried in the dust of the dark centuries and all but forgotten. We tend to assume, today, that all that is available to us now of ancient Greece and Rome was available to the world of the 13th and 14th centuries.That is not the case.

 The Renaissance is a turning away from the constricting forms of Byzantine culture, from the limits of a suppressive religion that dominated the mind of man, and the effects of invading hordes from the north. The Renaissance represents a new awakening of the old ways, ways that had disappeared and were now coming to light again.

The Renaissance  advanced over time to reach another high point we came to call the Enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution pushed us further along a growth curve that led to the advanced state we think we have today.

 War is still with us and the restrictions of suppressive religions continue to guide us. But we are looking forward today, not backward because there is no prior period in the world's history that gives man greater control over his own destiny.

[ALF43]

A new awakening of the old ways?  Who dared to be so bold?  Was this a huge movement en masse?

[Justin]

Andy; Yes, it was a significant movement. In fact the title of the book we are working on is the "Renaissance".  It's center was in Italy where the city states were the most important trading centers in Europe, the wool trade being most prominent. However, a Renaissance also occurred in the North particularly in Flanders, the Netherlands, France, and parts of Germany. The Northern Renaissance is not part of our current study and were we to enter that sphere it would be a diversion that were we patient we would come upon in the normal course of passing from one volume to another.

[ALF43]

Thank you Justin.  I will pursue my studies.

[Robby]

We must not conclude that Correggio was merely a sensualist with a flair for painting flesh.

He loved beauty perhaps immoderately, and in these mythologies he stressed the surface of it too esclusively, but in his Madonnas he had done justice to a profounder beauty.  He himself, while his brush romped through Olympus, lived like an orderly  bourgeois, devoted to his family, and seldom leaving home except to work.

 Basari tells us: 'He was content with little and lived as a good Christian should.'  He is reported to have been timid and melancholy.  Who would not be melancholy coming every day into a world of deformed adults from a haunting dream of loveliness?

A world of deformed adults?

Robby

[mabel1015j]

my question exactly, Robby??.................jean

[Justin]

Most artists have that problem. They see beauty in an esthetic ideal while they themselves are  bent and broken by the task of puting paint on plaster in a meaningful way. The job is taxing physically. Many like Michelangelo and Caravaggio suffer not only from job related injuries but also from outside activity ( a punch in the nose for example).

Painters tend to see other people not in terms of their universals but rather in terms of their oddities.  A beautiful model is an oddity as is all who live. We are unique oddities. Modern portrait painters like Andy Warhal see the oddities in a person and paint those in faces common to us all. Subjects never like Warhal's work but a subject's friends love it because it is what they see in the subject not what the subject sees in him or her self.

[Robby]

Any further comments about Post 174?

Robby

[winsummm]

  Masaccio Madonna hmm that should be a link.  wikipedia has it anyhow

maybe this will work.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/be/Madonna_Masaccio.jpg

yep

claire

[winsummm]

I'm lost in here and completely out of date so forgive the old thread. The child looks to me to be almost pasted on the painting maybe just overworked.

It's hard to know this late in the game.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and some of us find it in the unusual or different. I'm  inclined to do that.

claire

[ALF43]

It makes for good contrast winsumm, but look at the eyes--- creepy!

[winsummm]

The pagan element in art and the renessance.  We had another one in the nineteen sixtiees when sensuality, nice word for sex, became acceptable  in all the arts, and youth held sway.  It's disappeared again, religion and now politics take us backwards and even words are suspect. As for art, I haven't seen any growth. In  fact it looks like it is becoming more representative, abstract is old stuff now. I see it in architecture, but even that  is waining.  sad isn't it.

My own art is doubtful due to aging and eye problems which make me wonder if I can still do it.  I wonder if this has been the case throughout history.

[Emily]

The thing that caught my eye immediately was the cockamainey way the 'halos' were positioned. The baby's sits on its head like a plate. One of those at the feet has his on the side of his head. I agree with Claire, it looks like it was pasted on the wall.

Emily

[Justin]

Claire: I'm not much on beauty. I rarely use the term because I don't clearly understand it. I am more concerned with mechanics and achievement than with aesthetics. I'm not sure but i don't recall ever saying that a painting or a sculpture or any work of art for that matter is beautiful. A painting ,for example, may have all parts working well ( whatever that means ) and the total image convincing, but that does not necessarily make the work beautiful.

Ruskin seemed to have a familiarity with beauty, at least he was able to talk glibly about it. But i have never been able to finish anything Ruskin has written. I get lost in the middle usually. However, he was very popular in art circles in the early twentieth century as a critic. The Venetians raised a monument to him and put plaques on buildings he thought had the quality of beauty.

By the  way, how are your eyes these days?

[Justin]

Halos were made with hammered gold on wood panels. At the time of Masaccio, painters were just beginning to experiment with three dimensional illusion. Holy Family iconography was in many cases triangular and the depth technique was called "up the page". The pasted on appearance which you describe is quite common. Even as late as Michelangelo things appear pasted on. The sculpture of the tomb of Pope Julius for example, includes male forms with women's breasts pasted on. They look like inverted grape fruit halves. It was Correggio whom we just left who developed some sense of reality in female body parts.

[winsummm]

the pasted on effect . . .so it is something common Did they actually form the image separatel on some other material and PASTE it on?

the interesting thing about your approach Justin is that I don't see it elsewhere. I don't know how they resolved some of their effects. It surprised me that there was so little oil painting until much later. 

At UCLA where I went they taught a materials class. We made gesso and layered it on wood. Then separated eggs and painted with the yolk which does contain oil. The effects in layers were lumin;us and transparent.  I did one, a small one. It must have taken a lot of eggs to do those alter pieces.

Mine has more to do with internal aesthetics, the way I feel and the way I feel the artist may feel.  lol

btw back a bit was the churchill remark. I do believe it is catching, at least the play on words may be. It's fun in here isn't it.

  and OH YES my eyes hurt after only a few minutes of THIS because it is on a screen. that happens with the tv too, but not with reading on paper or a painting. It's just that I have trouble with the vision under those circumstances. can't see the detail without reading glasses.

I may  give it up. I've been at it for seventy three years now since I was four. nuff said.

[winsummm]

insert here ---- the book I am reading THE ART THIEF because it centers around a college art history professor who also specializes in tracking down art thieves It is like a course in art history. . . like our justin's posts it sets the scene that way. It  really it is a mystery but specialized in this area which we are discussing now in the search for a Carrevaccio alter piece and also a modern white on white painting with discussions on both periods and products.  fascinating.

claire.

[JoanK]

Relating to absolutely nothing:

We're proposing a discussion for May of "Three Cups of Tea". I've started the book, and had a hard time putting it down. It's the story of a "climbing bum", who got lost coming down from a failed attempt to climb K2, and wound up in a Pakistani village so small, it wasn't on the map. When he left, he promised he would come back and build a school. He wound up building over 100 schools for girls, in the area controlled by the Taliban.

If you're interested, come let us know in "Proposed discussions" or here:

http://seniorlearn.org/forum/index.php?board=57.0

[JoanK]

I loved The Art Theif, too. I found it a weakness that most of the art experts in the book treated the art as if it were just a commodity, like pork bellys. They have to know all the technical details to do their job, but they don't seem to care about the art, except in terms of how much it's worth. I found this depressing.

This is balanced by one professor who talks about the beauty and emotional effect of the paintings, and by some of the other characters.

[Justin]

Joan: I think you've made an astute observation. There are many "experts" in the marketing end of the business, particularly, who have little appreciation for the aesthetic values of art work other than what is necessary to make a sale.

 Aesthetics is a concept that is virtually impossible to define and yet it entails a quality that is often applied loosely. I personally, draw pleasure from the mechanics, from the iconography, from the history, and from the setting of an art work and I tend to ignore aesthetics but I have to admit that if pressed, beauty can be found in pure line, in conception, in expression, and in the blend of art work and setting. 

John Ruskin talked at great length about the nature of beauty in art. His books are full of it. Plato discussed the concept. Rather than talking about the beauty of a piece I prefer to discuss  the elements that give me pleasure. Once you say a thing is beautiful or has beauty, you've said it all and there is nothing more to be said. That's the trouble with abstract superlatives.

I suppose, in every profession, there are mechanics and technicians, who look at their product as so much pork belly, without understanding the joys of roast pig. They should read Charles Lamb's essay on the topic. 

[JoanK]

And here it is:

http://essays.quotidiana.org/lamb/dissertation_upon_roast_pig/

[Justin]

Joan: If you folks are doing "Three Cups of Tea", I will join you. Please send me details so I can find my way to the site.

[ALF43]

Justin-  HOORAY!  We would love to have you join us in Three Cups of Tea.  It is an amazing story on one man's humanitarian battle against the odds.
Do join us here.  We would be delighted to have you and your illustrious thoughts.

Three Cups of Tea discussion 

[Robby]

BOLOGNA

[ALF43]

Robby-
BOLOGNA that I would like to hav you join us in Three Cups of Tea OR BOLOGNA is our next stop in this discussion???

[Robby]

If we pass over Reggio and Modena in unseemly haste, it is not because they had no cherished heroes of sword or brush or pen.

In Reggio an Augustinian monk, Ambrogio Calepino, compiled a dictionary of Latin and Italian, which in successive editions grew into a polyglot lexicon of eleven languages.

 Little Carpi had a handsome cathedral designed by Baldassare Peruzzi.

 Modena had a sculptor, Guido Mazzoni, who shocked townsmen by the realism of a terra-cotta  Cristo morto.

 And the fifteenth century choir stalls of the eleventh century cathedral matched the beauty of the facade and campanile.  Pellegrino de Modena, who worked with Raphael in Rome and then returned to his native city, might have become a painter of note had he not been murdered by ruffians bent uon killing his son.

 Doubtless Renaissance violence snuffed out in their growth a regiment of potential geniuses.

Bologna, standing at a main crossing of Italy's trade routes, continued to prosper, though her intellectual leadership was passing to Florence as humanism dethroned Scholasticism.

Her university was now only one of many in Italy and could no longer read the law to pontiffs and emperors but its medical school was still supreme.  The popes claimed Bologna as one of the Papal States and Cardinal Albornoz had passingly enforced the claim but the schism of the Church between rival popes reduced papal control to a technicality.

 A rich family, the Bentivogli, rose to political mastery and maintaind throughout the fifteenth century a mild dictatorship which observed republican forms and acknowledged but ignored the overlordship of the popes.  As capo or had of the Senate, Giovanni Bentivoglio governed Bologna for thirty seven years with sufficient wisdom and justice to win the admiration of princes and the affection of the people.  He paved streets, improved roads, and built canals.  He helped the poor with gifts and organized public works to mitigate unemployment.  He actively supported the arts.

 It was he who brought Lorenzo Cosa to Bologna.  For him and his sons Franbcia painted.  Filelfo, Guarino, Aurispa, and other humanists were welcomed to his court.  During the later years of his rule, embittered by a consp;iracy to depose him, he used harsh methods to maintain his ascendancy and forfeited the good will of the people.

 In 1506 Pope Julius II advanced upon Bolognna with a papal army and demanded his abdication.  He yielded peaceably, was allowed to depart intact and died in Milan two years later.  Julius agreed that Bologna should thenceforth be ruled by its Senate, subjectd to veto, by a papal legate, of legisalation opposed by the church.  The rule of the popes proved more oirderly and liberal than that of the BEntivogli.  Local self government was unhindered.  And the university enjoyed remarkable academic freedom.

Bologna remained a papal state, in fact as well as name, until the advent of Napoleon in 1796.

No good act should remain unpunished.

Robby

[ALF43]

Robby is this from your book or did YOU write this?

How interesting!  It sounds as if Mr. Bentovogli was an early "capo."  The God father of all who intended good things for his populace with all of the improvements that were made under his rule.

Mr. Caso, on the other hand seemed a bit autocratic, if not paranoid.  Is this early Mafia shenanigans?

[Robby]

That is from the book, Andy.  I have no thoughts of my own.

Robby

[ALF43]

hahaha, yeah right Robby.  That would be the day that you didn't have a grand thought of your own to share.

[ALF43]

Wkipedia tells us:

During the Renaissance, Bologna was the only Italian city that allowed women to excel in any profession. Women there had much more freedom than in other Italian cities; some even had the opportunity to earn a degree at the university.
Considering the time here, that is amazing.