The other day I decorated the room I’m renting form my new landlords in Palo Alto. Above my dresser I put up these three photographs:
The first picture is of the Pazzi Chapel in one of the cloisters in the complex of the Cathedra of Santa Croce in Florence (‘Croce’, with the ‘ce’ pronounced like ‘Che’ in ‘Che Guevara’, means cross in Italian). The second is of one my favorite art historians, a mid-20th-century British art historian named Kenneth Clark, in another of the cloisters. The last is of the cloister in its full glory. The cloisters and the interior of the Pazzi Chapel were designed by Fillipo Brunelleschi[1], while the exterior of the chapel is by an unknown architect who did the design after Brunelleschi’s death.
I put up these pictures because to me the cloisters of Santa Croce and Pazzi chapel embody the values of the Renaissance--peace, harmony, order, and noble striving. Take the cloister in which Kenneth Clark sits, for example. There is no architectural form that speaks to me of inner peace and gentlenss like repeated semicircular arches. Moreover, the repetition of the arches and the banks of columns exudes a sense of harmonious order—not the jarring order of soldiers standing in a Draconian array, but the beautiful order of people standing gracefully by their own free will. And there is something too in how the second story of columns doesn’t support a layer of arches and in how they’re slightly shorter than the first story. Each column in the first story, and the two havles of the arches that it supports, and the column above it in the second story, seems to be united entity that sharpens as it rises, projecting energy into the sky.
In his television documentary Civilization: A Personal View[2], the British art historian Kenneth Clark sums up the spirit of the Renassiance with a quote from the humanist Leon Battista Albertti[3]:
Man!
To you has been given a body more graceful than other animals,
To you power of apt and various movements,
To you wit, reason, and memory, like an immortal god.[4]
I think it is because the cloisters of Santa Croce and the Pazzi Chapel embody this celebration of man that I love them so much and have posted them on my wall.
Here’s an excerpt from Civilization (I have a copy of it, so feel free to ask me for a copy!):
[1] Brunelesschi was of course the builder of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore or the Duomo. That dome is his most famous work. But while I feel the dome demonstrates his engineering genius, I think it is his other buildings like the cloisters of Sanata Croce that demonstrate his architectural genius. (The dome of the dumo is a gothic (peaked) dome and not a semicircular dome, but is does not have flying buttresses for support like other gothic domes. It’s held together by ingenious stone work and iron chains embedded in the walls, which are described in the Wikipedia article =))
[2] This is my favorite documentary program. It was a 13-hour series made by the BBC in about 1970, soon after the founding of the BBC, to demonstrate the potential of television. Kenneth Clark wrote and narrated it. The concept of the series was to survey European civilization from the fall of Rome by having Clark visit and comment on the great cultural sites of Europe and to combine the video of the great works of art and architecture with great pieces of classical music and readings from poetry and so forth. Clark chose the sites to emphasize what he felt were the noblest and wisest elements of European civilization. Kenneth Clark, by the way, is in my opinion one of the greatest art historians—extraordinarily intelliegent and sensitive and deeply satisfying with the approach to art he takes in Civilization. Coming from a wealthy Scottish family, he attended Oxford in the 1920’s, assisted the famous American art dealer Bernard Berenson, directed one of the museums at Oxford in his 20’s; became the director of the British National Gallery at age 30; and retired to become Slade Professor of Art History at Oxford in his 50’s.
[3] Leon Battista Alberti is considered to be one of the four fathers of the Renaissance, along with the architect Brunelleschi, the painter Massacio, and the historian Leonardo Bruni. He was most famous as the author of treatises on architecture and painting, in which he formulated the rules for designing of classically inspired buildings and for perspective. It’s clear that he was a friend of the leading painters and architects of the day. It’s not clear whether he took the lead in developing the rules he wrote about them or whether he formulated them based on discussion with his artist friends. He was also a philosopher, as suggested by the quote, though Kenneth Clark unfortunately does not source it.
[4] If like me, you have a tendency to question whether this summing up of the Renaissance is a romanticization, know that I’m fairly confident that is summing up is reasonably accurate. I think it’s accurate to say Renaissance culture (at least the culture of the elites In Flourence) differd from medieval culture (at least that of the church elites) in its belief in what man could achieve in this world, outside of the salvation of his soul. Of course, it’s a great challenge for a professional historian to establish what the people of an age thought. And of course, it’s a still greater challenge for me, I who lack the time to read much of the literature to come to a well-grounded, unbiased, and unsentemental conclusion. Nonetheless, I think it’s clear that if you look through the works of leading medieval philosophers like Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, you will find a preoccupation on doing God’s will and salvation (I read some of them in high school for a philosophy class). And I think it’s clear that the works of Renaissance humanists like Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (this is very short and available at http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_1/pico.html), Leonardo Bruni’s History of Italy, and Matteo Palmieri’s On Civic Life, you will find a clearly different concern with what man can achieve outside of salvation. Besides the Wikipedia pages on these works and authors, the pages on medieval scholasticism and the Renaissance are also good starting points to convince yourself the Albertti’s quote captures the general difference between Renaissance philsophy and what preceded it.
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