Renaissance: Birth of Modern Man
In the mid to late fifteenth century, there began to be felt, in Europe, a shift in our way of seeing the world so far-reaching in its implications, that it has since been deemed as marking the dawn of modernity. It is known by the name Renaissance, or ‘rebirth’.
In Italian City-States like Florence, wealth and culture, a notable freedom on the municipal level, and a relative separateness of Church from State 4 led to a moral climate in which man was free to mature an unprecedented confidence in his own capabilities. It was the era of voracious polymaths; uomini universali, like Leon Battista Alberti (1404? – 1472) and Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519), who made monumental contributions in multiple spheres. A renewed passion for pre-Christian philosophy, particularly that of Plato and, to a lesser extent, Aristotle, led to a resurgence in humanistic thought. All in all, man was beginning to timidly question his cosmic subservience, and re-evaluate his lowly position in the universe.
In 1496, Pico della Mirandola made his immortal contribution to humanistic thought: The Oration of the Dignity of Man. Here, he makes a point entirely revolutionary in its application. Unlike all other things in god’s cosmic vivarium, man’s essence is not fixed, but moveable:
“[God] therefore took man, this creature of indeterminate image, set him in the middle of the world,18 and said to him: “We have given you, Adam, no fixed seat or form of your own, no talent peculiar to you alone…We have made you neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that you may, as the free and extraordinary shaper of yourself, fashion yourself in whatever form you prefer.”
Man is thus unique among things and animals. He is neither of this world, nor completely of the next, and so is able to mould himself, to determine his own essence. A fish will never escape its fishiness, and an angel will never do worse than occupy his heavenly place at god’s right hand side. But man is endowed with an entirely unique capacity for upward and downward mobility. 8 If he shuts down his higher faculties (his rationality, his intellect, his ingenuity), and acts as if he doesn’t possess them, he vegetates and is no better than the fish. But if, on the other hand, he exercises them carefully, if he philosophises and accumulates knowledge, then he joins the ranks of angels.
The implications were clear: man was not as far, after all, from the divine logos as for centuries he’d convinced himself to be. Rather, if he delved deeply enough, he would see that he carried its spark inside him, and could wield it to achieve great things.
And achieve he did. The titanic advancements this new conception of man enabled are well-known enough – both in the scientific and philosophical spheres. In 1543, astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus proposed his heretical heliocentric model of the universe in his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. In 1609, Galileo began to use the prototypical telescope to observe the heavens, and concluded, based on said observations, that Copernicus had been right. In his Discourse on the Method (1637), René Descartes proposed a methodology for determining Truth by subjecting even the most sacrosanct and longest-held beliefs to rigorous four-step test, rejecting them mercilessly if they didn’t pass 11 . Taking Descartes’ lead, Isaac Newton published, some fifty years later, his revolutionary Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), in which he formulated his laws of motion and universal gravitation.
The birth of experimental science was upon us. Suddenly, the universe was no longer god’s impenetrable mystery; its essence no longer remote and unfathomable. By demonstrating that the Earth orbited around the Sun and not vice versa, Copernicus and Galileo had called into question the divine cosmic structure set forth in the book of Genesis and inadvertently evicted god from the heavens. By basing their factual conclusions, not on conventional wisdom or scriptural tradition, but on direct sensory observation and analytical rationalisations, Galileo and Newton had proven that man had all the tools he required – within himself – to give method to cosmic madness; to understand the world god had created and scrutinise the mechanisms underlying its basic operations. The elements around him, which had previously held merciless control of him, could now potentially be tamed and wielded to his favour.
This sea change was all-encompassing. If in our medieval infancy we had been like quivering children living under the roof of a severe and domineering father, we had now reached our rebellious adolescence and were ready to level our first challenges against paternal authority. Though not yet self-sufficient enough to leave his father’s home, man was all the same slowly mustering confidence enough in his own self-worth to question his complete dependence on him. Where the humanistic revolution of the 1400s had placed man at the centre of god’s cosmos, the scientific revolution of the following century provided him with a window through which to observe and systematise it. Heaven and Earth were no longer distinct and separate, but connected realms; and the fibre binding them was none other than man himself.
In the Arts, the newfound self-assuredness of the Renaissance yielded aesthetic developments directly equivalent to their counterparts in the philosophical and scientific spheres. In 1504, Michelangelo went to painstaking lengths to capture every anatomical nuance of the male form his David, proving that man himself could also be an object of artistic glorification. Where for Cimabue two centuries earlier, style had been a frivolous human indulgence, an unnecessary distraction from Art’s sole purpose (the glorification of god), for Michelangelo, it went hand in hand with subject matter, and was just as critical to his aesthetic end. Man, now aware of the divine spark within him, could legitimately permit himself to put his own stamp on his creative endeavours. The technical advancements that had enabled the depiction of such anatomical precision in, not only in the David, but also the Pietà (1499) and the Sistine Chapel frescoes (1512), are themselves an indication of man’s confidence in his skills, and wouldn’t have come about without it.
In Music, a similar evolution can be traced. The 1562 Missa Papae Marcelli by Roman composer Pierluigi Palestrina presents a clear qualitative leap from the works of his medieval predecessors. No longer fixed around a godlike drone, the harmonic structure is nuanced, fluid and mobile – like human nature itself. The harmonic Third, an interval long considered dissonant but in actual fact ubiquitous in the natural ordering of sound, is here embraced for its sumptuous, almost hedonistic sonority. A method of organising tonality around the Circle of Fifths – another naturally occurring overtone – was beginning to slowly take shape. In Art as in Science, man was wielding nature and systematising it. By the time Claudio Monteverdi had penned his Orfeo (1607) 15 , man had consolidated his proudest musical achievement to date – the diatonic system – and was now employing it, not merely to exult the divine, but also to add richness and nuance to the human world; in theatrical representations of human triumphs and foibles alongside masses and other sacred works.
The idea of Beauty itself had shifted, but it was no less readily available to the Artist’s intuition during the Renaissance than it had been in the Middle Ages. Beauty, for the thirteenth-century creative, had been the absolute moral order of the divine logos, as mirrored in a clean and unmannered style. For Michelangelo and Palestrina on the other hand, it was divine morality as perceived through the lens of man’s dignified mind, and represented by means of a set of manmade technical systematisations.
The Villa Rotonda (1571) by architect Andrea Palladio derives its sense of Beauty from precisely this human imposition on divine order. In its masculine structure, symmetrical proportions and quadrilateral form, it reflects the absolute, eternal and unified Truth of god’s moral world. But its ornamental flourishes, which are direct tributes to pre-Christian architectural forms, add subtle but unmistakable humanistic touches. Ionic capitals crown robust columns, and statues of pagan deities cap each of the villa’s four pediments. Atop divine structural foundations lie humanistic embellishments, the latter complementing the former. Man finishes off what god started, and it is as if the concept of Beauty itself is no longer complete without man’s intervention. Man keeps watch over all creation, and one has the sudden, unshakeable impression that without him, without his direct observations, none of it would have any sense at all.
And this is perhaps Renaissance Humanism’s greatest contribution to beauty and ethics; it made man god’s moral and aesthetic gatekeeper. This is echoed by Pico della Mirandola.
God the supreme Father and Architect had already fashioned this worldly home we behold…But when the work was finished, the Craftsman still longed for there to be someone to ponder the meaning of such a magnificent achievement, to love its beauty and to marvel at its vastness. So, when everything was done…He finally thought to bring forth man.
In other words, god didn’t need man, as such. The universe was, before man’s creation, complete as it was. He invented man, not out of need, but desire; a desire that ran much deeper than physical necessity and bordered on the spiritual. God desired man as his divine reflection on earth. Man was no longer an incidental cosmic afterthought, as he had been in the Middle Ages, but essential to the divine order of things; perhaps even the universe’s very raison d’être. God had created moral Truth and Beauty, and he had created them for man, his magnum opus.
