“The%Renaissance…Was%it%Really%a%Thing”%Crash%Course%World%History%Episode%
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So you probably already know about the Renaissance thanks to the work of noted
teenage mutant ninja turtles Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael. But
that isn't the whole story.
Me-from-the-past: Mr. Green, Mr. Green. What about Splinter? I think he was an
architect.
Ugh, me-from-the-past, you’re such an idiot. Splinter was a painter, sculptor, AND an
architect. He was a quite a Renaissance rat.
Right, so the story goes that the Renaissance saw the rebirth of European culture after
the miserable Dark Ages, and that it ushered in the modern era of secularism,
rationality, and individualism. And those are all in the list of things we like here at
Crash Course.
Yeah, fair enough. Then what's so controversial? Well, the whole idea of a European
Renaissance presupposes that Europe was like an island unto itself that was briefly
enlightened when the Greeks were ascendant and then lost its way and then
rediscovered its former European glory. Furthermore, I’m going to argue that the
Renaissance didn’t even necessarily happen.
But first, let’s assume that it did. Essentially, the Renaissance was an efflorescence of
arts (primarily visual, but also to a lesser extent literary) and ideas in Europe that
coincided with the rediscovery of Roman and Greek culture.
It's easiest to see this in terms of visual art, Renaissance art tends to feature a focus
on the human form, somewhat idealized, as Roman and especially Greek art had. And
this classicizing is also rather apparent in the architecture of the Renaissance which
featured all sorts of Greek columns and triangular pediments and Roman arches and
domes.
In fact, looking at a Renaissance building you might even be able to fool yourself into
thinking you’re looking at an actual Greek building, if you sort of squint and ignore the
fact that Greek buildings tend to be, you know, ruins.
In addition to rediscovering, that is, copying Greek and Roman art, the Renaissance
saw the rediscovery of Greek and Roman writings and their ideas. And that opened up
a whole new world for scholars as well, not a new world, actually since the texts were
more than 1000 years old, but you know what I mean.
The scholars who examined, translated, and commented upon these writings were
called humanists, which can be a little bit of a confusing term, because it implies they
were concerned with, you know, humans rather than, say, the religious world. Which
can add to the common, but totally incorrect, assumption that Renaissance writers
and artists and scholars were, like, secretly not religious. That is a favorite area of
speculation on the Internet and in Dan Brown novels, but the truth is that Renaissance
artists were religious. As evidence, let me present you with that fact that they painted
