People who spend their days thinking about beautiful things and making beautiful things are more likely to do creative and interesting things in their spare time.
REGINA: Gothic art faded away in the Renaissance, but briefly reappeared in the 19th Century. What happened?
Daniel: Gothic art lasted until the mid-16th Century. It was ended partly by a destructive campaign of censorship conducted by some small-minded bishops in the decades following the Council of Trent, and partly by Humanism. The Humanists considered medieval culture to be barbaric; they invented the slanderous name Gothic to associate medieval art with those who ruined Classical Rome. Gothic art really has nothing to do with the Gothic people or the Gothic language.
Humanism attributed to the individual a limitless autonomy, dignity, and capacity for improvement. Whereas medieval Christianity stressed dependence on divine grace for eternal salvation, Humanism advocated the making of a grand new order upon earth in which mankind might reach its fullest potential. This was to be done by studying and imitating the ancient Greeks and Romans. To the Humanists, Classical antiquity was the standard against which to weigh and find wanting the culture of medieval Christendom. In grammar, handwriting, architecture, painting and sculpture, they replaced medieval traditions with reconstructions based on ancient models.
Humanist art excludes any stylistic evidence that the medieval centuries ever happened. There is no place within it for the Lindisfarne Gospels, or for Chartres Cathedral.
REGINA: It seems as if Renaissance-era Humanists had similar goals to their modern counterparts: banish God in favor of promoting the greatness of human achievement.
Daniel: The original Humanists were not atheists, and they certainly continued to make professions of faith and works of religious art. But they were never totally able to shed an implicit belief in the inferiority or insufficiency of Christianity.
They were fascinated by the esoteric. They not only saw in Greek and Roman remnants the plans for building a better world; they even aspired to recover the lost language of Eden through the study of hieroglyphics, Hermetic doctrines, and Cabbala. They really seemed to believe that the confusion at Babel could be undone by scholarship and archaeology, rather than by the miracle at Pentecost!
I don’t favor the art of Classical Greece or Rome, but I certainly do not think that it should be excluded as an influence on Christian art, but other cultures have great things to contribute as well.
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