Part One

During most of the 1980s I was a fully paid-up member of the Italian Renaissance fan club. I loved it, especially the paintings. It sustained me during dark times, and provided untold inspiration when needed and while nothing else did.

It started with Botticelli, and then Michelangelo, before reaching its apotheosis besides the dark brooding canals and dreamy countryside landscapes of the Veneto with Titian and Giorgione. And from there it sank in 1990, disappearing from sight and mind beneath the waters of a damp, grey, October late afternoon of the Venetian lagoon, its outlines seen vague through the drizzle of a waterfront near San Marco.  

I gave talks and slide shows on the art of the Italian Renaissance at Buddhist Centres, propelled into action by the notion that this art could play an important role in 'spiritual life'. My enthusiasm blinded me to the possibility that some people might find all this a bit curious and eccentric, or not to their taste.

I implicitly subscribed to the beliefs and assumptions underlying 'the Italian Renaissance'; of what this 'renaissance' was. It was a rebirth, a renewal, yes. But more than that, it was a leap forward for human beings, in the direction of 'modernity'. The Renaissance men (and a few women) represented the beginnings of what was to become 'us'.

In essence, the story is simplicity itself. You had the Greeks and the Romans, who were civilised people, with aqueducts and lifelike sculptures and Plato and Vergil and stuff. But then they disappeared, and you had the Goths and Vandals and Vikings; you had the Dark Ages and the Medieval period, when art was rudimentary, the words of the philosophers vanished into the mist, and, having thrown off their pagan beliefs, people lived with a simple belief in and fear of a big scary God.

And then, to a fanfare of relief, you had the Renaissance. Philosophy, lifelike sculptures, and freethinking made a comeback. Human dignity was restored. And from there on in it's the beginning of human progress, of cultural evolution and the development of civilisation. 

This evolution can be well traced in art, from the medieval primitives through the Renaissance giants and the successive waves and schools of painting ever since. In particular, we can follow the process of decreasing focus on conventionally religious subject matter. During the Renaissance the figures begin to look like real human beings, not just religious stereotypes with a golden background. Art becomes based around humans and human concerns, relinquishing the psychological shackles of religion and God-up-there. That's the story, anyway.

There were books around - big, lavish, erudite books - that described the story, and I lapped it all up. It makes a good story, that's for sure.

I failed to question any of it. I asked no questions because I failed to realise that there was anything to question. This was how it was, all the books said so, and that's that. It is only during recent years that I have realised the extent to how everything - and I mean everything - we believe is based upon assumptions put out there into the culture. And how these unconscious assumptions need to be dug up and investigated properly.

Part Two 

So, to the Renaissance. How did it become 'the Renaissance'? Who coined the expression? When?

It doesn't require delving into obscure conspiracy theory tomes to find an answer. It's on the first page of the conventional search engine.

"The periodization and labelling of history is largely the work of the 19th century. The term 'Renaissance' was first prominently used by the French historian Jules Michelet in 1858, and it was set in bronze two years later by Jacob Burckhardt when he published his great book 'the Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.' " (NY Times archive)

Just let that sink in for a minute. For three hundred years following its major participants, the Renaissance did not exist. Three hundred years is quite a long time, and all sort of things can happen over those many years.

The assumed image is one of Italian dudes self-consciously taking part in this movement called the Renaissance. Here's Pico della Mirandola skilfully blending Christianity and paganism in the philosophical wing of the Renaissance. There's Lorenzo De Medici, proudly financing this great thing called the Renaissance. And look at Leonardo da Vinci, strutting around in his 'Proud to be a Renaissance man' t-shirt. Not at all. Nothing like. They were simply doing what people do who are creative by nature, as circumstances change. Elements such as wider availability of translations of the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers were crucial.

So our Renaissance people, ushering in the new period of modernity, were no such thing. This was simply the invention of a bunch of Victorians. These 19th century historians have a lot to answer for. They were pivotal in twisting the perception of the great mass of people in various directions. They invented other things as well as the Renaissance. They fabricated 'Buddhism' as an umbrella term for all manner of disparate spiritual and pseudo-spiritual, social and cultural, groupings and practices scattered across much of Asia and over many centuries of time. 

Inventing the Renaissance went hand-in-hand with the emerging notions of progress and evolution. Michelet's use of the word comes one year before Darwin published his famous 'Origin of Species' in 1859. Coincidence? Methinks not. 

Inculcating the belief in linear progress and evolution has been pivotal in providing a convenient story to underpin the high-speed changes that have characterised life in the west since mid 19th century. No matter what horror is inflicted upon humanity, behind it is the notion of evolution, and that things are really better then ever. Which is a cover for a lie, a barefaced lie.

Our Renaissance heroes did not actually go in for 'progress'. If anything, their view of the world was more akin to that of Hinduism (another 19th century fabrication?), of a cyclical shape to events. Things come and go, things go up and down, things return in slightly different shape. In 'The Flowering of the Renaissance' Vincent Cronin expresses a barely-disguised frustration with this apparent primitivism of our great Renaissance scholars and philosophers.

A leading figure to be dragged into creating the modern view of 15th and 16th century Italy is one Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574). While he was an artist himself, Vasari is best remembered as the author of 'Lives of the Artists'. This is a prime source for information about the painters and sculptors of the 'Renaissance'. He describes the lives of many of the main figures of the time in a mix of fact, fiction, and something on-between the two. His disregard for factual accuracy, and his willingness to mix it up with bullshit, would put him in good stead as a 'journalist' today.

Vasari is viciously of the 'silly primitives becoming civilised' school of thought. The opening few lines of his chapter on Giovanni Cimabue (c 1240-1302), the earliest of his great artists, says it all really:

"The flood of misfortunes which continually swept over and submerged the unhappy country of Italy not only destroyed everything worthy to be called a building but also, and this was of far greater consequence, completely wiped out the artists who lived there. Eventually, however, by God's providence, Giovanni Cimabue, who was destined to take the first steps in restoring the art of painting to its earlier stature, was born in the city of Florence, in the year 1240."

Note that, despite his scorn and despair for the previous Dark Ages, Vasari does not see in the great artists anything especially new - no progress or evolution as such. Rather, their job is one of 'restoration', returning painting to its earlier stature.

Part Three

Another word frequently associated with our Renaissance heroes is 'humanism'. They are humanists, we are told, and the rise of humanism is a major feature of this brave new era. 

'Humanism' in our modern times is most frequently understood as something rational, logical, where the matters of the world can be deduced by human beings. It is a world defined without recourse to religion or the supernatural or suchlike. People like to have a humanist funeral, without all the religious ritual and stuff.

In the Renaissance, humanism didn't mean this at all. It simply meant paying serious attention to 'the humanities', topics of study such as languages, literature, philosophy. It meant education that was not confined to matters of God and the Bible. 

So the meanings for Marsilio Ficino and Mr. 2024 were quite different. Yet by referring - ad nauseam, it has to be said - to the Renaissance dudes as humanists, the implication is always that they were a kind of proto-atheist, rejecting religion and all that superstitious stuff. They were somehow 'modern'.

How deliberate this confusion is I shall not discuss. Suffice to say that 'coincidence' is less common than many people believe.... But it undoubtedly creates a misleading impression of the Renaissance, and who these Renaissance people were. We are invited to believe that they would have been at home in the modern humanistic attitude to life, while in truth their worldview remained very much embedded in Christianity and in 'the supernatural'. 

Part Four

In April this year my wife and I went on a mini-pilgrimage to Castelfranco, a small and quiet town just north of Venice. The town is celebrated primarily as the supposed bir

Giorgione is one of the stars of the Renaissance - the High Renaissance to be precise, as the end of the 15th and early 16th century have become characterised in Italy. Little is truly known about him, but the myth and the persona ooze progressive Renaissance. Charming, handsome, well-mannered; educated, and with a sense for the mystical. Significantly for the humanist trend in the story, few of his extant works are of conventional religious themes, especially few for churches. Rather, he seems to have painted quite a bit for private patrons, and some of his work comes bathed in mystery, its subject matter remaining enigmatic to the day.

The Casa Giorgione in Castelfranco is an excellent little museum dedicated to the life and times of Giorgione and Castelfranco. On the top floor can be found his earliest known work. It is a frieze around the top of all four walls of the large and airy room. It is composed of all manner of strange things, which relation to one another or to anything at all remains a mystery. Be sure, however, that this is no random jumble of sketches and symbols. Rather, it is all to the design of the well-to-do man who owned the house and who employed Giorgione. Undoubtedly an excellent Renaissance humanist!

We can get all progressive about the objects depicted along the top of the room. But the exceptionally informative brochure that comes with a visit to the Casa Giorgione ignores the ideological bullshit and tells it like it is:

"The so-called Frieze of the Liberal and Mechanical Arts has been painted by Giorgione presumably between 1502 and 1503 and is a pictorial text of extraordinary charm and complexity, which has long engaged art historians......"

"Long thought to be a generic and refined exaltation of humanistic culture through the sciences...., the Frieze hides, conversely, a message much more unsettling and connected to the historical events and to the culture of the time....... Specifically, the large fresco testifies the deep anxiety that crossed contemporaries of Giorgione caused by the inauspicious astral conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in Cancer, that would have occurred between 1503 and 1504, followed by much feared eclipse of the moon. Conjunction that would bring misfortunes and revolutions of the constituted order and it did fear the end of a golden age for the civilization."

It doesn't sound that modern, progressive, ratio-scientific, and man-is-everything to me. I rest my case.

We are left with a sense that this Italian Renaissance and all its humanism is in large part a fabrication, inserted into the story we call history, in order to bolster up a particular view of evolution, linear development, and the slow but steady death of God. Given weight by oft-repeated quotes such as 'Man the measure of all things', the Renaissance is framed to usher in an increasingly godless world, one instead run on the principles of 'reason', 'science', and 'materialism'. 

It is part, in other words, of selling a lie. Selling a world, therefore, in which, despite fake pandemics, manufactured wars, brazenly evil politicians and media, faceless AI-lookalike bureaucrats everywhere, erosion of free speech and civil liberties at every turn; a world where, despite all this, we are supposed to sit back in our armchair, pour ourselves a whisky, and manage a smile in the knowledge that 'We've never had it so good'.

More to say about all this....... but not now.

Images: Nativity by Botticelli, National Gallery, London; Pico della Mirandola, Italian philosopher; Cimabue painting; Castelfranco; section of Giorgione's frieze, Casa Giorgione.