the bright spring with the «Corriere» – Corriere.it

Renaissance: beautiful definition. In the collective imagination it evokes an unrepeatable era of awakening to beauty and knowledge, as if a light had erupted from centuries of darkness. All positive images printed in our minds. A “romantic” story circulates among scholars about how a historical period came to be circumscribed with that expression; something more than a gossip, because it is endorsed by the creator of the word himself: Jules Michelet.

In the 1840s, the French historian, magnificent popularizer, after having devoted himself to the drafting of a monumental
History of France, having reached the 15th century, depressed by the loss of his first wife, he felt reborn. Fifty years old, he regained strength by crossing the very young Athenaide Mialaret on his way: let’s imagine Jules enchanted in front of Sandro Botticelli’s masterpiece, longing for a new Spring. She made no secret of it. To his friend Madame Dumesnil he forewarned the decision to appeal to “le mot Renaissance” to link an intellectual intuition to his particular sentimental condition: “I could not interpret even the most modest social event without calling everything to my aid – religion, art , law, poetry – realizing more and more that our classifications are generally not very serious … It is not a simple change of procedure and method, and a new life, a life in which I try to organize the world and which is not, neither more nor less, than my life itself ».

In the romantic era par excellence, that love in the nascent state led Michelet to to archive the Middle Ages in the same way as his mourningmirror of his recent past, a dark age, where the attempts to open the windows and let in new air, with characters like Abelard to give an example, did not take hold in milieu intellectual engraved on the Scholastic doctrine.

Naturally Gallic chauvinism oriented the authoritative historian towards the glories of his own home, neglecting the cradle of so much renewed wonder, namely Italy. To remember that everything had flourished in a mercantile and quarrelsome city between the Apennines and the sea, he had to provide, in three decades, Jacob Burckhardt, a Swiss-German Protestant friend of Friedrich Nietzsche. In love with art, and Raphael in particular, he too contributed to idealizing the Renaissance to the detriment of previous centuries, underestimating literary humanism which had ancient roots passing through Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. The Greek and Latin classics did not re-emerge by magic: they came out of the closet of history after a passionate search that lasted centuries; the Renaissance simply reaped the benefits.

It took many studies to admit that that golden age had distant origins and that the The Middle Ages, more than a suffocating tunnel, had been an incubator, the snow under which the seed had matured. At that point, heated debates broke out that failed to scratch the magnificence of the Renaissance. Thus the age of fires, witches, magic, wars of religion, oppression, growing inequalities remained the barbarian age, even if, in reality, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were the centuries of those inhuman drifts. But it is understandable: the wonders that remain to us in the universe of art, literature and flourished thought are then there to be seen.

By trying to get out of stereotypes, it’s much more interesting observe that period as the backbone of modernity. The invention of movable type printing is at the origin of the circulation of thought that changed the world; the new navigation techniques, with the discovery of America, pursued by the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, it is the start of globalization; the reversal of the paradigms of the economy, for which it is no longer the need for human survival that dictates the production of goods, but the latter that determines how much and what must be consumed, is the affirmation of capitalism. If we wanted to exaggerate, we could find in the passion for mnemonics that seduced the best minds of the time, the spark of the current need to enclose all knowledge on the Net.

If the Renaissance is at the origin of modernity, the Middle Ages is the adolescence of those two extraordinary centuries of awakening. It would be ungrateful to argue that the Renaissance was simply a return to the golden classical Greek and Roman past. Instead, it was the pursuit of ingenuity dictated by necessity. Not least the black plague of the mid-fourteenth century, which prostrated Europe and set new energies in motion.

In its millenary history, man has always found the strength to raise his head after something or someone crushed it in the mud. As, unfortunately, it still happens today.

The new volume

The essay by Michele Ciliberto is out on newsstands on 27 October with the Corriere della Sera

Thinking for opposites. Disenchantment and utopia in the Renaissance, at the cost of

€ 8.90 plus the price of the newspaper. This is the second volume of the «Rinascimento» series, edited by Franco Cardini. The third, out on November 3, is

The European Renaissance

by Peter Burke.