Renaissance and Renascences (Art History)

Introduction
This article is directed to the much-debated theme of “Renaissance and Renascences,” a concept defined by the German-born art historian Erwin Panofsky (b. 1892–d. 1968), who defended the unique and permanent status of the Renaissance “revival of antiquity” in relation to claims for earlier or “rival” Renaissances (Carolingian, 12th century) during the Middle Ages. According to Panofsky, these earlier revivals, while significant for their accomplishments in the realms of scholarship, literature, and the arts, were relatively short-lived and limited in scope, when compared to the “permanent” revival of antique forms accomplished during the Italian Renaissance. Panofsky described these earlier revivals as “Renascences” (or “not-quite Renaissances”) that, for all their accomplishments, remained strictly “mediaeval phenomena.” Panofsky’s argument may be seen as one chapter in a broader debate over the relationship of the Renaissance to the Middle Ages, on the one hand, and the “modern” world on the other. These distinctions have their origins in the humanist culture of the Renaissance itself, where the concepts of a distant period of great accomplishments (“Antiquity”) and a subsequent period of decline (the “Middle Ages” or medium aevum) were formulated as part of a programmatic movement for the “revival” of the former. During the 16th century, Giorgio Vasari used the Italian rinascita (“rebirth”) to describe the renewal of the arts in the 14th–16th centuries, setting the stage for the modern definition of the period, using the French term, “Renaissance.” But the origins of the “Renaissance” as a term and a periodic concept emerged only later, in the 18th and 19th centuries in France, Germany, Italy, and England. In the earlier Enlightenment tradition, the Italian revival of antiquity that eventually passed to France and other nations of Europe was understood as representing the beginning of a more secular, modern era, marked by the triumph of reason over the religiosity of the Middle Ages. From the mid-18th century onward, a more positive evaluation of medieval culture began to emerge, spurred by “nationalistic” patriotism and a growing religious reaction to the perceived excesses of the Enlightenment. During the 1850s and 1860s, a more favorable view of the “Renaissance” (using the French word first employed by Jean-Baptiste Seroux d’Agincourt and applied to the whole period by Jules Michelet in 1855), emerged. In some ways, this new concept of the era represented a simple revival or revision of the Enlightenment idea of the era as a turn away from the “darkness” of the Middle Ages and a first step toward the advent of the modern age. This trend reached its canonical form in the work of Jacob Burckhardt and John Addington Symonds in the 1860s and 1870s. In the early 20th century, a new critique of this model emerged, stressing the era’s continuities as well as breaks from medieval traditions. It was this “Revolt of the Medievalists” that set the stage for Panofsky’s mid-century defense of the Renaissance, which helped to inspire a broader debate over the relative merits of the Renaissance vs. the Middle Ages that began to fade by the end of the 1960s, when new disciplinary issues, related to class, gender, and globalism, among other themes, came to the fore.

Foundational Works
The concept of the Renaissance as a period in European political, intellectual, and cultural history, has it origins in the writings of 18th- and early-19th-century historians, including such notables as Voltaire (b. 1694–d. 1778), Edward Gibbon (b. 1737–d. 1794), and William Roscoe (b. 1753–d. 1831) who, in their own divergent ways, conceived of the period of the later 15th and early 16th centuries as a golden age exemplified by the Medici family’s patronage of art and learning in Florence (see Gibbon 1776–1788 and Roscoe 1796, and Hay 1965 cited under Anthologies and Edited Volumes for Voltaire). As noted in the Introduction, the earliest usage of the modern French term “Renaissance” appears to have been introduced in Agincourt 1823. Somewhat paradoxically, d’Agincourt’s lavishly illustrated volumes also contributed to the “Romantic reaction” against the classical art of the Renaissance and fueled a growing admiration for the art and architecture of the Middle Ages, including the so-called “primitive” painters of the 14th–15th centuries, a trend exemplified in Rumohr 1827–1831, Rio 1836, Ruskin 1854, and Ruskin 1851–1853, and inspired in part by Bottari’s new edition of Vasari 1759–1760.

Agincourt, Jean-Baptiste Seroux d’. Histoire de l‘art par les monumens, depuis sa décadence au IVe siècle jusqu’ à son renouvellement au XVIe. 6 vols. in 3. Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1823.

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English edition: History of Art by Its Monuments: From Its Decline in the Fourth Century to Its Restoration in the Sixteenth. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847. A monumental work of illustrated “universal” art history, covering Europe from the 4th to the 16th centuries. The author seems to have been the first to employ the term “Renaissance” for the artistic and cultural renewal following the “decadence” of Middle Ages. Agincourt’s illustrations of Italian “primitives” contributed to the early-19th-century enthusiasm for pre- and early Renaissance art.

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Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 6 vols. London: Printed for A. Strahan; and T. Cadell, 1776–1788.

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This famous work originated as a proposed study of the Florentine Republic under the Medici but was expanded to embrace the history of the Roman Empire and its collapse, ending in the 16th century.

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Rio, Alexis François. De la poésie chrétienne dans son principe dans sa matière et dans ses formes. Paris: Debécourt, 1836.

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English translation: The Poetry of Christian Art. London: T. Bosworth, 1854. Revised edition, De l‘art chrétien. 4 vols. Paris: Hachette 1861–1867. A devout Catholic and royalist, Rio was influenced by German philosophers and art historians (including Rumohr). He traces the late antique “decline” of Christian art to its “rebirth” in 13th-century Siena, and describes its rebirth in the art of Giotto and other 14th-century masters. In later chapters, Rio explores the development of 15th-century Italian painting, climaxing in the early work of Raphael. Rio influenced the thinking of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites.

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Roscoe, William. The Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Called the Magnificent. London: Printed for A. Strahan, T. Cadell jun. and W. Davies, and J. Edwards, 1796.

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A popular and influential biography of Lorenzo de’ Medici, presenting the subject as an enlightened patron of the arts and literature, whose cultural activities almost single-handedly made the revival of the arts at the end of the 15th century possible. Although Roscoe’s research drew extensively from contemporary printed and manuscript materials, the author never actually visited Italy himself.

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Rumohr, Carl Friedrich von. Italienische Forschungen. 3 vols. (in Vol. 1). Berlin: Nicolai’sche Buchhandlung, 1827–1831.

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Rumohr, sometimes referred to as the “father of modern art history” for his reliance on documentary research, was also one of the earliest scholars to favor the Italian “primitives” of the 14th–15th centuries over the “classical” masters of the 16th. He shared this enthusiasm with the group of expatriate German painters known as the Nazarenes. Rumohr’s ideas influenced the thinking of Rio, and through him the ideas of Ruskin. Updated edition with introduction by Julius von Schlosser, Italienische Forschungen. Frankfurt: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1920.

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Ruskin, John. The Stones of Venice. 3 vols. London: Smith, Elder, 1851–1853.

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Based on the author’s intensive study of Venetian architecture, this influential work champions the Gothic era as a time when honesty, piety, and artistic freedom brought the arts to their highest level, in contrast to the Renaissance, which extinguished this creative spar in favor of enforced conformity and spiritual corruption.

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Ruskin, John. Lectures on Architecture and Painting, delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853. London: Smith, Elder, 1854.

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A collection of lectures that captures the essence of Ruskin’s thinking in the era of the Stones of Venice (Ruskin 1851–1853) and his association with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

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Vasari, Giorgo. Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori scritte da Giorgio Vasari pittore et architetto. Corette da molte errori e illustrate con note. 3 vols. Edited by Giovanni Bottari. Rome: Niccolò and Marco Pagliarmi, 1759–1760.

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Scholarly edition by the Jesuit Bottari, based on the 1568 edition, augmented with material from the 1550 version, with notes, and commentary. This edition contributed materially to the later 18th- and 19th-century interest in Italian Renaissance art, and formed the basis for the nine-volume Gaetano Milanesi edition of 1878–1885.

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General Overviews
This select list of secondary studies is intended to provide the connecting threads and broader historical contexts associated with the emergence of the Renaissance idea in the 18th–19th centuries, as well as the continuing controversies regarding the Renaissance as a historical period. The detailed analyses and extensive bibliographies provided by Ferguson 1948, Kerrigan and Braden 1989, Bullen 1994, and Caferro 2011, in particular, are recommended for those seeking a deeper investigation of these themes. Fraser 1992 is a more focused study of Victorian, British responses to the period.

Bullen, J. B. The Myth of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994.

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A fascinating study of the emergence of the Renaissance from a complicated and contested field of historical writing (in England and France) in the later 18th and 19th centuries. More specifically, the author argues that the “classic” concept of the Renaissance was (and by inference, remains) almost inseparably tied to the idea of the Middle Ages, as seen most convincingly in the works of Ruskin and Michelet.

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Caferro, William. Contesting the Renaissance. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

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One of the most recent contributions to the literature on the Renaissance debate. The opening chapter, “The Renaissance Question,” provides a thoughtful and concise summary of the issues—old and new—that continue to keep the debate fresh (and sometimes heated). This is followed by thematic chapters on such themes as individualism, gender and the Renaissance woman, the nature of humanism and its debt to the Middle Ages, among others.

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Ferguson, Wallace K. The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948.

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Ferguson (b. 1902–d. 1985) was a prominent scholar in the fields of Renaissance humanism and intellectual culture whose sustained interest in the historical “problem” of the Renaissance culminated in this volume, which, more than half a century later, is still the most comprehensive examination of the historiography of the Renaissance written in English. His chapter “The Revolt of the Medievalists” (pp. 329–385) is central to any understanding of the Renaissance/Renascences debate.

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Fraser, Hilary. The Victorians and Renaissance Italy. Oxford; and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992.

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A sweeping, inclusive account of the British contribution to the “invention” and interpretation of the Italian Renaissance in art, poetry, fiction, and scholarship. This is an ideal introduction to the topic, which may be explored in further detail in the collections Law and Østermark-Johansen 2005 and Fletcher 2012 (both cited under Edited Volumes).

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Kerrigan, William, and Gordon Braden. The Idea of the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

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This collection of essays includes a surprisingly positive and insightful analysis of Burckhardt 1860 (cited under Flowering of the Renaissance Idea). The rest of the book explores the writings of Ernst Cassirer (b. 1874–d. 1945), a philosopher and historian of philosophy who influenced the thinking of Erwin Panofsky, and such Renaissance/Early Modern figures as Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and Descartes.

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Edited Volumes
These collections explore some of the same issues detailed in General Overviews, including both earlier—Fletcher 2012, Law and Østermark-Johansen 2005, Terpstra and Portebois 2003—and more recent concepts of the Renaissance, as exemplified here by Lee, et al. 2010.

Fletcher, Stella, ed. Roscoe and Italy: The Reception of Italian Renaissance History and Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Farnham, UK; and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.

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An edited volume of essays devoted to the genesis, character, and reception of Roscoe’s landmark biographies of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Pope Leo X.

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Law, John E., and Lene Østermark-Johansen, eds. Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance. Aldershot, UK; and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005.

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A collection of essays examining conceptions of the Italian Renaissance in England, and to a lesser extent, America, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, with chapters devoted to historiography, art history, and representations of the period in contemporary art.

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Lee, Alexander, Pit Péporté, and Harry Schnitker, eds. Renaissance? Perceptions of Continuity and Discontinuity in Europe, c. 1300–c. 1550. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2010.

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This collection of scholarly essays, derived from a conference held at the University of Edinburgh in 2007, addresses a wide variety of issues relevant to the Renaissance/Renascences debate, including the relationships between the “canonical” Renaissance and earlier revivals of classical antiquity, the international scope of the Renaissance “movement,” and any number of issues related to the visual arts, including the develop of pictorial perspective and Vasari’s concept of rinascita.

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Terpstra, Nicholas, and Yannick Portebois, eds. The Renaissance in the Nineteenth Century: Le XIXe siècle renaissant; Proceedings of a Conference Held in Toronto, Ont., 4–6 October 2001. Toronto: Toronto Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Victoria University, 2003.

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A bilingual collection of essays on the 19th-century reception of the Renaissance, with articles ranging from historiography to literature, drama, and art history.

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Journal Articles and Book Chapters
These shorter pieces include examinations of the Burckhardtian and general 19th-century conception of the Renaissance—Baron 1960, Bullen 1981, Cooper 1981, Gossman 1988, Klenze 1906, Lightbown 1985, Mali 1991—and an excellent, up-to-date survey of the entire concept from the Renaissance to the present—Kraye 2010.

Baron, Hans. “Burckhardt’s ‘Civilization of the Renaissance’ a Century after Its Publication.” Renaissance News 13 (1960): 207–222.

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Reviewing Burckhardt’s book a century after its publication, Baron considers the intervening “revolt of the Medievalists,” describing Burckhardt’s attitude to the Middle Ages as broadly misunderstood, and sympathetic.

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Bullen, Barrie. “The Source and Development of the Idea of the Renaissance in Early Nineteenth-Century French Criticism.” Modern Language Review 76 (1981): 311–322.

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Traces the emergence of the term and concept of the Renaissance in early-19th-century art historical literature, most notably in the work of Jean-Baptiste Seroux d’Agincourt.

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Cooper, Robyn. “The Relationship between the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Painters before Raphael in English Criticism of the Late 1840s and 1850s.” Victorian Studies 24 (1981): 405–438.

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Examines critical responses to the ideas and works of the Pre-Raphaelites in relation to contemporary views regarding the earlier Renaissance painters.

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Gossman, Lionel. “Jacob Burckhardt as Art Historian.” Oxford Art Journal 11 (1988): 25–32.

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A fascinating and essential study of Burckhardt’s character and accomplishments as an art historian, with particular focus on his conception of the “development” of art from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance as put forth in his Der Cicerone (1855) and other writings.

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Klenze, Camillo von. “The Growth of Interest in the Early Italian Masters: From Tischbein to Ruskin.” Modern Philology 4 (1906): 207–274.

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An early and still-useful account of the emergence of the taste for “early Renaissance” art in the 18th and 19th centuries.

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Kraye, Jill. “Renaissance. II. The West.” In The Classical Tradition. Edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, 810–815. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010.

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Excellent survey of the Renaissance concept in relation to the revivals of Antiquity and cultural history in general, with sharp characterizations of the Carolingian, Ottonian, and 12th-century “Renaissances,” the intellectual and artistic aspects of the 14th- to 16th-century Renaissance in Europe, and the emergence and subsequent controversies associated with the idea of the Renaissance as a historical period.

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Lightbown, R. W. “The Inspiration of Christian Art.” In Influences in Victorian Art and Architecture. Edited by Sarah Macready and F. H. Thompson, 3–40. London: Society of Antiquaries, 1985.

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A useful study of the influence of Romantic-era enthusiasm for Christian (pre-“renaissance”) art, including the writings of Alexis-François Rio, on Victorian-era critics such as Alexander Crawford Lindsay, whose Sketches of the History of Christian Art (1847) is discussed.

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Mali, Joseph. “Jacob Burckhardt: Myth, History and Mythistory.” History and Memory 3 (1991): 86–118.

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An erudite and original investigation into the junctures of myth and history as they relate to the work of Burckhardt. Expanded version later published in Mali 2003 (cited under Book-Length Studies and Edited Volumes).

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Renaissance Roots
The notion of an Italian Renaissance “rebirth” of classical learning and culture may be traced, to some extent, to the period itself, most notably in the writings of early humanists such as Francesco Petrarca (known in English as Petrarch, b. 1304–d. 1374) and Flavio Biondo (b. 1392–d. 1463), who introduced the notion of a “dark age,” the medium aevum (“Middle Age”) that separated their own time from the glories of Roman Antiquity (see Mommsen 1942). Equally important for the narrative of the “revival of the arts” during the period were the works of such artist-writers as Lorenzo Ghiberti (b. 1378–d. 1455) and Giorgio Vasari (b. 1511–d. 1574), who described this “middle period” as a time of decline and virtual extinction of the principles of ancient art, and attributed the renewal of these in their own time to the emulation of antique works that survived into their own time (see Ghiberti 1998, Vasari 1568, and Vasari 1996). Vasari’s use of the Italian rinascita (“rebirth”) to describe the restoration of the arts from the 14th to the 16th centuries has been cited as a direct precedent for the modern term “Renaissance.” This is a select list of primary and secondary sources, including, among the latter, some key studies of the revival of Antiquity: Buddensieg 1965, which discusses the changing fortunes of the legend of Gregory the Great as the destroyer of ancient idols, Gombrich 1961, Reynolds and Wilson 1991, Ullman 1952, and Weiss 1969.

Buddensieg, Tilmann. “Gregory the Great, the Destroyer of Pagan Idols: The History of a Medieval Legend concerning the Decline of Ancient Art and Literature.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965): 44–65.

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A masterful account of the legend of Pope Gregory the Great as the iconoclastic smasher of pagan idols, from the 12th to the 16th centuries. The author shows that what began as a heroic chapter in the history of Christianity’s triumph was eventually viewed, by humanist writers and artists of the early and high Renaissance, as a disgraceful episode in the story of the decline of art.

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Ghiberti, Lorenzo. I commentarii: Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze, II, I, 333. Florence: Giunti, 1998.

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Critical edition of Ghiberti’s manuscript, which provided an early model for Vasari’s account of decline and revival of the arts. Book I is a history of the arts in antiquity. Book 2 ascribes the decline of art to the early Christian iconoclasts and barbarian invaders, followed by its return to greatness in the art of Giotto and others. Part 3, mostly devoted to technical matters, also records the discovery of some ancient sculptures.

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Gombrich, E. H. “Renaissance and Golden Age.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 24 (1961): 306–309.

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Gombrich links the persistent mythology of the “golden ages” of Cosimo il Vecchio and Lorenzo de’ Medici to the rhetorical strategies of Medici artists and propagandists (notably Giorgio Vasari) in the 16th century.

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Mommsen, Theodor E. “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages.’” Speculum 17 (1942): 226–242.

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Classic account of Petrarch’s conception of an “age of darkness” that followed the glorious era of Roman Antiquity. Mommsen demonstrates that this conception, which led ultimately to our own concepts of the “ancient” and “medieval” periods, was conceived in response to the shattered and virtually abandoned state of the city of Rome in Petrarch’s day.

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Reynolds, L. D., and N. G. Wilson. Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. 3d ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.

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The third and most up to date edition of this introduction to the survival and transmission of ancient texts from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Byzantine, Carolingian, 12th-century) to the Renaissance.

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Ullman, B. L. “Renaissance: The Word and the Underlying Concept.” Studies in Philology 49 (1952): 105–118.

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An examination of the origins of the concept and identification of some forerunners of the term “Renaissance” in the culture of Italian humanism.

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Vasari, Giorgo. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori, scritte e di nuovo ampliate da Giorgio Vasari con i ritratti loro e con l’aggiunta delle vite de’ vive et de’ morti dall’ anno 1550 infino al 1567. 3 vols. Florence: Giunti, 1568.

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The second, much amplified and updated version of the Lives, originally published in 1550. Vasari’s history of the revival of the arts in Italy. His prefaces, with their accounts of the decline of art after the fall of Rome, followed by a revival of in three stages from the 14th to the 16th century, are derived in part from the writings of Ghiberti.

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Vasari, Giorgo. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. 2 vols. Translated by Gaston Du C. De Vere. New York: Knopf, 1996.

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This translation originally published New York and London, Macmillan and The Medici Society, 1912–1915. This is the best and most accessible English translation of most (but not all) of Vasari’s 1568 edition.

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Weiss, Roberto. The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.

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Still the best introduction to the Renaissance “rediscovery” of the “tangible remains” of Roman and Classical Antiquity with chapters treating the medieval traditions, the humanist study of Rome and its ruins, the discovery and response to Italian and Greek antiquities, the study of inscriptions and numismatics, and collections of antiquities.

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The Flowering of the Renaissance Idea
In 1855, the French historian Jules Michelet (b. 1798–d. 1874) published the seventh volume in his monumental Histoire de France (17 vols., 1833–1862), with the title La Renaissance. Michelet 1855 is the earliest, modern book-length treatment of the Renaissance as a cultural and historical period, a circumstance that has prompted some to proclaim him the “inventor” of the period as we understand it today. Michelet’s main focus is the history and culture of 16th-century France, but the author devotes considerable attention to Italy, where, he argues, the revival of Antiquity and a new flowering of the arts established the terms of a much broader explosion of human accomplishment—the discovery of new worlds, the first stages of the scientific “revolution,” etc. Five years later, Burckhardt 1860 presented a synthetic, and in some ways, definitive portrait of the period in a series of thematic chapters, devoted to such themes as the revival of Antiquity, the development of the individual, and the discovery of the world and of man. Conspicuously missing are the visual arts, which Burckhardt intended to address in another volume, and had already considered in Burckhardt 1855. Nevertheless, Burckhardt 1860 established and codified a basic vision of the Renaissance—shared and popularized in Symonds 1875–1886—that has proved remarkably durable, despite the misgivings of later critics. Its impact in the English-speaking world, following its translation in 1878, has been immeasurable, and the ensuing “Renaissance or Renascences” debate is almost unimaginable without it. Among contemporary works of note, the history of Rome in the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Gregorovius 1859–1872, the aestheticized interpretations of Renaissance culture in Pater 1980, and the important early study of the Renaissance humanists’ recovery of ancient literature in Voigt 1880–1881 have been included.

Burckhardt, Jacob. Der Cicerone: Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens. Basel: Schweighauser’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1855.

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English translation: The Cicerone: Or Art Guide to Painting in Italy. Trans. Mrs. A. H. Clough. London: John Murray, 1873. Described as a “handbook” for art-loving travelers in Italy, but organized by periods (Antique, Medieval, Romanesque, Gothic, 15th Century, 16th Century) and “schools” (Florentine, Venetian, Umbrian, etc) rather than locations. Some of the classifications seem unusual today (Cimabue is in the “Romanesque” section), but may be explained by the author’s emphasis on the continuities, as well as the changes, in Italian art.

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Burckhardt, Jacob. Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch. Basel: Schweighauser’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1860.

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English translation: The Civilization of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy. Trans. S. G. C. Middlemore. London: C. K. Paul, 1878. [Penguin, London, 1990]. The classic and, for many years, definitive presentation of the Italian Renaissance as a cultural period. Still in print, it is a bit past its prime as a textbook for undergraduates, but it remains an entertaining and compelling read. Especially pertinent for this article are Burckhardt’s characterization of the “Revival of Antiquity” (Part III) and his insistence that the period marked a decisive break from the culture of the Middle Ages, manifest above all in the emergence of the “individual” as a cultural mindset.

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Gregorovius, Ferdinand. Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter: vom fünften Jahrhundert bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert. 8 vols. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1859–1872.

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English translation: History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages. Translated by Annie Hamilton. London: G. Bell, 1894–1902. Reissued New York: Italica Press, 2002–2004. A monumental, popular, and still useful history of Rome from the fall of the Western Empire in 400 CE to 1534.

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Michelet, Jules. La Renaissance. Vol. 7 of Histoire de France. Paris: Chamerot, 1855.

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Michelet’s main focus is the culture of France during the 16th century, whose entrée into the Renaissance is ascribed to the experience of Italy, which began to experience the revival many years earlier. Michelet’s treatment of the Middle Ages is almost entirely negative, an attitude that was informed in no small part by the author’s opposition to the contemporary revival of ecclesiastical influence in France. In 1852–1867, 17 vols, Paris: L. Hachette.

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Pater, Walter. Walter Pater The Renaissance Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text. Edited by Donald L. Hill. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.

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First published as Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Oxford and London: Macmillan, 1877. Pater’s collection of essays, published here in the definitive 4th edition, contains important appreciations of the work of Botticelli, “The School of Giorgione,” Michelangelo’s poetry, and most famously, the author’s poetic account of the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci as an artist/scientist. Pater’s celebrated description of the Mona Lisa as a trans-historical but paradoxically modern symbol of human experience contributed to the fame of the picture as a definitive product of the Renaissance.

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Symonds, John Addington. The Renaissance in Italy. 7 vols. London: Smith, Elder, 1875–1886.

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This monumental work by Symonds (b. 1840–d. 1893) presented an idealized vision of the Renaissance to English-speaking readers. The author, who also wrote a still-useful biography of Michelangelo (The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1893) and an English translation of The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (1881), praises the artists of the era for harmonizing and synthesizing the pagan and Christian traditions they inherited from the past.

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Voigt, Georg. Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus. 2d ed. 2 vols. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1881.

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Italian translation: Il Risorgimento dell’antichità classica, ovvero Il primo secolo dell’Umanismo. Florence, G. C. Sansoni, 1888–1890. A classic early study of the Italian humanist recovery of ancient literature.

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Renaissances in the Middle Ages
During the first half of the 20th century, a reaction set in against the supposed “exclusivity” of the Renaissance as a turning point in the history of culture (in general) and the revival of classical learning and classical forms in the arts (in particular). This “Revolt of the Medievalists,” as Wallace K. Ferguson so memorably referred to it (see Ferguson 1948 cited under General Overviews), pointed to the revivals of classical learning and Latin literature in the Carolingian period and the 12th century, and the renewal of Classical/Roman forms in art and architecture of these periods as “Renaissances” in their own right. Then there were the various “Renaissances” in the Byzantine East (the Macedonian Renaissance of the 8th–10th centuries, a second one in the 12th century, and a final one during the Palaeologan dynasty of 1261–1453). Indeed, the concept of a “Renaissance” seems to have been applied at one point or another to virtually every important period of art and culture in the medieval era. This section considers a selection of the basic literature regarding these Roman “revivals” in the arts, literature, scholarship, and politics in medieval European culture, from the Carolingian/Ottonian renovatio to the 12th-century “Renaissance” and beyond. Among the texts included here, special attention should be paid to the landmark study Haskins 1927, which delivered a serious blow to Renaissance claims of exclusivity, and Huizinga 1919, which argued that the flowering of Netherlandish painting in the era of the Van Eycks should be understood as the final, if glorious, manifestation of the refined and courtly (if decadent) culture of the Gothic era.

Haskins, Charles Homer. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927.

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The classic medievalist’s response to the “uniqueness” of the revival of Antiquity in the Renaissance. Refuting the notion of the “unlearned” Middle Ages, Haskins compares the 12th-century revival of classical learning favorably to the earlier “Renaissances” of the Carolingian and Ottonian periods. In the end, however, Haskins describes the 12th-century revival as a temporary one, and acknowledges that it was left to the humanists of the 14th–15th centuries to reignite the flame.

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Huizinga, Johan. Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen: Studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden. Haarlem, The Netherlands: H. D. Tjeenk Willink, 1919.

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English translations: The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought and Art in France and the Netherlands in the XIVth and XVth Centuries. Translated by Frederik Jan Hopman. London: E. Arnold, 1924. The Autumn of the Middle Ages, translated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Huizinga’s “portrait” of the late Gothic culture of France and the Netherlands is a “cultural history” or “portrait of a civilization” in the tradition of Burckhardt 1860 (cited under The Flowering of the Renaissance Idea). Huizinga describes a courtly society that managed, while seeking refuge from troubled time in fantasies of fading chivalry, to foster a new and spectacular “realist” art in the works of Jan van Eyck and his contemporaries.

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Book-Length Studies
This section includes two pioneering but perhaps under-appreciated studies from the German tradition (Bezold 1922 and Thode 1885), an exhibition catalogue devoted to the 12th-century Renaissance (Scher 1969), and a more recent study that extends the 12th-century Renaissance idea into the arts (Swanson 1999). Also found here are some important studies of the so-called Byzantine Renaissances—Fryde 2000, Geanakopolos 1989, Kazhdan and Epstein 1985, Wilson 1983—and two studies of the relationship between later medieval scholarship and Renaissance humanism, a classic (Kristeller 1974) and a more recent one (Witt 2012).

Bezold, Friedrich von. Das Fortleben der antiken Götter im mittelalterlichen Humanismus. Bonn, Germany, and Leipzig: K. Schroeder, 1922.

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A pioneering study of the continuity of the classical tradition in the scholarly and literary culture of the Middle Ages. In an argument that anticipates Haskins 1927 (see Renaissances in the Middle Ages), Bezold argues that what survived of the pagan tradition experienced a revival in the “clerical humanist” culture of the 11th and 12th centuries. According to the author, this was followed by a steep decline in the 13th century, so much as to render the subsequent revival of the 14th–15th centuries an entirely new phenomenon.

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Fryde, Edmund. The Early Palaeologan Renaissance (1261–c. 1360). Leiden, The Netherlands, and Boston: Brill, 2000.

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An account of the movement to preserve, interpret, and disseminate ancient literature fostered by the Palaeologan emperors in the first century after the recovery of Constantinople in 1261.

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Geanakopolos, Deno John. Constantinople and the West. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.

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A series of articles addressing many aspects of the relationship between Byzantium and the West during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, with an emphasis on the relationship between Greek and Latin scholars (and scholarship).

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Kazhdan, A. P., and Ann Wharton Epstein. Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

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A study of social, political, economic, and cultural change in Byzantium during the period sometimes known as the Komnenian “Renaissance,” although the authors have no use for the term or the overriding concept of a “Renaissance” here. The emphasis throughout, even in the chapters on art and literature and art, is on economic and social factors, including a proposed shift in art of the era from “classicizing illusionism to opulent abstraction” (p. 98), which the authors suggest may be the product of a shift from aristocratic to popular taste.

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Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Medieval Aspects of Renaissance Learning: Three Essays. Edited and translated by Edward P. Mahoney. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974.

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In this collection of essays, Kristeller (b. 1905–d. 1999), perhaps the most influential scholar of Renaissance humanism in the 20th century, explores various aspects of the medieval contribution to Renaissance learning.

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Scher, Stephen K. The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. Providence: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1969.

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Catalogue of an exhibition of 12th-century sculpture and architectural fragments, with an introductory essay, “Was There a Renaissance of the Twelfth Century?,” by Bryce Lyon, who provides a useful survey of the historiography up to that date, with bibliography.

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Swanson, R. N. The Twelfth-Century Renaissance. Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999.

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A more recent survey of the issues and various aspects related to the concept of the 12th-century Renaissance, with a welcome discussion of the visual arts and architecture. Intended for students, this book provides a good introduction to the topic, with an excellent bibliography.

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Thode, Henry. Franz von Assisi und die Anfänge der Kunst der Renaissance in Italien. Berlin: G. Grote, 1885.

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Thode (b. 1857–d. 1920), an important scholar of Michelangelo, was an admirer of Richard Wagner, with whom he shared a Christian-Romantic view of history that was unsympathetic to the ideas of Burckhardt. In this study of the impact of Franciscanism on Italian art, Thode proposes that it was this spiritual movement, and not the humanist revivals of classical antiquity, that was the driving force behind the emergence of the Renaissance.

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Wilson, N. G. Scholars of Byzantium. London: Duckworth, 1983.

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A sweeping account of the Byzantine tradition of classical scholarship from Late Antiquity to the Palaeologan Revival. With a very useful index of authors and manuscripts.

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Witt, Ronald G. The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511779299Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

Traces the origins of Renaissance humanism in the Latin cultures of the Church, on the one hand, and the study of ancient Roman law, on the other, in the centuries beginning with the Carolingian and Ottonian conquests.

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Edited Volumes
This section includes collections of essays on the topic of Medieval “Renaissances,” including an extremely important volume, Benson and Constable 1982, that reflects and expands upon Haskins 1927 (cited under Renaissances in the Middle Ages), a pair of very useful “readers” produced (during the same year) for academic use (Hollister 1969 and Young 1969), a broader collection of essays spanning Renaissances in Antiquity as well as the medieval eras (Treadgold 1984), and an excellent collection devoted to the Carolingian period with a fine introduction of the Renaissance theme (McKitterick 1994).

Benson, Robert L., and Giles Constable, eds. Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.

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A monumental collection of studies (running over 700 pages), derived from a conference held under the auspices of UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Harvard University Committee on Medieval Studies, 26–29 November 1977, Cambridge, Massachusetts, marking the fiftieth anniversary of Haskins’s The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century. The topics covered include religion and theology, education, “society and the individual,” law, politics, philosophy, literature, science, and the arts.

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Hollister, C. Warren. The Twelfth-Century Renaissance. New York: Wiley, 1969.

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A textbook “reader” for courses on the period, with excerpts from Haskins, Panofsky, and other then-current scholars, along with selected primary sources in translation (John of Salisbury, etc.) Art and architecture are covered in a series of illustrations.

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McKitterick, Rosamond, ed. Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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A collection of essays on various aspects of Carolingian culture, including an introductory essay (by Giles Brown) on the concept of the Carolingian Renaissance as an effort to reform society and the state in Christian terms. Includes a useful bibliography for further reading on the Carolingian Renaissance concept. Chapters on Latin literature, the copying of books and development of Carolingian script, and “emulation and innovation” in Carolingian art are also of interest.

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Treadgold, Warren. Renaissances before the Renaissance: Cultural Revivals of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984.

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A collection devoted to the “Renaissances” of Antiquity and the medieval world (Carolingian, Macedonian, “Anglo-Saxon,” 12th-century, and Palaeologan). With a few exceptions, the emphasis here is almost entirely on scholarship, learning, and literature, with little attention paid to the arts.

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Young, Charles R., ed. The Twelfth-Century Renaissance. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969.

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A reader, including contributions (most of them excerpted from previous publications) from a wide variety of scholars, including Haskins, R. W. Southern, Eva Matthews Sanford, William S. Heckscher, and Paul Oskar Kristeller, addressing various aspects of the 12th-century Renaissance.

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Journal Articles and Book Chapters
This selection of useful and/or provocative pieces on the medieval Renaissance theme includes introductions to aspects of the theme by Davis (Davis 1992), dealing with responses to Rome in the Medieval era, as well as Cesaretti 2010, which provides an excellent introduction to the theme of Byzantine Renaissances. See Krautheimer 1942 for an important study of (late antique) Roman influences in Carolingian architecture. There are critical and at times skeptical contributions: Jaeger 2003, Nelson 1977, Sanford 1951, and Trompf 1973, and important articles on the Byzantine influences on Renaissance humanism: Setton 1956 and Witt 1988.

Cesaretti, Paolo. “Renaissance. I. Byzantium.” In The Classical Tradition. Edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis, 807–810. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2010.

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Cesaretti reminds us that, unlike the West, the Byzantine world did not experience a comparably traumatic “break” with its ancient traditions. The story in this case is, rather, one of continuity with the classical Greek heritage, marked by periods of intensified cultural activity that followed times of instability or crisis.

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Davis, Charles. “The Middle Ages.” In The Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal. Edited by Richard Jenkyns, 61–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

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A useful survey of medieval ideas about ancient Rome in the pre-Petrarchan era.

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Jaeger, C. Stephen. “Pessimism in the Twelfth-Century ‘Renaissance.’” Speculum 78 (2003): 1151–1183.

DOI: 10.1017/S0038713400100478Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »

A leaned rumination on the pessimism expressed by writers and scholars of the 12th century regarding the diminished state of learning in their own time. The author concludes that these authors would be surprised to learn that their age has been described in such positive terms as a “Renaissance” and suggests that it might be time for us moderns to retire the term.

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Krautheimer, Richard. “The Carolingian Revival of Early Christian Architecture.” Art Bulletin 24 (1942): 1–38.

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An important study of the Carolingian revival of early Christian basilica-plan churches. Churches of this essentially Roman type were unknown in Carolingian territories until they began to be built in imitation of models like St. Peter’s in Rome.

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Nelson, Janet L. “On the Limits of the Carolingian Renaissance.” In Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History: Papers Read at the Fifteenth Summer Meeting and the Sixteenth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society. Edited by Derek Baker, 41–59. Studies in Church History 14. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977.

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Reprinted in Nelson, Janet L. Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe. London: Hambledon, 1986. Nelson examines the character and scope of the Carolingian “Renaissance” concept in relation to the claims and/or reservations of previous scholarship.

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Sanford, Eva Matthews. “The Twelfth Century—Renaissance or Proto-Renaissance?” Speculum 26 (1951): 635–642.

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Argues that the notion of continuity with the ancient Roman world was a distinguishing feature of the 12th-century Renaissance, in contrast to the sense of distance that emerged during the Italian Renaissance proper.

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Setton, Kenneth M. “The Byzantine Background to the Italian Renaissance.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 100.1 (1956): 1–76.

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An investigation of the intricate relationships between Italy and the Byzantine world from the 6th century to the fall of the Empire in 1453, emphasizing the contribution of Byzantine scholarship to Italian developments.

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Trompf, G. W. “The Concept of the Carolingian Renaissance.” Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973): 3–26.

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An enjoyable and provocative survey/critique of the concept of the Carolingian “Renaissance” in relation to broader historiographic themes.

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Witt, Ronald G. “Medieval Italian Culture and the Origins of Humanism as a Stylistic Ideal.” In Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy. Vol. 1. Edited by Albert Rabil Jr., 29–70. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.

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A very useful survey of the medieval background to the Latin studies of the early Renaissance.

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Panofsky and the Defense of the Renaissance
In the 1940s, the discourse regarding the Renaissance as a periodic and conceptual entity entered a new phase, exemplified by the emergence of a more heated “debate” over whether the Renaissance deserved its prominent position in Western history. Into the fray stepped Erwin Panofsky. In the decades following his immigration to the United States in 1934, Panofsky became the most widely known and admired art historian in the United States. Panofsky’s defense of the unique character of Renaissance culture had both historical and contemporary implications, since he quite explicitly described the Renaissance revival of Antiquity, in particular, as a “permanent” accomplishment of Renaissance age culture (and one that still informed the best learning of his own day). Key to Panofsky’s argument was his “theory of disjunction,” a concept he developed in collaboration with his sometime co-author Fritz Saxl (b. 1890–d. 1948)—see Panofsky and Saxl 1932–1933—and which ultimately derived from the less programmatic thinking of Aby Warburg (b. 1866–d. 1929). Warburg’s classic paper from 1912 (see Warburg 1999) identified the strange astrological figures in a 15th-century fresco cycle by Francesco del Cossa, Cosme Tura, and others as personifications of the Decans (the stars or spirits ruling the ten-day divisions of the months), who had traveled from ancient Egypt and Hellenistic Greece via the various translations and mistranslations of the astrological tradition in Asia Minor, Arabia, and Spain. The difference between Panofsky’s conceptions of the “survival” of ancient figures and forms in the Middle Ages and their “liberation” in the Renaissance and Warburg’s is a subtle but important one. According to Warburg, no matter how debased the conditions of their survival, the gods of the pagans retained a measure of agency, as embodiments of threatening superstition and demonic power. In Panofsky’s narrative, these potentially troubling creatures remained safely quarantined from a series of medieval revivals of classical form. Reintegration of form and content became possible only when the Renaissance sense of “historical distance” from the antique past, which marked, among other things, the first dawning of the “modern” age, rendered them harmless. This section includes Panofsky’s two most important, programmatic statements on the topic—the Kenyon Review article (Panofsky 1944) and the book-length study (Panofsky 1960), where the theme of this article—“Renaissance and Renacences”—achieved its classic form. Panofsky 1962 is a closely related piece that expands the Renaissance idea into the juncture of science and the arts. Also mentioned are some earlier pieces, including a study of Renaissance perspective as “symbolic form” (Panofsky 1927), which later critics (notably Moxey; see Moxey 1995, cited under Critiques) have cited for its more “distanced” approach in comparison to Panofsky 1960, Panofsky’s study of the “historical consciousness” apparent in the frames created by Vasari for his early “Gothic” drawings (see Panofsky 1955), and the aforementioned piece on Classical mythology—Panofsky and Saxl 1932–1933. Also included here are the astrology piece Warburg 1999 and the important, parallel study of the survival of the pagan gods by Panofsky’s contemporary, Seznec (Seznec 1953).

Panofsky, Erwin. “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form.’” Vörträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1924–1925 (1927): 258–330.

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A major forerunner of the author’s later “Renaissance and Renascences” arguments regarding the place of perspective in the broader culture of the Italian Renaissance. This difficult but important essay interprets the one-point perspective system developed in the early 15th century as a “symbol” of the conceptual and perceptual attitudes of the day. English Translation: Perspective as Symbolic Form. Translated by Christopher Wood. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1991.

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Panofsky, Erwin. “Renaissance and Renascences.” Kenyon Review 6 (1944): 201–236.

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Condensed, focused (and largely unfootnoted) predecessor to Panofsky 1960, emphasizing the unique and permanent character of the Renaissance revival of classical Antiquity.

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Panofsky, Erwin. “The First Page of Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Libro’: A Study on the Gothic Style in the Judgment of the Italian Renaissance (1930).” In Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History. By Erwin Panofsky, 169–225. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955.

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Panofsky argues that the graphic “frames” fashioned by Giorgio Vasari for his personally owned drawings by early “Gothic” painters reveal an awareness of period style and “historical distance” that also characterizes Vasari’s writing.

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Panofsky, Erwin. Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1960.

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This is the book at the center of the issue (see the Introduction as well). The basic arguments associated with Panofsky 1944 and Panofsky 1932–1933 are combined with an updated version of the “Perspective” essay and a new, amplified account of the reintegration of antique form in the 15th century.

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Panofsky, Erwin. “Artist, Scientist, Genius: Notes on the ‘Renaissance-Dammerung.’” In The Renaissance: Six Essays. Edited by Wallace K. Ferguson, et al., 121–182. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

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Revised version of a paper delivered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1952, and published in “preliminary form” in 1953. The introductory section, which includes material on the “theory of disjunction,” was reduced somewhat in this second edition. The second part focuses on perspective, human proportions, anatomy, and other proto-scientific aspects of the arts in the 15th and 16th centuries.

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Panofsky, Erwin, and Fritz Saxl. “Classical Mythology in Medieval Art.” Metropolitan Museum Studies 4 (1932–1933): 228–280.

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An early presentation of the “principle of disjunction,” written in collaboration with Panofsky’s colleague from the Warburg Institute, Fritz Saxl. Expanded version appears in Renaissance and Renascences (1960), Chapter II.

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Seznec, Jean. The Survival of the Pagan Gods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. Translated by Barbara F. Sessions. New York: Pantheon Books, 1953.

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Originally published as La survivance des dieux antiques: Essai sur le rôle de la tradition mythologique dans l‘humanisme et dans l‘art de la Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, 1940. Seznec (b. 1905–d. 1983), while obviously influenced by the work of Warburg, Panofsky, and Saxl, provides a fascinating account of the survival and “mutation” of the pagan gods in the various medieval traditions. His chapter on the often bizarre and syncretic representations of the gods that appear in the mythographic literature of the 16th century provides a fascinating counterpoint to the more idealist trajectory of Panofsky 1960.

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Warburg, Aby. The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance. Translated by Kurt W. Forster. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999.

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A translation of the posthumous 1932 German edition of Warburg’s writings. All of the essays are fascinating in various ways, but the essential contribution here is the 1912 lecture on “Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara” (pp. 563–591), which provided the foundation for the work of Saxl, Panofsky, and Seznec.

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Critiques
By the middle of the 1990s, a tradition of questioning the methodologies and conclusions of the “old masters” of the mid-20th century prompted a host of new scholarship on the thought and work of Panofsky. While some of this scholarship attempted to reframe his work in terms friendly to current trends in then-fashionable areas like Semiotics, others were more critical, a trend that is especially notable in the revisionist analyses of Panofsky’s theory of disjunction, as seen in Recent Literature on the Idea of the Renaissance: Book-Length Studies and Edited Volumes. While Landauer 1994 makes the most direct and effective critique, Moxey 1995 and Sankovitch 2001 are more focused in their criticism, addressing Panofsky’s changing views on perspective in the first case and his argument regarding Vasari’s historicism in the latter.

Landauer, Carl. “Erwin Panofsky and the Renascence of the Renaissance.” Renaissance Quarterly 47 (1994): 255–281.

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A critical interpretation of Panofsky’s defense of the Renaissance and its essential ‘modernity,” focusing mainly on Panofsky 1944 in the context of his experience as an exile from Nazi oppression in the United States.

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Moxey, Keith. “Perspective, Panofsky, and the Philosophy of History.” New Literary History 26 (1995): 775–786.

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An exploration of Panofsky’s concept of Renaissance perspective in relation to the changing theories on the Renaissance system of perspective. Moxey’s conclusion, that Panofsky moved from a symbolic/conventional view of the system to a more “essential” and truthful conception of it, dovetails with Landauer’s 1994 interpretation of Panofsky’s views on the Renaissance in general.

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Sankovitch, Anne-Marie. “The Myth of the ‘Myth of the Medieval’: Gothic Architecture in Vasari’s Rinascita and Panofsky’s Renaissance.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 40 (2001): 29–50.

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A critique of Panofsky’s interpretation of the “Gothic” frame in Vasari’s Libro as a product of “historical distance” and hostility to the forms of the medieval era. The author concludes that Panofsky’s own limited understanding of Gothic architecture, especially in the Italian context, led him to overestimate the rupture and obscure the continuity between styles.

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The Great Renaissance Debate
As noted elsewhere in this article, during the period from the 1940s to about the end of the 1960s, a scholarly debate, sometimes heated, was conducted regarding the validity of the merits of the Renaissance as a periodic concept. Much of the debate focused on the claims made for the age during the previous century by scholars like Michelet and especially Burckhardt: the revival of Antiquity, the revivals of the arts and classical learning, and claims for the “discovery of the the individual and the world” were the focus of much of the discussion. Panofsky’s original essay (Panofsky 1944, cited under Panofsky and the Defense of the Renaissance) was conceived as a response to a set of papers published the previous year in the Journal of the History of Ideas (Vol. 4, no. 1, January 1943). In that issue, a number of notable scholars contributed papers amounting to a formal “debate” on the relative merits of the medieval and “canonical” Renaissances (Durand 1943, Johnson 1943, Cassirer 1943, Kristeller 1943, Thorndike 1943, Baron 1943, Lockwood 1943). They are listed here with brief summaries of their arguments. Before the first decade of the “debate” was over, a book-length study of the phenomenon, Ferguson 1948 (cited under General Overviews) was published, with the author’s expressed hope that some sort of synthesis of the arguments for medieval or Renaissance primacy might be achieved. But this only seems to have prompted a second wave of publications on the matter, some of them directed to academic use as readers for college courses. This section lists some of the more important and/or interesting journal articles and essays (Notable Essays, 1940s–1960s) and anthologies (Anthologies and Edited Volumes) of the era.

Baron, Hans. “Towards a More Positive Evaluation of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance.” Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1943): 21–49.

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In this essay, Baron (b. 1900–d. 1988) argues for a more nuanced and positive evaluation of 15th-century Italian innovations in the sciences, expanding the field, so to speak, to include the innovations of artists and scholars of an intellectual bent.

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Cassirer, Ernst. “Some Remarks on the Question of the Originality of the Renaissance.” Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1943): 49–56.

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In this response, Cassirer provides support for the view that while the true “revolution” in science had to wait for another century (or more), significant steps were made in attitude and practice during the 15th century.

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Durand, Dana B. “Tradition and Innovation in Fifteenth Century Italy: ‘Il Primato Dell’ Italia’ in the Field of Science.” Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1943): 1–20.

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Examines the evidence for Italian primacy in the areas of science, including cartography, cosmology, mathematics, and physics. Concludes that “the balance of tradition and innovation in fifteenth-century Italy was not so decisively favorable as to distinguish that century radically from those that preceded it” (p. 20).

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Johnson, Francis R. “Preparation and Innovation in the Progress of Science.” Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1943): 56–59.

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Johnson (b. 1901–d. 1960), a historian of science at Stanford, echoes Baron’s argument that the 15th century was a period of consolidation and preparation for the scientific progress of later centuries.

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Kristeller, Paul Oskar. “The Place of Classical Humanism in Renaissance Thought.” Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1943): 59–63.

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Kristeller emphasizes the role played by “classical humanism” in the intellectual life of the time and describes the humanist recovery and popularization of ancient learning and literature as a fundamental accomplishment of the age.

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Lockwood, Dean P. “It Is Time to Recognize a New Modern Age.” Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1943): 63–65.

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Lockwood (b. 1883–d. 1965), a scholar of Renaissance humanism, asserts that while the era had once been considered the beginning of the “modern” age, that claim is no longer tenable, especially in the field of science. Declaring the advent (in his own time) of a new era represented by the annihilation of global space, Lockwood concludes that the old notion of the modern world, spanning the 14th–19th centuries, has passed away, and with it any claims for the modernity of the Renaissance.

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Thorndike, Lynn. “Renaissance or Prerenaissance?” Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1943): 65–74.

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In this colorful response, which has been much and deservedly cited and anthologized, Thorndike (b. 1882–d. 1965), an accomplished scholar of medieval science and magic, argues in effect that there was nothing special or new about the Renaissance, that the humanists of the “so-called Italian Renaissance” had a superficial understanding of Antiquity, and that they failed to accomplish anything of importance or lasting value.

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Notable Essays, 1940s–1960s
This section brings together some of the more important contemporary, or slightly later, contributions to the mid-20th-century Renaissance-medieval debate. Some of these—notably De Filippis 1943, Ferguson 1951, and Lucas 1950—represent attempts to survey the character of the debate to date and propose a kind of reconciliation or synthesis of competing arguments. Others are more idiosyncratic—including Lopez 1962, where the Renaissance is explained as a product of cultural investment in the face of economic decline. In the three pieces by Ernst Gombrich—Gombrich 1966, Gombrich 1967, and Gombrich 1974—variations on that author’s characterization of the Renaissance as a successful cultural “movement,” rather than the product of some broader historical zeitgeist, are applied to a number of issues, including the “revival” of ancient architectural forms (Gombrich 1967). For a fascinating “alternate take” on this topic, see Burns 1971, where the continuity of medieval forms in the early architecture of the Florentine Renaissance is stressed.

Burns, Walter. “Quattrocento Architecture and the Antique: Some Problems.” In Classical Influences on European Culture A.D. 500–1500: Proceedings of an International Conference Held at King’s College, Cambridge, April 1969. Edited by R. R. Bolgar, 269–287. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971.

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Important investigation of the non-antique sources for “classical” or Romanizing motifs in the architecture of Filippo Brunelleschi and other early-15th-century Florentine architects.

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De Filippis, M. [Michele]. “The Renaissance Problem Again.” Italica 20 (1943): 65–80.

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An investigation of the Renaissance–Middle Ages controversy from the 18th century to the author’s own time, accepting of many elements of continuity as well as change in the medieval-Renaissance transition.

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Ferguson, Wallace K. “The Interpretation of the Renaissance: Suggestions for a Synthesis.” Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (1951): 483–495.

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Ferguson, the author of one the most useful surveys of the historiography of the Renaissance (see Ferguson 1948, cited under General Overviews), argues that the period might be viewed as an “age of transition” from the medieval era to the modern one.

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Gombrich, Ernst H. “The Renaissance Conception of Artistic Progress and Its Consequences.” In Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. Vol. I. By Ernst. H. Gombrich, 1–10. London: Phaidon, 1966.

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Gombrich proposes that it was the rhetoric of the humanist’s praise for artists and patrons, and the study (by artists like Ghiberti) of ancient accounts of artistic “progress” among the Greeks, that spurred the artists of the day to innovate and conceive of new approaches in their work.

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Gombrich, Ernst H. “From the Revival of Letters to the Reform of the Arts: Nicolò Niccoli and Filippo Brunelleschi.” In Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday. Edited by D. Fraser, H. Hibbard, and M. Lewine, 71–82. London: Phaidon, 1967.

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Reprinted in Gombrich, The Heritage of Apelles: Studies in the Art of Renaissance 3, 93–110. Oxford: Phaidon, 1976. Argues that the revival of classical forms and the invention of one-point perspective by Filippo Brunelleschi in early-15th-century Florence may be compared to the analogous “correction” of Latin grammar, spellings, and script by contemporary humanists like Nicolò Niccoli.

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Gombrich, Ernst H. “The Renaissance—Period or Movement?” In Background to the English Renaissance. Introductory Lectures. Edited by Arthur G. Dickens, et al., 9–30. London: Gray-Mills, 1974.

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Gombrich argues that the notion of the Middle Ages as a period of decline was a basically self-serving and rhetorical idea, coined by Petrarch and his followers as a promotional tool to advance their own ideological and careerist agendas.

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Lopez, Robert S. “Hard Times and Investment in Culture.” In The Renaissance: Six Essays. Edited by Wallace K. Ferguson, et al., 29–54. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

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Lecture originally published in the first edition of this collection, The Renaissance: A Symposium (1953). Lopez (b. 1910–d. 1986) argues that, in contrast to the expansion of commerce and wealth during the later Middle Ages, the subsequent era that saw the emergence of the Renaissance was marked by plague and economic decline. He goes on to propose that the cultural and artistic accomplishments of the Renaissance could be explained as a shift from commercial to cultural investment, as part of an escapist idealization of Antiquity.

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Lucas, Henry S. “The Renaissance: A Review of Some Views.” Catholic Historical Review 35 (1950): 377–407.

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A thoughtful review of the origin and early history of the Renaissance/Middle Ages debate, with comparative analysis of the work of Burckhardt, Thode, and others.

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Anthologies and Edited Volumes
The Renaissance debate of the 1940s–1960s inspired the publication of a variety of anthologies that brought many of the key texts described in this chapter—or excerpts from them—together to encourage discussion. Many of these seem to have been intended as “readers” to facilitate discussion in college classrooms. This list includes two useful compilations apparently intended for classroom use, Dannenfeldt 1959 and Hay 1965, the latter being much more comprehensive, with excerpts from many early sources in translation. Also included are some symposium collections, Helton 1961 and Ferguson, et al. 1962 (an expanded edition with important pieces by the editor and Erwin Panofsky), and a collection compiled from the Journal of the History of Ideas: Kristeller and Wiener 1968.

Dannenfeldt, Karl H., ed. The Renaissance: Medieval or Modern? Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1959.

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A reader directed to the Renaissance debate of the day, with excerpts from Burckhardt, Haskins, and Huizinga, as well as more contemporary essays, by Robert S. Lopez, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Hans Baron, Lynn Thorndike, and Wallace K. Ferguson. Released in an expanded edition as The Renaissance: Basic Interpretations. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1974.

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Ferguson, Wallace E., et al. The Renaissance: Six Essays. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

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Revised edition of The Renaissance: A Symposium. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1953. A collection of papers delivered at a symposium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1952. Important contributions include Panofsky 1962 (cited under Panofsky and the Defense of the Renaissance).

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Hay, Denys, ed. The Renaissance Debate. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1965.

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The most extensive and historically minded of the mid-century academic “readers” on the topic, Hay’s collection begins with excerpts from Renaissance authors like Boccaccio and Vasari, moves on to Voltaire, Michelet, Voigt, Burckhardt, Haskins, and Huizinga, and concludes with well-chosen contributions from Thorndike, Baron, Kristeller, et al.

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Helton, Tinsley, ed. The Renaissance: A Reconsideration of the Theories and Interpretations of the Age. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961.

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Papers from a symposium held at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in 1959. Six chapters by various authors consider changing interpretations of political, intellectual, art historical, scientific, and literary history.

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Kristeller, Paul O., and Philip Wiener, eds. Renaissance Essays. From the Journal of the History of Ideas. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

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This generally less polemical collection of fourteen essays (from 1942–1963) includes important contributions from Cassirer, Ferguson, and Baron, as well Charles Trinkhaus, William J. Bouwsma, Eugene F. Rice, Meyer Shapiro, and others.

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Recent Literature on the Idea of the Renaissance
These relatively recent studies (covering about 1970–present, with emphasis on more recent titles) are included to give an idea of the continued vitality both of the debate regarding the meaning of the Renaissance period and of studies of the period itself. It is not intended to be in any way definitive.

Book-Length Studies and Edited Volumes
This select list includes important studies directly relevant to the Medieval/Renaissance problem, including Belting 1994 and Eisenbichler 2009, selections of papers on a variety of relevant issues—Brown 1995; Greico, et al. 2002; Martin 2003—and individual studies of historiographic and methodological issues—see Emison 2012, Mali 2003, Rabb 2006. Directly related to the Panofskian vision of medieval disjunction and Renaissance synthesis is Nagel and Wood 2010, which posits a number of new models and approaches to the problems of historical perception in the period.

Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

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Originally published as Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990. Belting’s sweeping and precise investigation of the “holy portrait image” from its origins in Late Antiquity to its eclipse in the Renaissance “era of art” addresses some of the issues implicit in the Renaissance/Renascences debate, including what he sees as the eventual subjugation of the miraculous image in virtuosic works of art like Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and Rubens’s Chiesa Nuova altarpiece.

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Brown, Alison, ed. Language and Images of Renaissance Italy. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995.

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A selection of papers broadly devoted to “re-evaluations” and alternate approaches to the Renaissance. Relevant contributions from Salvatore Settis “Did the Ancients Have an Antiquity?,” pp. 27–50), Robert Black (“The Donation of Constantine: A New Source for the Concept of a Renaissance,” pp. 51–86), Patricia Fortini Brown (“Renovatio or Conciliato? How Renaissances Happened in Venice,” pp. 127–156), Samuel K. Cohn (“Burckhardt Revisited from Social History,” pp. 217–236), and others.

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Eisenbichler, Konrad, ed. Renaissance Medievalisms. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. 2009.

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Essays collected from a symposium exploring medieval continuities in the art, literature, and sciences of the Renaissance. Of special note is the contribution by Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, “What Counted as an ‘Antiquity’ in the Renaissance?,” which addresses some of the issues treated subsequently in Nagel and Wood 2010.

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Emison, Patricia. The Italian Renaissance and Cultural Memory. New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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In this sometimes polemical and always interesting book, Emison addresses the apparent “decline” of the Renaissance as a paradigmatic cultural epoch and proposes a number of explanations and remedies for it. The culminating argument is that of the complexity and variety of Renaissance art and culture and the continuing relevance of the issues it confronted to contemporary concerns.

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Greico, Allen J., Michael Rocke, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi, eds. The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century. Acts of an International Conference in Florence, Villa I Tatti, 9–11 June 1999. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2002.

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A collection of papers “looking back” on the study of various aspects of the historiography of the Italian Renaissance in the 20th century, many of them (by Paul F. Grendler, James J. Sheehan, Christopher S. Wood, Paula Findlen, Georges Didi-Huberman, etc.) relevant to the “Renaissance and Renascences” theme and its broader implications.

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Mali, Joseph. Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

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An erudite and challenging study, exploring the junctures of myth and history, with outstanding discussion of Burckhardt and Aby Warburg’s approaches to cultural history.

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Martin, John Jeffries, ed. The Renaissance: Italy and Abroad. London: Routledge, 2003.

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A collection of essays by contemporary scholars on issues of politics, language, gender, identity, humanism and science, and region during the period. With a introductory essay, “The Renaissance between Myth and History,” (pp. 1–24) by the editor.

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Nagel, Alexander, and Christopher S. Wood. Anachronic Renaissance. New York: Zone Books, 2010.

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A provocative and wide-ranging investigation of the concept of “plural temporalities” and other aspects of anachronism and the “anachronic” in the artistic and historical cultures of the Renaissance. The authors address the limitations of Panofsky’s “disjunction” theory in a series of chapters that reveal a more dynamic and complicated relation to issues of past, present, and the “authenticity” of supposedly ancient and/or sacred objects and images.

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Rabb, Theodore K. The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

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Noting that the Renaissance “debate” has tended to focus on the problem of its beginnings, Rabb considers its end, which he situates around 1700.

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Journal Articles and Book Chapters
This select list of recent articles and chapters offers a range of ruminations on the continued validity of the Renaissance as a concept or topic of study—Bouwsma 1979 is an important early example, supplemented here by Bouwsma 1998, Burke 1992, and the much more positive pieces Findlen and Gouwens 1998, Findlen 1998, and Gouwens 1998, which seek to refresh and recontextualize the vitality of the Renaissance based on the experiences of those who lived and created the culture. Monfasani 2006 returns us to the old problem of the break and/or continuity of the Renaissance with the medieval period, while Parr 2001 questions the use of terms such as Renaissance and Early Modern in the context of Spanish studies. We conclude with an optimistic view of the potential of a “postmodern” Renaissance in Starn 2007.

Bouwsma, William J. “The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History.” American Historical Review 84 (February 1979): 1–15.

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Reprinted in Bouwsma, A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History, pp. 348–365. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. In this paper, taken from a presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1978, Bouwsma addresses the shifting (and declining) fortunes of the Renaissance in recent historiography. The author acknowledges that both new and older approaches to the era have their virtues and limits and considers the possibility of a more pluralistic history in the future.

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Bouwsma, William J. “Eclipse of the Renaissance.” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 115–117.

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In this response to the Findlen-Gouwens papers in this issue of the AHR, Bouwsma expresses deep pessimism regarding the future viability of the Renaissance as a periodic concept.

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Burke, Peter. “Anthropology of the Italian Renaissance.” Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies 1 (1992): 207–215.

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A survey and, to a certain extent, a call for further work from sociological and anthropological methodologies in the study of the Italian Renaissance. Questioning old notions of the Renaissance as an early phase in a continuous thread of modern life, Burke argues that to grasp the intricacies of the Renaissance, modern scholars should be advised to approach as they would an “alien culture.”

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Findlen, Paula. “Possessing the Past: The Material World of the Italian Renaissance.” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 83–114.

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In her contribution to the AHR Forum, Findlen focuses on the artistic and material culture of the Renaissance as a source of its enduring popularity. As she points out, the Renaissance enthusiasm for antiquities, for collections, and for works of art forms the basis for many of the cultural values—popular and scholarly—that endure in the present day.

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Findlen, Paula, and Kenneth Gouwens. “AHR Forum: Introduction: The Persistence of the Renaissance.” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 51–54.

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In this introduction to a set of papers by the authors, with responses, Findlen and Gouwens discuss the durability of the Renaissance as a popular and scholarly concept, despite the legitimate critiques lodged against it by social and feminist historians, and the more recent postmodern suspicion regarding “metanarratives.”

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Gouwens, Kenneth. “Perceiving the Past: Renaissance Humanism after the ‘Cognitive Turn.’” American Historical Review 103 (1998): 55–82.

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In this contribution to the AHR Forum, Gouwens emphasizes the subjective and cognitive delight that prompted the humanists’ pursuit of a desired past.

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Monfasani, John. “The Renaissance as the Concluding Phase of the Middle Ages.” Bulletino dell’Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo 108 (2006): 165–185.

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Monfasani, a leading scholar in the areas of Renaissance humanism and intellectual history, argues that, in contrast to past emphases on change and even opposition, the relationship between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages may be more accurately characterized in terms of continuity.

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Parr, James A. “A Modest Proposal: That We Use Alternatives to Borrowing (Renaissance, Baroque, Golden Age) and Leveling (Early Modern) in Periodization.” Hispania 84 (2001): 406–416.

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Proposes that the use of “borrowed” and/or “leveling” terms such as Renaissance, Baroque, Early Modern, and the like to describe periods of Spanish literature be replaced by simpler, descriptive classifications such as “sixteenth century for Renaissance, “seventeenth century for Baroque.”

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Starn, Randolph. “A Postmodern Renaissance?” Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007): 1–24.

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After admitting that we have good reason to worry about the health of our intellectual and academic institutions and culture, Starn sees much vitality in the pluralistic swarm of present-day Renaissance studies.