The article in my source says that the literal meaning of renaissance is "rebirth". However, it is arguable whether renaissance is a rebirth or a completely new style which is inspired by Roman period. Personally I do believe that the second statement is more logical than the first one, because we can not simply claim that renaissance is the contiuniation of Roman art & ideas. For example, with the innovation of Brunelleschi, a new dome construction method was created. This contributed to the modern architecture. Also, the perspective technique and many others facilitated the depiction of humanism in painting. In conclusion, a lot of redical shifts in social values are evident in renaissance, and that is the reason why it has to be explored as independent from the preceding periods.
1- I think the most striking part of the Reformation in Christianity is the purification of the church art. Starting from the Romanesque Period, the complexity of the Monastery Life pushed the artists to tell more in limited space; simply because these people (monks) lived in this almost isolated-religious world spend almost all of their time thinking of religion and expressing it in new ways. And all those ideas, stories, characters had to be transfered to the church art; that’ s why we got visual bombardment which is usually found overwhelming by most of us. These idealogies peaked the overwhelming atmosphere in the Gothic Era; especially in Church Art. The first thing we recognise when we look at Chartres Cathedral is the size of the building; it is enormous. One can not focus on his/her prays inside of this giant, to much space with the dominance of verticality; makes you feel unimportant, scared and perhaps uncomfortable. Central tympanum welcomes us with it’s “Apocalypse with a central Christ surrounded by four beasts (Revelations 4-5); the twenty-four Elders and angels are in the voussoirs”(Bluffton) as it’s subject. The one on the right and the left tells the story of Christ’s Ascension and Incarnation. Together, they unite under the Christ’s entry, departure and his last times with it’s typical complex Gothic unity (Bluffton). We enter from the central portal and inside awaits us the nave that leads us to the transept. On both sides we have stained glasses that again tries to gives us many different small stories. The usage of the colors also differs to achieve a graual crescendo. On outside, we have flying buttresses again gives us the verticality feeling that forces us to look up, where God is. Also the sculptural and pictoral iconography were used to tell stories. Also the ideologies that developed at that times confused the believers such as dualism, Gothic oppositions and divisions, number theories. All gave the Christianity a meaning that was beyond the surface; more and more symbolism got involved. Even the Feminine influence distracted the focus from the Jesus to Virgin Mary; which I think is total deviation. I think Virgin Mary should have nothing to do with Christianity. But then, with the growth of the middle class (money spreading more equally) and press, more people had access to the Bible and they all had their individual ways of understanding Christianity. Sawing what the book of God really says contradicted with what the church has said; through it’s art and through it’s priests. It was not church’ s interior to tell the whole story to the visitors, people could now interpret their own ways. Without the need of message giving, we have purer churches that are some how closer to what we have in Jubilee Church; simple enough to be ready to become everyone’ s church.
From my personal point of view the term “re-birth” for Renaissance is appropriate. The definition of the term “re-birth” guides us to understand the fundamental aspects of renaissance. According to Wikipedia, re-birth or reincarnation is “literally ‘to be made flesh again’, is a doctrine or metaphysical belief that some essential part of a living being (in some variations only human beings) survives death to be reborn in a new body”. The essential part is reborn into a new body! When we look at the renaissance we see what has been reborn: the essential ideas that dominated the antiquity. It is not merely the rebirth of a style; it is the rebirth of essential ideas into a new body. A new body with the essential “soul” of something would move forward from what it inhabited. I see Renaissance with a similar fashion; essentials, inhabited traits are there, but yet there is advancement, a growth over what is there already. This growth is the all the interpretations, advancements in science, art and architecture. But it all started with the soul –the essential ideas- finally finding a body to reborn. Just as a newborn child, renaissance grew over time, yielding unbelievable advancements and improvements. However our book suggests that the Renaissance is merely the discovery of what they already had, so it is ambiguous to call this rebirth. Yes, things are reborn says our book, but what has been reborn is not so clear. “Enlightenment, recreation… those terms does define renaissance, however partially. My belief is that those terms are not adequate to describe the essence of Renaissance, not deep enough to fully explain what it is all about. Re-birth, however, for the abovementioned reasons, can fully describe the essence of renaissance; therefore I believe “re-birth” is the most appropriate.
Shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance primarily stemmed from different economic systems and classes that gave shape to the general social structure of the society. In the middle ages, land-based system, feudalism determined the social structure which was built upon the strict hierarchical principles. Because only ones who were noble and owned land had authority and power, education and habit of thinking and questioning was not spread among all classes. On the other hand, in Renaissance, the restricted area of thinking altered into a place of free thinking and questioning by the help of more independent economic structure. As a result of increasing trade, a new class called merchant class arose and formed a powerful middle class which started to have both money and power. My source explains the reason of money flow from nobles to the merchants by saying that “ ... Because the nobility tended to borrow money only to do non-productive things like gamble, party, and fight wars, they often defaulted on their loans. When they did, part of their property would transfer to the wealthy bankers and merchants.” Then, my source adds that as a result of all these events, by the end of the fifteenth century, most of the wealth was transferred away from nobility (including the pope in Rome) to the hands of the merchants. The intellectual awakening couldn’t be completely understood without looking at all these processes that changed the strictly settled understanding of the medieval ages. Pressure of the church was no more a threat, obeying was no more present. It was time of thinking, questioning and inventing. It was an intellectual awakening from a deep sleep called the middle ages... And it shouldn't be forgotten that if there were not major differences in the economic and consequently, social structure of the society, this awakening would not be possible and maybe it would take another hundred year for human beings to awake from a deep sleep...
1. There were fundamental differences between the understanding of the medieval periods and that of Renaissance. The difference between how they undertake art and religion in these periods can be seen as the latter was a reaction to the Gothic, because these basic branches were interpreted totally different in these two periods, although art was still art and god was the most supreme. First, the dualism that was strongly important in the Gothic Period leaves its place to diversifications in thinking, in social/political life. What we see in Gothic Period is reconciliation of science, religion and logic. They try to explain religion with logic, but with a pre-acceptance of what the Bible says. They don’t question the Christian discipline; they fit their logic into what the book says. However, in Renaissance, what we have is the actual questioning, cleaning up, reforming. This time, they question the church, and the parts that doesn’t fit into their logic, they simply exclude it from their beliefs. Religion does not loose its importance, but the way to reach him changes. Also, in the Gothic Period, the towns kept competing about religious matters, cathedrals, pilgrimage etc. Guilds invested for religious purposes, so art was dependent heavily on religion. With renaissance, pieces of art started to be commissioned, and the pieces were much more individual and unique. So art was not for God anymore, in Renaissance, art was performed for the sake of art. The last and I believe the most important difference was about the baking practices that rose with renaissance. My source explains the development on this idea very explicitly. The enormous amount of wealth has been composed in this period, thanks to the economical practices, which were hold by Jews in Gothic Period since having interest, investing with money were forbidden in Christianity. Their orthodox religious beliefs stopped them from the liberal improvements; therefore that prosperity couldn’t have been achieved until Renaissance. From what I have observed up to now, I think when we dig a little bit deeper on almost any historical conflict or development, money acts as the stimulator behind such movements, and renaissance is no exception to that. So what we see through these periods is a shift in the perspective of the society, and change in role of religion, and arts among people, with the power of new liberal approach.
http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/renaissance2/economic.htm, Looking at the Renaissance
1.) Reformation in Renaissance is counted as a revolutionary act that gave birth to a new age of faith and gave rise to permanent changes in both people’s behavior and society’s institutions, back in the early sixteenth century. In the Gothic period, church was the central authority which led the daily life along with the ecclesiastical life. Before the Renaissance, people never considered to question the church. What made people such as Martin Luther question it was the obvious corruption, where the basics of Christianity were changed according to the benefit of the church. As I learned in Asl last semester, Christianity started as a religion standing by the poor and desperate. However, in the Gothic period being a Christian was expensive. The church started to sell lands from heaven or pardons to the ones who can afford it. There actually started the beginning of class differences in the church too, as it was already the same in secular life. I don’t think that anyone who can’t afford the payment of their pardons was still strictly bound to the church by heart after realizing the injustice. However, since the situation was in favor of both the church and the wealthy, they couldn’t do anything till Martin Luther did. The power, being in the hands of the wealthy man and powerless people not questioning the church was a part of the chaos in the Gothic period, as people sank into the chaos. What the church was telling to the people was that they needed the priests to actively practicing their religion, Steven Ozment states in his book. I think, it should have been a great way to preserve the authority of the church until the Reformation, a secure way enough that Machiavelli could have used in his book “The Prince” under a section about maintaining power. What Martin Luther does is to remind people of the history and the source of Christianity which is the Bible, Steven Ozment continues explaining. People believing in the fact that what priests are telling to them should be what is in the Bible, start to question the reason why then the Bible is kept as a secret under the church. Martin Luther and the reformers thought that the Bible was for everyone to read and there was no need for a third subject, which was the priest. It was all between the God and the individual. The thought was against the benefit of the church because it would mean the revealing of their lies however, it wasn’t avoidable since it was pure logic. As I heard from my friends in the Socratic Seminar and it made sense to me, it could be said that Reformation brought the free environment to individual ideas about everything, including faith. I think of Reformation as the must have of Renaissance because it is the birth of questioning and free thinking is the source to all other aspects of Renaissance.
Source: Ozment, Steven. PROTESTANTS – The Birth of a Revolution. New York: Doubleday, 1991.
2) Feudalism was the social structure of the Middle Ages, where the king is the ultimate ruler in the physical world and everybody else respects and obeys him and his full power. The active life meant to be a part of a strict pyramid of hierarchy where the lower parts were completely devoted to and dependent on the upper parts. Each person’s place was static, his duties predetermined, and his responsibilities listed to him by the church. The church was especially very powerful and set the religious rules and created the mainstream religious thinking. During Renaissance, however, most of this started to change and it’s obvious that money started playing a much more important role in the community (as a result of this, we are able to relate this period to our modern world more easily). The main reason of the increasing importance of money was the geographical explorations. After these explorations, new trade routes and sources of wealth were discovered. The flow of money made the mercantile class richer. Families with professions such as banking started ruling cities. According to my source, Italian cities easily became “intellectual crossroads”, and this was due to their suitable positions as trading centers. The suggestion that Italy’s position was suitable is logical: because of its geography, Italy is a bridge between the East and Europe. Therefore, merchants, just like bees that help flowers reproduce by carrying pollens on their legs (for this phenomenon, please see the article “pollination” at wikipedia), carried ideas from East and West and dropped them on Italy. The availability of a great variety of new, forgotten, or originally Eastern-based ideas was what made Italy the “intellectual crossroads” that the source is talking about. Acknowledging this, we can understand one of the biggest changes in Renaissance: the number of scientific studies and observations were increased, due to the new information available, and new inspirations and broadened horizons of individual researchers. As a result, the spirit of free inquiry re-evolved. Since newly available ideas about art improved the quality of art and thus the respect towards art, more pieces of art were commissioned and commissioning art became a way to gain prestige. Church’s control over normal life (the one that we live in) decreased (and this made Reformation possible) with the increasing encouragement of free and personal thinking. Finally, the life began to be more full of possibilities; the people therefore chose to use the opportunities: People were not just interested in one profession (like it was in before), they aimed to excel at various subjects to become an ideal man of knowledge and skill. This blurred the lines between social classes even more.
Outside source: http://www.boistate.edu/courses/hy309/docs/burckhardt/1-7.htm and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance #Social_and_political_structures_in_Italy (both have the same information) * In this revision, I tried to make sure that I demonstrate how I benefited from my source, and how I utilized the information taken from the source in order to improve the ideas in the paragraph. ** By the way, I’m sorry that I couldn’t come to school today. I have a fever of 38.5 °C … I’m having a terrible second semester… :S
7 comments:
The article in my source says that the literal meaning of renaissance is "rebirth". However, it is arguable whether renaissance is a rebirth or a completely new style which is inspired by Roman period. Personally I do believe that the second statement is more logical than the first one, because we can not simply claim that renaissance is the contiuniation of Roman art & ideas. For example, with the innovation of Brunelleschi, a new dome construction method was created. This contributed to the modern architecture. Also, the perspective technique and many others facilitated the depiction of humanism in painting. In conclusion, a lot of redical shifts in social values are evident in renaissance, and that is the reason why it has to be explored as independent from the preceding periods.
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/glo/renaissance/
1- I think the most striking part of the Reformation in Christianity is the purification of the church art. Starting from the Romanesque Period, the complexity of the Monastery Life pushed the artists to tell more in limited space; simply because these people (monks) lived in this almost isolated-religious world spend almost all of their time thinking of religion and expressing it in new ways. And all those ideas, stories, characters had to be transfered to the church art; that’ s why we got visual bombardment which is usually found overwhelming by most of us. These idealogies peaked the overwhelming atmosphere in the Gothic Era; especially in Church Art. The first thing we recognise when we look at Chartres Cathedral is the size of the building; it is enormous. One can not focus on his/her prays inside of this giant, to much space with the dominance of verticality; makes you feel unimportant, scared and perhaps uncomfortable. Central tympanum welcomes us with it’s “Apocalypse with a central Christ surrounded by four beasts (Revelations 4-5); the twenty-four Elders and angels are in the voussoirs”(Bluffton) as it’s subject. The one on the right and the left tells the story of Christ’s Ascension and Incarnation. Together, they unite under the Christ’s entry, departure and his last times with it’s typical complex Gothic unity (Bluffton). We enter from the central portal and inside awaits us the nave that leads us to the transept. On both sides we have stained glasses that again tries to gives us many different small stories. The usage of the colors also differs to achieve a graual crescendo. On outside, we have flying buttresses again gives us the verticality feeling that forces us to look up, where God is. Also the sculptural and pictoral iconography were used to tell stories. Also the ideologies that developed at that times confused the believers such as dualism, Gothic oppositions and divisions, number theories. All gave the Christianity a meaning that was beyond the surface; more and more symbolism got involved. Even the Feminine influence distracted the focus from the Jesus to Virgin Mary; which I think is total deviation. I think Virgin Mary should have nothing to do with Christianity. But then, with the growth of the middle class (money spreading more equally) and press, more people had access to the Bible and they all had their individual ways of understanding Christianity. Sawing what the book of God really says contradicted with what the church has said; through it’s art and through it’s priests. It was not church’ s interior to tell the whole story to the visitors, people could now interpret their own ways. Without the need of message giving, we have purer churches that are some how closer to what we have in Jubilee Church; simple enough to be ready to become everyone’ s church.
http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/chartreswest/centralportal.html
From my personal point of view the term “re-birth” for Renaissance is appropriate. The definition of the term “re-birth” guides us to understand the fundamental aspects of renaissance. According to Wikipedia, re-birth or reincarnation is “literally ‘to be made flesh again’, is a doctrine or metaphysical belief that some essential part of a living being (in some variations only human beings) survives death to be reborn in a new body”. The essential part is reborn into a new body! When we look at the renaissance we see what has been reborn: the essential ideas that dominated the antiquity. It is not merely the rebirth of a style; it is the rebirth of essential ideas into a new body. A new body with the essential “soul” of something would move forward from what it inhabited. I see Renaissance with a similar fashion; essentials, inhabited traits are there, but yet there is advancement, a growth over what is there already. This growth is the all the interpretations, advancements in science, art and architecture. But it all started with the soul –the essential ideas- finally finding a body to reborn. Just as a newborn child, renaissance grew over time, yielding unbelievable advancements and improvements. However our book suggests that the Renaissance is merely the discovery of what they already had, so it is ambiguous to call this rebirth. Yes, things are reborn says our book, but what has been reborn is not so clear. “Enlightenment, recreation… those terms does define renaissance, however partially. My belief is that those terms are not adequate to describe the essence of Renaissance, not deep enough to fully explain what it is all about. Re-birth, however, for the abovementioned reasons, can fully describe the essence of renaissance; therefore I believe “re-birth” is the most appropriate.
Question 2
Shift from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance primarily stemmed from different economic systems and classes that gave shape to the general social structure of the society. In the middle ages, land-based system, feudalism determined the social structure which was built upon the strict hierarchical principles. Because only ones who were noble and owned land had authority and power, education and habit of thinking and questioning was not spread among all classes. On the other hand, in Renaissance, the restricted area of thinking altered into a place of free thinking and questioning by the help of more independent economic structure. As a result of increasing trade, a new class called merchant class arose and formed a powerful middle class which started to have both money and power. My source explains the reason of money flow from nobles to the merchants by saying that “ ... Because the nobility tended to borrow money only to do non-productive things like gamble, party, and fight wars, they often defaulted on their loans. When they did, part of their property would transfer to the wealthy bankers and merchants.” Then, my source adds that as a result of all these events, by the end of the fifteenth century, most of the wealth was transferred away from nobility (including the pope in Rome) to the hands of the merchants. The intellectual awakening couldn’t be completely understood without looking at all these processes that changed the strictly settled understanding of the medieval ages. Pressure of the church was no more a threat, obeying was no more present. It was time of thinking, questioning and inventing. It was an intellectual awakening from a deep sleep called the middle ages... And it shouldn't be forgotten that if there were not major differences in the economic and consequently, social structure of the society, this awakening would not be possible and maybe it would take another hundred year for human beings to awake from a deep sleep...
Source: http://wsu.edu/~dee/REN/BACK.HTM
1. There were fundamental differences between the understanding of the medieval periods and that of Renaissance. The difference between how they undertake art and religion in these periods can be seen as the latter was a reaction to the Gothic, because these basic branches were interpreted totally different in these two periods, although art was still art and god was the most supreme.
First, the dualism that was strongly important in the Gothic Period leaves its place to diversifications in thinking, in social/political life. What we see in Gothic Period is reconciliation of science, religion and logic. They try to explain religion with logic, but with a pre-acceptance of what the Bible says. They don’t question the Christian discipline; they fit their logic into what the book says. However, in Renaissance, what we have is the actual questioning, cleaning up, reforming. This time, they question the church, and the parts that doesn’t fit into their logic, they simply exclude it from their beliefs. Religion does not loose its importance, but the way to reach him changes.
Also, in the Gothic Period, the towns kept competing about religious matters, cathedrals, pilgrimage etc. Guilds invested for religious purposes, so art was dependent heavily on religion. With renaissance, pieces of art started to be commissioned, and the pieces were much more individual and unique. So art was not for God anymore, in Renaissance, art was performed for the sake of art.
The last and I believe the most important difference was about the baking practices that rose with renaissance. My source explains the development on this idea very explicitly. The enormous amount of wealth has been composed in this period, thanks to the economical practices, which were hold by Jews in Gothic Period since having interest, investing with money were forbidden in Christianity. Their orthodox religious beliefs stopped them from the liberal improvements; therefore that prosperity couldn’t have been achieved until Renaissance. From what I have observed up to now, I think when we dig a little bit deeper on almost any historical conflict or development, money acts as the stimulator behind such movements, and renaissance is no exception to that. So what we see through these periods is a shift in the perspective of the society, and change in role of religion, and arts among people, with the power of new liberal approach.
http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/renaissance2/economic.htm, Looking at the Renaissance
1.) Reformation in Renaissance is counted as a revolutionary act that gave birth to a new age of faith and gave rise to permanent changes in both people’s behavior and society’s institutions, back in the early sixteenth century. In the Gothic period, church was the central authority which led the daily life along with the ecclesiastical life. Before the Renaissance, people never considered to question the church. What made people such as Martin Luther question it was the obvious corruption, where the basics of Christianity were changed according to the benefit of the church. As I learned in Asl last semester, Christianity started as a religion standing by the poor and desperate. However, in the Gothic period being a Christian was expensive. The church started to sell lands from heaven or pardons to the ones who can afford it. There actually started the beginning of class differences in the church too, as it was already the same in secular life. I don’t think that anyone who can’t afford the payment of their pardons was still strictly bound to the church by heart after realizing the injustice. However, since the situation was in favor of both the church and the wealthy, they couldn’t do anything till Martin Luther did. The power, being in the hands of the wealthy man and powerless people not questioning the church was a part of the chaos in the Gothic period, as people sank into the chaos. What the church was telling to the people was that they needed the priests to actively practicing their religion, Steven Ozment states in his book. I think, it should have been a great way to preserve the authority of the church until the Reformation, a secure way enough that Machiavelli could have used in his book “The Prince” under a section about maintaining power. What Martin Luther does is to remind people of the history and the source of Christianity which is the Bible, Steven Ozment continues explaining. People believing in the fact that what priests are telling to them should be what is in the Bible, start to question the reason why then the Bible is kept as a secret under the church. Martin Luther and the reformers thought that the Bible was for everyone to read and there was no need for a third subject, which was the priest. It was all between the God and the individual. The thought was against the benefit of the church because it would mean the revealing of their lies however, it wasn’t avoidable since it was pure logic. As I heard from my friends in the Socratic Seminar and it made sense to me, it could be said that Reformation brought the free environment to individual ideas about everything, including faith. I think of Reformation as the must have of Renaissance because it is the birth of questioning and free thinking is the source to all other aspects of Renaissance.
Source:
Ozment, Steven. PROTESTANTS – The Birth of a Revolution. New York: Doubleday,
1991.
2) Feudalism was the social structure of the Middle Ages, where the king is the ultimate ruler in the physical world and everybody else respects and obeys him and his full power. The active life meant to be a part of a strict pyramid of hierarchy where the lower parts were completely devoted to and dependent on the upper parts. Each person’s place was static, his duties predetermined, and his responsibilities listed to him by the church. The church was especially very powerful and set the religious rules and created the mainstream religious thinking. During Renaissance, however, most of this started to change and it’s obvious that money started playing a much more important role in the community (as a result of this, we are able to relate this period to our modern world more easily). The main reason of the increasing importance of money was the geographical explorations. After these explorations, new trade routes and sources of wealth were discovered. The flow of money made the mercantile class richer. Families with professions such as banking started ruling cities. According to my source, Italian cities easily became “intellectual crossroads”, and this was due to their suitable positions as trading centers. The suggestion that Italy’s position was suitable is logical: because of its geography, Italy is a bridge between the East and Europe. Therefore, merchants, just like bees that help flowers reproduce by carrying pollens on their legs (for this phenomenon, please see the article “pollination” at wikipedia), carried ideas from East and West and dropped them on Italy. The availability of a great variety of new, forgotten, or originally Eastern-based ideas was what made Italy the “intellectual crossroads” that the source is talking about. Acknowledging this, we can understand one of the biggest changes in Renaissance: the number of scientific studies and observations were increased, due to the new information available, and new inspirations and broadened horizons of individual researchers. As a result, the spirit of free inquiry re-evolved. Since newly available ideas about art improved the quality of art and thus the respect towards art, more pieces of art were commissioned and commissioning art became a way to gain prestige. Church’s control over normal life (the one that we live in) decreased (and this made Reformation possible) with the increasing encouragement of free and personal thinking. Finally, the life began to be more full of possibilities; the people therefore chose to use the opportunities: People were not just interested in one profession (like it was in before), they aimed to excel at various subjects to become an ideal man of knowledge and skill. This blurred the lines between social classes even more.
Outside source: http://www.boistate.edu/courses/hy309/docs/burckhardt/1-7.htm and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance #Social_and_political_structures_in_Italy (both have the same information)
* In this revision, I tried to make sure that I demonstrate how I benefited from my source, and how I utilized the information taken from the source in order to improve the ideas in the paragraph.
** By the way, I’m sorry that I couldn’t come to school today. I have a fever of 38.5 °C … I’m having a terrible second semester… :S
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