No, The Renaissance, Man is not "the measure of all things," sit down.

The philosophical confidence trick we still suffer from

School of Athens, Raphael Sanzio. Fresco. Apostolic Palace, the Vatican. 1509-1511

You’re probably wondering what I’ve got against the Renaissance

The thing about revolutions is they don’t let anyone ignore them. You can’t just say to revolutionaries, “Why don’t you go off over there and have your little revolution, and let us know how it all goes, and we’ll just get on with our day.” And after it’s over, you can’t just say, “Well, that didn’t work out as hoped. Things weren’t really that bad before, so why don’t we go back to that?”

No, the revolution by nature has to come and interfere with you; it has to change everything forever, take away your whole world and replace it with something someone cooked up as their Bright Idea. So even if it does ultimately fail, because it turns out the idea wasn’t so very bright after all, it’ll never let you hear the end of itself.

And five hundred years later, we certainly are still hearing all about this revolution.

“There's no better instance of how a burst of civilization depends on confidence than the Florentine state of mind in the early 15th century.”

Sir Kenneth Clark

“Confidence” is one word for it, I suppose.

The wealthy bankers and merchants that made up the elite of one of the richest and most culturally influential cities in Europe of the time did not think they were rejecting Christianity or the Christian social order by adopting Humanism. Like most people in every time attracted to a new Bright Idea, they would have resisted strenuously the idea that this shiny, attractive and deeply flattering new thing was in reality an ideology radically incompatible with Christianity that would eventually corrode away the foundations of everything that had built their world.

Cosimo I de' Medici in armour, by Angolo Bronzino. c. 1545. Cosimo, the quintessential ”Renaissance man,” was certainly deeply confident about his ideas. As Grand Duke of Tuscany and autocratic lord of Florence, he did quite a lot of things for which he needed philosophical moral cover.

They claimed they were good Christian rulers, and didn’t see, or decided not to see, any contradiction to the statements, “Before the mountains were born, before you had given birth to the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God,” “…in whom we live and move and have our being,” and “Man is the measure of all things.”

These were men so supremely “confident” in their powers, their wealth and their general superiority to every other man who’d come before, with the possible exception of Aristotle, that the square circle was not the least bit square if they decided it was not.

Why was it such an attractive idea to someone like Cosimo di Medici? If you have to ask, you’re probably not a megalomaniacal narcissist with billions to spend to force the world to go your way. In brief, it’s an assertion that humans can do whatever they want - as long as they’re reasonably successful - and God doesn’t have anything to say about it. This of course, coming from an Italian of the 15th century, was a direct assault on the 1500 year old teaching of the Catholic Church that it is the Man-God, the Logos, who actually is the “measure of all things,” because He made them and owns all those things by right.

Move over, Jesus of Nazareth; Cosimo’s got some ideas.

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The Renaissance - the original Hermeneutic of Rupture

I’ve always loved this series and am the world’s biggest fan of Sir Ken¹. But it helped popularise the prejudices that we take for granted about the Renaissance² being the centre of the universe of western art and philosophy, the direction human beings were supposed to go, the one intended by a benign and orderly universe.

My Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy comes right out and says it: Renaissance Humanism was a philosophical outlook, “a general perspective,” that was in opposition to the prior outlook and general perspective, and led inexorably to the disaster we’re in now.

Of course, the academic writer at Cambridge uses nicer language, but it’s pretty easy to see what it really means. The nature of humanism, it says, “comes into focus when it is compared with two competing positions. On the one hand, it can be contrasted with the emphasis on the supernatural, transcendent domain, which considers humanity to be radically dependent on divine order.”

That is, the medieval social order of Christianity that came before it.

“On the other hand it resists the tendency to treat humanity scientifically as part of the natural order, on a [moral] par with other living organisms. Occupying the middle position, humanism discerns in human beings unique capacities and abilities, to be cultivated and celebrated for their own sake.”

Another way to put it is to say that Renaissance Humanism, rejecting the notion of man’s dependence on a transcendent God, had no answer for the questions, “Well, what are we for then? Who decides what’s good and what’s not good and by what criteria? How do we, who did not create the universe, assign objective value to things? How do we order our ideas about existence?” It laid an axe to the metaphysical foundations of Christian civilisation, and ushered in 500 years of war and moral chaos.

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The decision of powerful men to adopt it, because of the moral cover it provided, led to the next inevitable stage of the logic; the radical materialist naturalism that ascended in the 17th and 18th centuries, and finally to the nihilism we currently labour under. If Man is not connected in any way with something higher than and outside himself, with the transcendent order of the divine, and takes only himself as the “measure of all things,” he quickly remembers his woeful incapacity to create meaning that is actually meaningful.

And when he is confronted with the irrefutable reality of his sinfulness - in the shape of the wars of the 17th to 20th centuries and their escalating capacity for industrial scale atrocities - and he doesn’t turn back to God in repentance for his original hubris, he gets not himself as a standard for goodness but nothing. Ruin. Meaninglessness and ultimately total self-destruction. The modern world is the grandchild of the “confident” Renaissance men who thought they needed a revolution.

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What were those ideas, exactly?

“Humans are the measure of all things - of things that are, that they are; of things that are not, that they are not.”

Protagoras of Abdera, c. 490 - 420 BC

The expression Sir Ken quotes in his video comes originally from a Sophist philosopher of the 5th century BC, Protagoras of Abdera. His famous proposal led to him being formally charged by the city of Athens with “impiety” - of attacking the foundation of religious belief upon which the state was dependent for authority. He died, according to one report, in a shipwreck as he was leaving Athens on the way into exile after his conviction in a public trial.

Sophists were the first recorded group of philosophers to say that ultimate, objective certitude about truth was unattainable. They held that decisions about the business of public life could be acquired, but not by profound thinking, only by discussion and debate and coming to a consensus of agreement through rhetoric. Following the logic, therefore, whatever man decides is good is good, or at least good enough, and all moral considerations are totally subjectivised³.

The Renaissance Humanists’ love of everything Classical, particularly the Greek philosophers like Protagoras, would lead them to create the cultural assumption that we still accept today: the centuries between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the collapse of Classical civilisation and letters and their own time were a period of barbarism and superstition, something for “mature” people to shake off. Hence we have to this day the expression, “Middle Ages,” for those ages of faith that men like Cosimo de Medici no longer had any time for.

Prior to their adoption as a mode of living by powerful elites in central Italy, the classical writings were taken simply as part of the standard educational curriculum.

“On the rise of secularism these views underwent a change, especially in Italy. In that country the body politic had grown powerful, the cities had amassed great wealth, and civic liberty was widespread. Worldly pleasure became a strong factor in life and freer play was given to sensory impulse. The transcendental, unworldly concept of life, which had till then been dominant, now came into conflict with a mundane, human, and naturalistic view, which centred on nature and man.”

I use the term “naturalism” a lot when I write about sacred art, and understanding the term is a key to understanding religious objections to secular humanism, and to later forms of art.

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Naturalism: Material nature is the one original and fundamental source of all that exists, and everything can be explained in terms of nature. The limits of nature are also the limits of existing reality. If there is a “first cause” (God) that made everything, and exists outside of material nature, it has nothing to do with the ongoing working of natural agencies (cf. Deism). All events find an explanation within nature itself.

Naturalism is in opposition to supernaturalism, the proposal that there is a God or incorporeal soul, or a transcendent, supernatural aspect to reality that gives reality meaning.

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How were these ideas expressed in art?

1. The focus on human figures: Humanist artists were fascinated by the human form as an expression of cosmic perfection, and sought to portray it with anatomical accuracy and naturalism. They often depicted nudes and secular, naturalistic portraits, a novelty at the time. Later Renaissance painters, like Caravaggio, ceased using the canons to create human form and faces and started using live models drawn from direct observation.

2. The use of illusionistic perspective: Humanist artists developed and refined the use of linear perspective, which used geometric techniques to create the illusion of 3 dimensional depth, of figures existing in natural space and the picture frame as a kind of window. This technique helped to create a sense of depth and grandeur in their works, which reflected the humanist belief in the power and importance of human vision.

3. The depiction of classical themes: Humanist painters started depicting scenes and figures from ancient Greek and Roman history, mythology and literature.

Giorgio Vasari, b. 1511; painter, architect and propagandist.

Giorgio Vasari: paid to spread a new ideology

Here’s a little fun-fact about Giorgio Vasari: his seminal work on the Renaissance, “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects,” was commissioned by Cosimo I de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. It’s a work of socio-political propaganda, promoting a new ideological viewpoint about art, but also about the nature of history in general. The notion that our culture’s history is “leading” somewhere in particular, a proper or desired place and condition, has a moral purpose, is an assumption that Cosimo and the whole clique of nouveau-riche social climbers very much wanted promoted - since they considered themselves the peak and goal of that cosmic progress. The assumption that “history” has a kind of quasi sentience with a purposeful moral direction can still be seen in our current political discourse; we are told quite often, aren’t we, that we are on the “right” or “wrong” “side” of history.

Vasari’s book far overshadowed his painting in importance, and over time, his Lives became the standard reference work for art history, shaping the perception of Renaissance art for centuries. He was paid 1000 scudi, a substantial sum, and given access to the duke’s private literary collections. Vasari was careful to flatter his patrons, including Cosimo and other members of the Florentine elite, ensuring the book would be well-received by the people who mattered most.

Where do we, to this day, get our idea that Renaissance painters were some kind of magical superheroes who “invented” 3 dimensionality, linear perspective and illusionistic naturalism? How do we have the impression that Leonardo da Vinci, who completed a great grand total of 20 paintings, was the greatest artistic genius who ever lived? I’m not saying Leonardo wasn’t great, but was he the greatest ever? Why do we think that, why is it just the accepted wisdom? Why is he the one artist everyone has heard of?

Vasari has been criticised for his obvious biases since his book was published. This is mainly because the book wasn’t really about art, so much as a kind of business investment brochure about the glories of Florence, and his dismissiveness to other previous forms of art - that we still accept today without critique - is a result.

Artist as divine oracle: idolatry

Vasari's narrative of the Renaissance is linear and teleological⁴, giving us the idea that remains a strong thread in our cultural narrative, that the Renaissance was a period of steady progress intended by God towards the perfection, and achieved by the Florentine painters. If we have the idea that our cultural history is going somewhere particular, heading with inexorable “progress” toward some ideal cosmic goal, Vasari is one of the people we can thank for it.

But one of my main objections to him is his invention of the artist as celebrity, and the consequent reduction of their works to a kind of divine or supernatural magic trick. Vasari's view of the artist as superheroic and idealized portrays them as superhuman figures whose abilities are innate, at the same time reducing their works to the status of conjuring tricks and rendering them immune to critique.

In the medieval Christian culture, the painter was a craftsman, an artisan, who learned a trade and devoted his life to bringing his skill up to the highest level possible. Paintings were made in churches with the aim of elevating the attention of the viewer to God and heavenly things. In Vasari’s new Renaissance world, one does not use the work of painters as honest craftsmen for the right worship of God; one worships the work itself, and elevates the painter to the status of “artist,” a kind of oracular or quasi divine cultural office. And that, friends, is idolatry.

And that’s where we’ve been about “art” ever since. It’s how we got to the point of practically worshipping the artist, (or the rock star or the actor or sportsman) of holding them as quasi-sacred persons with a direct link to the divine cosmos, whose mere name attached to a physical object catapults the value of the object beyond all reason. It’s how we got to our current state of madness, in which whatever a celebrity artist produces, from a good figurative painting to, literally, a tin of excrement, is considered a great work.

Vasari was one of the earliest and most successful propagandists for the core ideological proposal of the Renaissance: “Man is the measure of all things.” It wasn’t his idea. Nor was it Cosimo Di Medici’s. But it was their favourite idea. What it meant was that all knowledge is subjective, being derived from observations made by humans, and there can be no objective truth, or at least no objective truth we can definitively obtain.

And it’s how we got here from there.

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1. Kenneth McKenzie Clark, Baron Clark of Saltwood, 1903 –1983, art historian, became a Catholic on his deathbed after a lifetime of examining medieval and Renaissance Christian art.

2. The term was coined by Giorgio Vasari in his book Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550), from the Italian word rinascita, "rebirth". Marked by a renewed interest in the classical world, a flourishing of creativity in all areas of art and literature, and a growing emphasis on human potential and individualism.

The term was not widely used outside of Italy until the 1830s, when French historian and socialist Jules Michelet popularized it in his book Histoire de France (1855), which traces the history of France from the earliest times to the French Revolution. Michelet took Vasari’s idea that the Renaissance was a turning point in Western history, a definitive break from the Christian age of faith.

3. “Good” being no longer objective, came to be applied circumstantially: “good for this particular end or purpose,” leaving room for obvious political applications. Keep this idea firmly in mind whenever a politician or public figure starts talking about their policies being up to the “highest ethical standards”.

4. Teleological: relating to the design and purpose in the material world