Vittoriano
This conference will explore the many notions of Renaissance through the centuries, examining the key figures, artistic practices and paradigms that help keep its fire burning five hundred years later. The title references the dialectic relationship between the different eras that have contributed to the current notion of “Renaissance”, as too the challenging historiographic issue of “Renaissance” and “Modernity”.
Chronologically divided into four sessions and with debates among academics from different disciplinary fields, the talks will start from and gravitate around specific tasks, seen as key.
Retracing from within, starting from the notion of Rebirth as celebrated in 14th century Italy and the development of a changing paradigm that led to Vasari’s codification, segmented in several parts and anchored to auctoritates (Giotto or Simone Martini, Masaccio or Gentile, Donatello or Ghiberti, Brunelleschi or Alberti), albeit sometimes incompatible to our eyes. We might therefore imagine the mature Renaissance as a “palimpsest” from which to scrape away, like paint, the homologating high rhetoric and bring out those “municipal origins” which remained fertile and vibrant until the late 15th century. A dynamic perfectly applicable to the role Giorgio Vasari was to entrust to the totalising language of the “modern manner”, with the ensuing subordination of the diversarum artium system of mediaeval tradition to the standard setting aesthetic of “Drawing”. Against this backdrop, we shall ascertain the degree to which the dominant material culture of the 15th century workshop, in substance lacking hierarchies between type and method, was progressively conceptualised and disarticulated in the following century.
Verifying what remained of the “modern manner” in the 17th and 18th centuries: Which and how much Michelangelo? Which and how much Leonardo? Why was the enduring triad Raphael, Correggio and Titian formed? And why Veronese and not Tintoretto? How was the golden age of Pope Leo X reflected in the 17th century papacies and why did it come to play an authoritative role in the historiography of the Enlightenment?
Reconsidering, starting from the 19th century, the historiographic significance of the Renaissance, come to coincide in pre- and post-unification ideology, e.g. in the exemplary case of Francesco De Sanctis’ History of Italian Literature (1870), with the “end of Italian freedom” and the failed religious reform: a country divided, subjected to Spanish “oppression” and gagged by the Church of Rome seemed therefore barred from accessing Modernity in the very same period it had reached its peak. How conscious was artistic historiography of this paradoxical contradiction? And with how much clarity and what success? What was the relationship outside Italy between Vasari’s “modern manner” and the “Renaissance” of Michelet, Sismondi, Roscoe and Burckhardt, initially, and Wölfflin, Warburg and Panofsky later? From another and more general stance, on what basis is it still valid to consider the Protestant Reformation as a counterpoint to the European Renaissance and its legacy or, on the contrary, can it be argued that it formed a part of it?
Confronting the fact that, for almost the last 40 years, the “Renaissance” paradigm has been deconstructed if not indeed demolished, starting from post- and de-colonial studies, gender studies, global history, the highly pertinent “post-human” issue and so on to the most recent neo-iconoclastic, as too hegemonic, Eurocentric, patriarchal and white episodes. How much does the epistemological crisis of the “history of art” – the “end” of which has paradoxically been declared in many quarters – drag that of the “Renaissance” with it? To what point is it right to “deconstruct the deconstruction”, verify the historical endurance of formulae and slogans that appear to have in turn become precocious clichés? Moreover, how do we explain the continuing periodising success of “Renaissance”, a term still employed to underscore rebirth, redemption and the revendication of liberty all over the world and in whatever period in history they occur or have occurred? If such a narration centred on Europe had automatically made all other cultural histories peripheral, the time seems right to lucidly consider that the notions imposed on others as bedrocks of power are simply a way of reflecting on our own projections and rejections. For this reason, the organisers of this encounter believe we must rethink the notion of Renaissance once again and for the better.
