Renaissance Thought and the Arts: Collected Essays

by Paul Oskar Kristeller

Written by an eminent authority on the Renaissance, these classic essays deal not only with Paul Kristeller's specialty, Renaissance humanism and philosophy, but also with Renaissance theories of art. The focus of the collection is on topics such as humanist learning, humanist moral thought, the diffusion of humanism, Platonism, music and learning during the early Renaissance, and the modern system of arts in relation to the Renaissance. For this volume the author has written a new preface, a new essay, and an afterword.

"[This book] includes some of Professor Kristeller's most celebrated essays. . . . no student of the Renaissance can afford not to have read these--the most perfect--introductions to Renaissance thought. . . . One of the main merits of the present book is that it contributes to the survival of truly great scholarship. The elegant and erudite essays contained in it should serve as models for every historian of ideas". --The Heythrop Journal "[These] papers . . . illuminate various aspects of Renaissance thought through the impressive mediums of a copious and detailed knowledge of original materials, a seemingly limitless comprehension of the whole subject, a clear, clean style, and a wise, learned, and scholarly mind".--The Personalist

Contents:
Humanism: Humanist learning in the Italian Renaissance -- The moral thought of Renaissance humanism -- The European diffusion of Italian humanism
Platonism and Aristotelianism: The Platonic Academy of Florence -- Ficino and Pomponazzi on the place of man in the universe -- Paduan Averroism and Alexandrism in the light of recent studies
The Arts: The origin and development of the language of Italian prose -- Music and learning in the early Italian Renaissance -- The modern system of the arts -- Rhetoric in Medieval and Renaissance Culture -- Afterword: “Creativity” and “Tradition”

Genres: Philosophy, Renaissance, History, Art, Art History, Essays, Nonfiction

258 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Paul Oskar Kristeller (May 22, 1905 in Berlin – June 7, 1999 in New York, USA) was an important scholar of Renaissance humanism. He was awarded the Haskins Medal in 1992. He was last active as Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York, where he mentored both Irving Louis Horowitz and A. James Gregor.

During his university years he studied with Werner Jaeger, Heinrich Rickert, Richard Kroner, Karl Hampe, Friedrich Baethgen, Eduard Norden, and Ulrich von Wilamowitz. He also attended lectures by noted philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer, Edmund Husserl, and Karl Jaspers. In 1928, he earned his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg under Ernst Hoffmann with a dissertation on Plotinus. He did postdoctoral work at the universities of Berlin and Freiburg. At Freiburg, Kristeller studied under the philosopher Martin Heidegger from 1931 to 1933. The Nazi victory in 1933 forced Kristeller to move to Italy. At his arrival, Giovanni Gentile secured for him a position as lecturer in German at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. It was at the Scuola Normale that Kristeller completed his first great works in the Renaissance: the Supplementum Ficinianum (1937) and The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (1943). In 1939, he fled Italy, due to the enactment of Mussolini's August 1938 racial laws, to live in the USA. Thanks to the help of Yale University historian Roland Bainton, he sailed from Genoa in February 1939 and by March was teaching a graduate seminar at Yale on Plotinus. However Kristeller taught for only a short time at Yale University until moving to Columbia University, where he taught until his retirement in 1973, as Frederick J. E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy. He continued to be an active researcher after he retired. Paul Kristeller received the Serena Medal of the British Academy in 1958, the Premio Internazionale Galileo Galilei in 1968 and the Commendatore nell'Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana in 1971.

The emphasis of Kristeller's research was on the philosophy of Renaissance humanism. He is the author of important studies on Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Pomponazzi and Giambattista Vico.

An especially important achievement is his Iter Italicum (the title recalls Iter Alemannicum and other works of Martin Gerbert), a large work describing numerous uncatalogued manuscripts. After decades of neglect, Kristeller's lengthy, erudite essay of the early 1950s, "The Modern System of the Arts", in Journal of the History of Ideas, proved to be an influential, much reprinted classic reading in Philosophy of Art.

Kristeller was the chief inspirer of the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, the ongoing project that aims to chart the fortune of all extant classical works through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, serving as Founder and Editor-in-Chief for the first two volumes and Associate Editor for the next five volumes.

Reviews

[Bruno Romano · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a rather arbitrary and random selection of articles. Volume I unite the better ones and better connects them as well; this one not so much. For this reason I read mostly the articles on Platonism and Aristotelianism, leaving arts and etc behind.

Kristeller is revisionist history, so some ideas you’ll find:

- There was no particular attitude of humanists toward Christianity (pg. 40). They could be pagan, or catholic, or protestant. Few were actually pagans. Most mythology serverd as poetic ornament or allegory to morals. The issue of pagan philosophy and it’s assimilation to Christianity was there, as it was with the early fathers. They just went the other way around in the assimilation.

- Overview of humanist educational program. How they laid stress in the moral fundaments of classical thought and it’s practical orientation. Here Kristeller’s research shines nice on clues to true humanist education.

- This practical orientation (against medieval contemplation) might be a lead towards modernity (pg. 54-55).

- Humanists were not naïve or only optimistic about life issues. They had nostalgia and saw misery.

- Rebuttal of claim that they were not god-centered but man-centered, on the basis that they simply had no interest in theology or metaphysics, hence obvious stress in human problems (this argument doesn’t seem to stand: isn’t this lack of interest a reflection of loss of faith?)

- Someone could say that the talk of “dignity of man” is man-centered. Kristeller says this is a common Christian theme since the early fathers. Only platonic philosophers gave it a metaphysical approach, and indeed it became more systematic, persistent and exclusive (pg. 108)

- In the platonics talk about the dignity and glorification of man, a new theme comes in: liberty. This is novelty and shows up in Pico, as we all know. Dignity of man is not conceived anymore on his universality, but on his freedom. This is NEW.

- Individualism was really growing in Renaissance (following Burkhardt). Proof: obsession with immortality of the soul (pg. 95)

[Judy]

The Renaissance period encompassed from about 1300-1600 A.D.
In the 16th century humanism was not superseded by the Protestant and Catholic Reformation, as many historians claim, for it was not a theology, but a literary and scholarly tradition that survived in both Catholic and Protestant countries. In philosophy and the sciences, humanism was definitely superseded during the 17th century by the new developments which started with Galileo and Descartes, developments which had in part been prepared by humanism itself." p 18
"...we see in the Renaissance a vast body of the humanities, that is secular learning which partially at least, is independent of practical life of science, of religion, and of the arts, and which occupies a large and important place in the attention and initiative of the time. p. 19
Pico de Mirandola said that all known philosophies and religions contained some elements of truth: " In particular he maintained that the writings of the Jewish Cabalists represented an ancient oral tradition, and were in agreement with the teachings of Christianity." p. 68
"Every humanist takes himself very seriously and thinks that everything he has heard and seen is eminently worth recording." p. 65
"When we come to the end of the Renaissance, this subjective and personal character of humanist thought finds its most conscious and consummate philosophical expression in the Essais of Michel de Montaigne." p. 66
"The 'studia humanitatus' which we thus take as the basis for the definition of Renaissance humanism, comprised a well defined cycle of disciplines, as we may learn from a number of contemporary documents: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy. To this list we may add, as implied, the study of the Greek and Roman authors of classical antiquities." p. 71
Ficino taught immortality of the soul. He saw it as a central doctrine of Platonism." p. 95 Ficino was probably the greatest Florentine philosopher and metaphysicist in Florence, the capital of the Renaissance.
Vico was considered by Croce to be founder of modern aesthetics. Vico's theory of phantasy refers to poetry only. He lists two groups of arts, the visual and oratory politics and medicine. p. 188
Shaftesbury and his follower Francis Hutcheson distinguished between the moral sense and the sense of beauty. Hume adopted this distinction and Diderot quoted it -- leading to the separation of ethics and aesthetics.
There were important periods in cultural history when the novel, instrumental music or canvas painting did not exist or have any importance." p. 226
On the other hand, the sonnet and the epic poem, stained glass and mosaic, fresco painting and tapestry, bas relief and pottery have al been 'major' arts at various times and in a way they no longer are now. Gardening has lost its standing as a find art since the eighteenth century. " p. 226
I cite the Renaissance as evidence that creativity is not always stifled by tradition and must not always assert itself by denying the value of all tradition, but may well combine with a selective use of valuable traditional elements to bring about quite excellent works of art, literature and of abstract thought. \" p. 258