The Renaissance

by Will Durant

Amid these types was an arresting mutation, a sport of the species and the time, the kind of man we think of when we recall the Renaissance, a type unique in history, except that Alcibiades, seeing him, would have felt reborn.

There were instances of fine loyalty of man to man, of citizen to state; but by and large the development of cunning put a premium on deceit.

Against the tyranny of governments the only recourse was tyrannicide.

the Italians of the Renaissance, like the later French, were gourmets, not gourmands.

The art of conversation—bel parlare—to speak with intelligence, urbanity, courtesy, clarity, and wit—was reinvented by the Renaissance.

had not poetry always intended itself to be at least a recitative, if not a song?

and the music for a madrigal, played without song, became the instrumental canzone, the distant progenitor of the sonata,109a and therefore of the symphony.

Men went to church not always to pray but to hear a great organist like Squarcialupi or Orcagna.

Musical theory lagged a generation behind practice: performers innovated, professors denounced, then debated, then approved.

all evidence is a selection.

“if there is a hell, then Rome is built upon it; and this I have heard in Rome itself.”

“In our corrupt times,” said Guicciardini, “the goodness of a pontiff is commended when it does not surpass the wickedness of other men.”

The great Church that had once ruled kings could no longer govern or cleanse itself.

Fuori i barbari!—” Out with the barbarians!”

He could find a hundred reasons for a decision, and a hundred against it; it was as if Buridan’s ass sat on the papal throne.

A passion for leisure kept him this side of genius.

(Artists are mostly of lowly stock: the middle classes seek utility first, hoping to have time for beauty in their senility; aristocrats, though they nourish art, prefer the art of life to the life of art.)

“Who will care, a thousand years hence, whether these are their features or not?”

A knighthood was offered him, without income; he refused it, remarking that “a knighthood without revenue is like a wall without Forbidden signs; everybody commits nuisances there.”

Aretino was the first example of what was later called the power of the press; nothing like his influence would appear again in literature until Voltaire.

They were popular because it is hard for us not to enjoy the excoriation of others; because they exposed real abuses, and courageously attacked the great and powerful; and because they brought all the resources of the language of the streets to the uses of literature and gainful literary homicide.

I’d wager my soul against a pistachio nut”);

The conclusions to which the dialogues come is that courtesans are the most praiseworthy of the three classes of women, for the wives and nuns are faithless to their vows, while the courtesans live up to their professions and give an honest night’s labor for their pay. Italy was not shocked; it laughed with delight.

he defined slander as “telling the truth”;

Aretino had style without seeking it.

He had whatever virtue is implied by abundant animal spirits; in private he was a good-natured animal who had never learned a moral code. He thought—with some excuse in those times—that no person of any consequence had any real moral code.

Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino, Who evil spoke of everyone but God, Giving as his excuse, “I never knew him.”

Titian took the world as he found it, took men as he found them, took women when he found them, and enjoyed them all.

“The design of Michelangelo and the color of Titian.”

he grew too fond of dim backgrounds and heavy shadows; he became a specialist in picturing the play of light and shade upon hands and face and drapes, buildings and landscapes and clouds. He left no pebble unturned in his struggle for excellence.

Our final feeling in the presence of these pictures is one of affirmative response: this is art in the grand style. Other artists have painted beauty, like Raphael, or strength, like Michelangelo, or the depths of the soul, like Rembrandt; but here in these cosmic canvases—as in the roar of a city, or in mute masses at prayer, or in the troubled and affectionate intimacies of a thousand homes—is humanity.

But he was too joyously intent upon surface melodies to hear the subtle overtones, tragic discords, and deeper harmonies that make the greatest paintings great.

A Frenchman once said that l’été c’est un coloriste, l’hiver c’est un dessinateur—”summer is a colorist, winter is a designer”;

Liberalism is a luxury of security and peace.

Archimedes, Aristotle, Euclid, Apollonius of Perga, Archytas of Tarentum, al-Khwarizmi, al-Kindi, Gebir, Duns Scotus, and Richard Swineshead—

“What animal do I find more treacherous, vile, and deceitful than man?”

We must not expect to find a major philosopher in so small a span of space and time.

Some measure of liberalism must have survived in the Church to let Telesio die a natural death (1588).

It is easier to rule a state in its decline than in its youth; diminished vitality almost welcomes subjugation.

He tried to console himself with amours but found more boredom in promiscuity than in marriage.

The last word must be one of humility. We middling mortals, even while presuming to sit in judgment upon the gods, must not fail to recognize their divinity. We need not be ashamed to worship heroes, if our sense of discrimination is not left outside their shrines.

A style once dead cannot properly be revitalized unless the civilization that it expressed can be restored; the vigor and health of the style lie in its harmony with the life and culture of its time.

For restraint is essential to sculpture; the enduring medium does not fitly embody a contortion or an agony that by its nature must be brief. Sculpture is motion immobilized, passion spent or controlled, beauty or form preserved from time by metal congealed or lasting stone.

The popularity of portraiture in the sixteenth century suggests the rise of the nouveaux riches, and their hunger to see themselves in the glass of fame.

Refutations never convince, and to pit one half-truth against its opposite is vain unless the two can be merged into a larger and juster view.

The Renaissance had tired of original sin, breast-beating, and mythical post-mortem terrors; it turned its back upon death and its face to life; and long before Schiller and Beethoven it sang an exhilarating, incomparable ode to joy.