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The Horizon of the Renaissance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

André Chastel
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Extract

The centuries have acted rather as a warehouse for the idea we harbour about the Renaissance: the age of initiative, the age, above all others, of motivated decision-making provoked by strong images, the age when decisions were taken with ardour and carried through with confidence. If this intuition is not an unreal one, then historians should both stake their claim in it and account for it.

The fine quality of self-confidence which we attribute to the great figures of the Renaissance supposes the necessary and certain knowledge that one can “change the order of things.” And one can have a fairly clear idea from the example of the French how this certain knowledge is formulated and how it operates.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 19 , Issue 74 , June 1971 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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References

* This text includes the first two parts of the inaugural Reading of the Chair of “Renaissance Art and Civilisation in Italy” given at the College de France on January 20th 1971.

1 C. P. Goujet, Mémoires historiques et littéraires sur le Collège Royal de France, Paris 1758, volume I, page 239. In Pandora's Box, The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol, New York 1956, p. 41, No. 9, D. and E. Panofsky point out the passage which nevertheless escaped consideration in the study "The Iconography of the Galerie François Ier at Fontainebleau," in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, July 1958, p. 119. The introduction of Lazare de Baïf as the probable author of the design is appropriate: see Bulletin de la Société na tionale des Antiquaires de France, 1968, pp. 186-187.

2 A. Lefranc, "La fondation et les commencements du Collège de France," in Le Collège de France, 1560-1930, Paris 1932, pp. 25-58; M. Bataillon, "Le Collège de France," in Revue de l'Enseignement Supérieur, 1962, No. 2, p. 7.

3 Archives de l'art français, vol. I, p. 108 etc.

4 F. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen au temps de Philippe II, 2nd edition, vol. II, Paris 1966.

5 Abbé du Bos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture, Paris 1919, vol. II, p. 288.

6 Augustin Renaudet, "Le problème historique de la Renaissance Italienne (1947)," in Humanisme et Renaissance, Geneva 1958, p. 81 ff.

7 André Pézard, "Nymphes platoniciennes au Paradis terrestre," in Medioevo e Rinascimento, Studi in onore di Bruno Nardi, Florence 1955, pp. 543-594.

8 J. M. Huskinson, "The Crucifixion of St. Peter: Fifteenth Century Topo graphical Problem," in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XXXII (1968), p. 135 ff.

9 D. Hay, The Italian Renaissance in its Historical Background, Cambridge, 1961. Note the preface by F. Saxl: "Historians have something to gain by turning their attention to beliefs which the 19th century rejected as childish," in Lectures, London, 1957, p. 94.

10 A. Chastel, Le mythe de la Renaissance, Geneva 1968.

11 P. O. Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, Rome, 1956 (among other collections).

12 E. Garin, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano, Florence, 1961 (among many other studies).

13 R. Lopez, The Three Ages of the Italian Renaissance, University Press of Virginia, 1970

14 R. Klein, "Le thème du fou et l'ironie humaniste" (1963), in La forme et l'intelligible, Paris, 1969.