Many people today think the definition of a humanist is the same as a humanitarian. They are not entirely wrong. But this conception leaves out at least one major qualification: in the eyes of the Renaissance masters who coined the term, a humanist must study the great works of antiquity. That study is what the Renaissance was all about: the great art of the era came from the rediscovery of the ancient world and the application of its genius to the present. Renaissance humanism formed the basis of a classical education that thrived well into the middle of the twentieth century, until the 1960s brats decided it was irrelevant.
Though the Renaissance burst into full bloom in fifteenth-century Florence, it first began to sprout in the century before, still the late Middle Ages, in the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, as well as in Giotto’s painting. Now, a beautiful and compact exhibition at Paris’s Bibliothèque nationale, “Inventing the Renaissance,” allows visitors to explore the Renaissance’s roots and its fruits.
Petrarch (1304–74), the great poet and perhaps the first humanist, remarked that donning the humanist’s garb by studying the great books of antiquity—as well as the Bible and the works of the Church fathers—raised man from a ferocious animal into a human being. A century later, the humanist and military leader Frederico da Montefeltro, First Duke of Urbino (1422–82), was asked by a bookseller what made a good ruler. The duke replied: “Being human.”
Federico was famous for mingling with his subjects and soldiers, in the way of Shakespeare’s Henry V. He is celebrated in the exhibition’s opening room, which is devoted to the period’s concept of the studiolo room. The studiolo, a sort of secular descendant of the medieval monk’s cell and a forebear to the latter-day study or artist’s studio, was the room where a humanist studied his classics. Federico’s studiolo held portraits of Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy, all of them sporting thick beards, painted either by Pedro Berruguete or Justus van Gent (scholars can’t agree on which). One of these two artists also painted Federico’s likeness in profile in Portrait of Federico de Montefeltro and His Son Guidobaldo (ca. 1476), which hung in the subject’s ducal palace in Urbino. The duke of Urbino was the greatest soldier of his time and region, but he loved the written word. His portrait shows him in his studiolo, a bound manuscript in his hands, dressed in both armor and a grand robe. We get the impression that he returns each day from the battlefield—his armor unscathed and unstained—and dons this more majestic robe before immersing himself in the writings of the ancient world.
A section of the studiolo’s original wooden wall is included as well, emanating the “calm and timelessness” that Kenneth Clark claimed in Civilisation is to be found in the place. The palace at Urbino, Clark said, was the space where he could most easily walk about “without feeling oppressed.” The art historian Michael Levey wrote that the palace “impresses by harmony rather than strength.”
The studiolo first appeared in the fourteenth-century papal court at Avignon, where Petrarch was raised by his father, an exiled Italian notary. The exhibition’s second room celebrates the poet and his inspirations. Chief among these was his muse, Laura, for whom he formed a lifelong obsession after their first encounter in a church when he was still young. But Virgil, Horace, Boethius, and Cicero spurred the writer as well, and he claimed to have read the entirety of their works a thousand times each. Cicero inspired Petrarch’s unfinished prose work De viris illustribus (Illustrious men), which in turn inspired other texts such as Vasari’s Lives of the Artists.
Though Petrarch didn’t get far in his attempt to learn Greek—he read Homer in Latin—other fifteenth-century Florentine humanists, such as Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) and Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444), were more successful. Bracciolini and Bruni traveled the lengths of Europe to acquire Greek manuscripts, and after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the Medici family gave refuge to many Greek scholars and their libraries. Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449–1492) spent much of his fortune on manuscripts.
A number of early Renaissance paintings and sculptures are on display too. They are typically full of joyous, springtime hues and vibrant figures. That goes not only for Marco Zoppo’s Madonna and Child with Angels (1455) and Perugino’s Apollo and Daphnis (ca. 1483), but also for Donatello’s twin statues of Spiritelli (1439), bursting with fun, prime examples of the era’s ebullient energy.
By the close of the fifteenth century, the Renaissance had spread from Florence to the rest of Italy and beyond. François I of France (1492–1547) was very much a Renaissance king, and the last room of the exhibition is crowned by the treasures formerly housed in his sumptuous library at the Palace of Fontainebleau. It is impressive, of course, but lacking the warmer atmosphere of the Ducal Palace of Urbino.
On the whole, “Inventing the Renaissance” provides an enchanting tour through the minds and rooms of some of the Renaissance’s most emblematic men.