🛑 “ORTA ÇAĞLAR” TERİMİ BİR YANLIŞ ADLANDIRMADIR

Woodcut of Florence. From the Nuremberg Chronicle, by Hartmann Schedel, 1493.

“Orta Çağlar” modern Avrupa tarihini Roma tarihi ile süreklilik içine getirme amacıyla türetilen bir terimdir.
Sayısız tarihçi Avrupa’nın kendisi için geçersiz olan “Orta Çağlar” terimini Dünya Tarihinin kendisine uygular.
Terim en iyisinden salt kronolojik bir anlam taşır.
“Orta Çağlar” terimi “orta”nın neyin ortası olduğu, hangi iki dönem arasında durduğu sorgulanmaksızın alışkanlıkla kullanılır.
“Orta Çağlar” terimi Roma uygarlığı ve Germanik barbarlık arasında tarihsel bir süreklilik ya da ardıllık yanılsaması yaratır.
“Orta Çağlar” Klasik Roma uygarlığı ve modern Avrupa uygarlığı arasında bir geçiş aşaması olarak, bağlayıcı bir halka olarak kabul edilir.
Bu bağ “karanlık” bir bağdır, ve gerçekte estetik, etik ve entellektüel bir kopmayı temsil eder.
Bu karanlık bağ Katolik Kilisesinin başatlığı altında yaşanan bir boşinanç ve moral gerilik dönemini temsil eder.

“Orta Çağlar” Klasik Roma ve Modern Batı Avrupa arasında bir geçiş kültürü değildir.
“Orta Çağlar” terimi bir halkayı değil, bir kopmayı temsil eder, çünkü Germanik Orta Çağlar ne bir kültürel kalıttır, ne de herhangi bir kültürün öncülü olması olanaklıdır.
Germanik kültürün karanlık Orta Çağları ile karşıtlık içinde, 500-1500 yılları arasındaki dönem Roma İmparatorluğunun kendisi tarafından, ayrıca Arap İmparatorlukları, ve Selçuklu ve Osmanlı İmparatorlukları altında yaşanan parlak bir bilim ve sanat dönemidir.

“Orta Çağlar” Roma İmparatorluğunun Batı bölümünün Germanik kabileler tarafından yıkıntıya döndürülmesi, İtalya’nın barbarlaşarak dilini, Latince’yi bile yitirmesi, kent yaşamının ve ona bağlı etkinliklerin sona ermesi, feodalizmin yerleşmesi, bilgisizlik, açlık, salgın hastalıklar, pogromlar, Haçlı Seferleri ve Engizisyon dönemidir.
Bubonik Veba (“Black Death”) 13’üncü yüzyıl ortalarında patlak verdi ve 20 milyonun üzerinde insanın ölümüne yol açtı (kıta nüfusunun üçte biri).
Dönem boyunca Katolik Kilisesi dünyasal politik güç olmak için çabaladı.
Kuzeyli Germanik halklar ilk kez uygarlık ile tanışmaya başladılar.
Roma İmparatorluğu Germanik Batıyı tanımlayan bütün bir karanlık “Orta Çağlar” boyunca varlığını ve gücünü sürdürdü.

🛑 KLASİĞİN ÖLÜMÜ

Ölümsüzü öldürmek Germanik kabilelerin dünya-tarihsel önemdeki eylemleridir.
Ölümsüzü öldürdüğü ileri sürülen etmen Germanik barbar r kabilelerdir (başlıca Ostrogotlar, Lombardlar; ikincil olarak Hunlar ve Normanlar).
Ölen kendilik Roma İmparatorluğunun Batı bölümüdür.
Ölüm “Karanlık Orta Çağlar” terimi ile anlatılan bin yıllık dönemdir (5 ve 15’inci yüzyıllar arası).
Yeniden-doğuş gerçekte salt bir doğuştur.

🛑 DUYUSAL BİÇİM OLARAK GÜZELLİK

Klasik olan, ilksiz-sonsuz olan, ölümsüz olan, eksiksiz olan, tüm daha öte değişim ve gelişimi gereksizleştiren ideal biçim Tinin gerçek biçimidir — varoluşun duyusal anlatımı olarak saltık, sonsuz Güzellik.

İdea ve ideal realiteden kopuk olmak bir yana, tam tersine onu realite yapan etmendir: Biçimini İdeadan almayan bir realite gerçekte bir realite değil, bir soyutlama, bir hiçlik, varolmayan birşeydir. İdeanın bu dünyanın ötesinde, erişilemeyecek bir sonsuzlukta olduğu düşüncesi geçersiz ve gereksizdir. Soru realitenin idealiteye ne denli karşılık düştüğüdür. İdea Realitenin biçimi, olanağı, her varoluşun saltık koşuludur.

DİZİN

1) Rönesans — Anahatlar
• Rönesans — ANAHATLAR

2) Renaissance

• Renaissance of the 12th century
• Renaissance
• Continuity thesis

3) Italy in the Middle Ages

• Middle Ages in Italy
• Italy
• İtalya 5-15’inci Yüzyıllar

4) Italian Language

• Boccaccio
• Dante
• Italian Language
• Petrarch

5) Humanism

• Humanism

6) Roman Catholic Church

• Papacy
• Papal states
• Roman Catholic Church

7) Florence

• Florence

8) Medici

• Medici

9) Renaissance Personalities

• Boticelli
• Erasmus
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Machiavelli
• Michelangelo

10) Dark Ages

• Dark Ages

🎨 Death of an Empire

Death of an Empire.

Death of an Empire.

Death of an Empire.

Death of an Empire (Sack of Rome by the Visigoths on 24 August 410, by JN Sylvestre 1890).

Renaissance of the 12th century

Renaissance of the 12th century (W)

The Renaissance of the 12th century was a period of many changes at the outset of the High Middle Ages. It included social, political and economic transformations, and an intellectual revitalization of Western Europe with strong {!} philosophical and scientific roots. These changes paved the way for later achievements such as the literary and artistic movement of the Italian Renaissance in the 15th century and the scientific developments of the 17th century.

Medieval renaissances

The groundwork for the rebirth of learning was laid by the process of political consolidation and centralization {!} of the monarchies of Europe. This process of centralization began with Charlemagne (768-814) King of the Franks and later (800-814), Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne’s inclination towards education, which led to the creation of many new churches and schools where students were required to learn Latin and Greek, has been called the Carolingian Renaissance.

A second "renaissance" occurred during the reign of Otto I (The Great) (936-973) King of the Saxons and from 962 onwards Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Otto was successful in unifying his kingdom and asserting his right to appoint bishops and archbishops throughout his kingdom. Otto's assumption of this ecclesiastical power brought him into close contact with the best educated and ablest class of men in his kingdom. {!} Because of this close contact many new reforms were introduced in the Saxon Kingdom and in the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, Otto's reign has been called the Ottonian Renaissance.

Therefore, the Renaissance of the 12th century has been identified as the third and final of the medieval renaissances. Yet the renaissance of the twelfth century was far more thoroughgoing than those renaissances that preceded in the Carolingian or in the Ottonian periods. Indeed, Charlemagne's Carolingian Renaissance was really more particular to Charlemagne himself, and was really more of a "veneer on a changing society" than a true renaissance springing up from society, and the same might be said of the Ottonian Renaissance.

Renaissance (W)

The Renaissance is a period in European history, covering the span between the 14th and 17th centuries and marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity.

The traditional view focuses more on the early modern aspects of the Renaissance and argues that it was a break from the past, but many historians today focus more on its medieval aspects and argue that it was an extension of the middle ages.

Sandro Botticelli, Idealized Portrait of a Lady (Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci as Nymph).

The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman Humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that “Man is the measure of all things.” {!} This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science and literature. Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the recycled knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the later 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe: the very first traces appear in Italy as early as the late 13th century, in particular with the writings of Dante and the paintings of Giotto.

As a cultural movement, the Renaissance encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch; the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting; and gradual but widespread educational reform.

In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, and in science to an increased reliance on observation and inductive reasoning. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man".

The Renaissance began in the 14th century in Florence, Italy. Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time: its political structure, the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici, and the migration of Greek scholars and their texts to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. Other major centres were northern Italian city-states such as Venice, Genoa, Milan, Bologna, and finally Rome during the Renaissance Papacy.

The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and, in line with general scepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual culture heroes as "Renaissance men", questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation. The art historian Erwin Panofsky observed of this resistance to the concept of "Renaissance":

“It is perhaps no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been most vigorously questioned by those who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects of civilization – historians of economic and social developments, political and religious situations, and, most particularly, natural science – but only exceptionally by students of literature and hardly ever by historians of Art.”

Some observers have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity, while social and economic historians, especially of the longue durée, have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a thousand ties".

The word Renaissance, literally meaning "Rebirth", first appeared in English in the 1830s. The word also occurs in Jules Michelet's 1855 work, Histoire de France. The word Renaissance has also been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th century.

Overview (W)

Overview

“The Arch of Titus,” (1787) by Abraham Louis Rodolphe Ducros (Swiss, 1748-1810).

🔎

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period. Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, its influence was felt in literature, philosophy, art, music, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, and searched for realism and human emotion in art.

Renaissance humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini sought out in Europe's monastic libraries the Latin literary, historical, and oratorical texts of Antiquity, while the Fall of Constantinople (1453) generated a wave of émigré Greek scholars bringing precious manuscripts in ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity in the West. It is in their new focus on literary and historical texts that Renaissance scholars differed so markedly from the medieval scholars of the Renaissance of the 12th century, who had focused on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural sciences, philosophy and mathematics, rather than on such cultural texts.

In the revival of neo-Platonism Renaissance humanists did not reject Christianity; quite the contrary, many of the Renaissance's greatest works were devoted to it, and the Church patronized many works of Renaissance art. However, a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached religion that was reflected in many other areas of cultural life. In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, were brought back from Byzantium to Western Europe and engaged Western scholars for the first time since late antiquity. This new engagement with Greek Christian works, and particularly the return to the original Greek of the New Testament promoted by humanists Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus, would help pave the way for the Protestant Reformation.

Well after the first artistic return to classicism had been exemplified in the sculpture of Nicola Pisano, Florentine painters led by Masaccio strove to portray the human form realistically, developing techniques to render perspective and light more naturally. Political philosophers, most famously Niccolò Machiavelli, sought to describe political life as it really was, that is to understand it rationally. A critical contribution to Italian Renaissance humanism Giovanni Pico della Mirandola wrote the famous text "De hominis dignitate" (Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486), which consists of a series of theses on philosophy, natural thought, faith and magic defended against any opponent on the grounds of reason. In addition to studying classical Latin and Greek, Renaissance authors also began increasingly to use vernacular languages; combined with the introduction of printing, this would allow many more people access to books, especially the Bible.

Origins (W)

Origins

Hubert Robert, “Ruins of a Roman Bath with Washerwomen” (L)

🔎

Many argue that the ideas characterizing the Renaissance had their origin in late 13th-century Florence, in particular with the writings of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) and Petrarch (1304-1374), as well as the paintings of Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337). Some writers date the Renaissance quite precisely; one proposed starting point is 1401, when the rival geniuses Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi competed for the contract to build the bronze doors for the Baptistery of the Florence Cathedral (Ghiberti won). Others see more general competition between artists and polymaths such as Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, and Masaccio for artistic commissions as sparking the creativity of the Renaissance. Yet it remains much debated why the Renaissance began in Italy, and why it began when it did. Accordingly, several theories have been put forward to explain its origins.

During the Renaissance, money and art went hand in hand. Artists depended entirely on patrons while the patrons needed money to foster artistic talent. Wealth was brought to Italy in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries by expanding trade into Asia and Europe. Silver mining in Tyrol increased the flow of money. Luxuries from the Eastern world, brought home during the Crusades, increased the prosperity of Genoa and Venice.

Jules Michelet defined the 16th-century Renaissance in France as a period in Europe's cultural history that represented a break from the Middle Ages, creating a modern understanding of humanity and its place in the world.

Continuity thesis

Continuity thesis (W)

In the history of ideas, the continuity thesis is the hypothesis that there was no radical discontinuity between the intellectual development of the Middle Ages and the developments in the Renaissance and early modern period. Thus the idea of an intellectual or scientific revolution following the Renaissance is, according to the continuity thesis, a myth. Some continuity theorists point to earlier intellectual revolutions occurring in the Middle Ages, usually referring to the European Renaissance of the 12th century as a sign of continuity. Despite the many points that have been brought up by proponents of the continuity thesis, a majority of scholars still support the traditional view of the Scientific Revolution occurring in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Duhem

The idea of a continuity, rather than contrast between medieval and modern thought, begins with Pierre Duhem, the French physicist and philosopher of science. It is set out in his ten volume work on the history of science, Le système du monde: histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic. Unlike many former historians such as Voltaire and Condorcet, who did not consider the Middle Ages to be of much intellectual importance, he tried to show that the Roman Catholic Church had helped foster the development of Western science. His work was prompted by his research into the origins of statics, where he encountered the works of medieval mathematicians and philosophers such as Nicole Oresme and Roger Bacon. {!} He consequently came to regard them as the founders of modern science, their having in his view anticipated many of the discoveries of Galileo and later thinkers. Duhem concluded that "the mechanics and physics of which modern times are justifiably proud proceed, by an uninterrupted series of scarcely perceptible improvements, from doctrines professed in the heart of the medieval schools." {!}

Sarton

Another notable supporter of the continuity thesis was George Sarton (1884–1956). In The History of Science and the New Humanism (1931), George Sarton put much stress on the historical continuity of science. Sarton further noted that the development of science stagnated during the Renaissance, due to Renaissance humanism putting more emphasis on form over fact, grammar over substance, and the adoration of ancient authorities over empirical investigation. As a result, he stated that science had to be introduced to Western culture twice: first in the 12th century during the Arabic–Latin translation movement, and again in the 17th century during what became known as the "Scientific Revolution". He said this was due to the first appearance of science being swept away by Renaissance humanism before science had to be re-introduced again in the 17th century.

Sarton wrote in the Introduction to the History of Science:

“It does not follow, as so many ignorant persons think, that the mediaeval activities were sterile. That would be just as foolish as to consider a pregnant woman sterile as long as the fruit of her womb was unborn. The Middle Ages were pregnant with many ideas which could not be delivered until much later. Modern science, we might say, was the fruition of mediaeval immaturity. Vesalius, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton were the happy inheritors who cashed in.” (Sarton, George (1947). Introduction to the History of Science. 3. p. 15; Williams & Wilkins for Carnegie Institution of Washington)

“We shall not be far wrong in saying that it was Occamism combined with Averroism which prepared the gradual dissolution of mediaeval continuity and the beginning of a new age.” (Sarton, George (1947). Introduction to the History of Science. 3. p. 91; Williams & Wilkins for Carnegie Institution of Washington.)

Franklin and Pasnau

More recently the Australian mathematician and historian of science James Franklin has argued that the idea of a European Renaissance is a myth. He characterizes the myth as the view that around the 15th century:

There was a sudden dawning of a new outlook on the world after a thousand years of darkness
Ancient learning was rediscovered
New ideas about intellectual inquiry and freedom replaced reliance on authority
Scientific investigation replaced the sterile disputes of the schools. (Franklin, James (Nov 1982). "The Renaissance Myth". Quadrant. 26 (11): 51-60.)

He claims that the Renaissance was in fact a period when thought declined significantly, bringing to an end a period of advance in the late Middle Ages, and that the twelfth century was the "real, true, and unqualified renaissance.” For example, the rediscovery of ancient knowledge, which the later Italian humanists claimed for themselves, was actually accomplished in the 12th century.

Franklin cites many examples of scientific advances in the medieval period that predate or anticipate later 'discoveries'. For example, the first advances in geometrical optics and mechanics were in the 12th century. The first steps in understanding motion, and continuous variation in general, occurred in the 14th century with the work of the scientists of the Merton School, at Oxford in the 1330s and 1340s. (Franklin notes that there is no phrase in ancient Greek or Latin equivalent to "kilometres per hour"). Nicole Oresme, who wrote on theology and money, devoted much of his effort to science and mathematics and invented graphs, was the first to perform calculations involving probability, and the first to compare the workings of the universe to a clock. Franklin emphasises how much of later thought, not only in science, was built on a foundation of revived scholasticism, not Renaissance humanism.

But little of importance occurs in any other branches of science in the two centuries between Oresme and Copernicus. Like other historians of this period, Franklin attributes the decline to the plague of 1348–1350, (the black death), which killed a third of the people in Europe. Johan Huizinga's examination of this period, The Waning of the Middle Ages, suggests a tendency towards elaborate theory of signs, which Franklin compares with the degeneracy of modern Marxism. He cites the late Renaissance naturalist Aldrovandi, who considered his account of the snake incomplete until he had treated it in its anatomical, heraldic, allegorical, medicinal, anecdotal, historical and mythical aspects. He marks the 15th century as coinciding with the decline of literature. Chaucer died in 1400; the next writers that are widely read are Erasmus, More, Rabelais and Machiavelli, just after 1500. "It is hard to think of any writer in English between Chaucer and Spenser who is now read even by the most enthusiastic students. The gap is almost two hundred years." He points to the development of astrology and alchemy in the heyday of the Renaissance.

Franklin concedes that in painting the Renaissance really did excel, but that unfortunately the artistic skill of the Renaissance concealed its incompetence in anything else. He cites Da Vinci, who was supposed to be good at everything, but who on examination, "had nothing of importance to say on most subjects". (A standard history of mathematics, according to Franklin (E. T. Bell's The Development of Mathematics, 1940), says that “Leonardo’s published jottings on mathematics are trivial, even puerile, and show no mathematical talent whatever.”) The invention of printing he compares to television, which produced "a flood of drivel catering to the lowest common denominator of the paying public, plus a quantity of propaganda paid for by the sponsors".

The philosopher and historian Robert Pasnau makes a similar, but more extreme claim that "modernity came in the late twelfth century, with Averroes’ magisterial revival of Aristotle and its almost immediate embrace by the Latin West.”

Pasnau argues that in some branches of 17th century philosophy, the insights of the scholastic era fall into neglect and disrepute. He disputes the modernist view of medieval thought as subservient to the views of Aristotle. By contrast "scholastic philosophers agree among themselves no more than does any group of philosophers from any historical period." ( Pasnau, Robert (Nov 2006). "A Theory of Secondary Qualities". Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 73 (3): 568-591.) Furthermore, the almost unknown period between 1400 and 1600 was not barren, but gave rise to vast quantities of material, much of which still survives. This complicates any generalizations about the supposedly novel developments in the seventeenth-century. He claims that the concerns of scholasticism are largely continuous with the central themes of the modern era, that early modern philosophy, though different in tone and style, is a natural progression out of later medieval debates, and that a grasp of the scholastic background is essential to an understanding of the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, and others.

Renaissance (EUROPEAN HISTORY) (B)

Renaissance, (French: “Rebirth”) period in European civilization immediately following the Middle Ages and conventionally held to have been characterized by a surge of interest in Classical scholarship and values.

The Renaissance also witnessed

the discovery and exploration of new continents,
the substitution of the Copernican for the Ptolemaic system of astronomy,
the decline of the feudal system and the growth of commerce,
the invention or application of such potentially powerful innovations as paper, printing, the mariner’s compass, and gunpowder.

To the scholars and thinkers of the day, however, it was primarily a time of the revival of Classical learning and wisdom after a long period of cultural decline and stagnation.

The Renaissance

Few historians are comfortable with the triumphalist and western Europe-centred image of the Renaissance as the irresistible march of modernity and progress.

A sharp break with medieval values and institutions,
a new awareness of the individual,
an awakened interest in the material world and nature, and
a recovery of the cultural heritage of ancient Greece and Rome

— these were once understood to be the major achievements of the Renaissance. Today, every particular of this formula is under suspicion if not altogether repudiated. Nevertheless, the term Renaissance remains a widely recognized label for the multifaceted period between the heyday of medieval universalism, as embodied in the papacy and Holy Roman Empire, and the convulsions and sweeping transformations of the 17th century.

In addition to Classical scholarship, the systematic investigation of the physical world, and commercial enterprise based on private capital, other important innovations of the Middle Ages that came into their own in the period included the revival of urban life, banking, the formation of states, and vernacular literatures.

In religious life, the Renaissance was a time of the broadening and institutionalizing of earlier initiatives in lay piety and lay-sponsored clerical reforms, rather than the abandonment of traditional beliefs.

In government, city-states and regional and national principalities supplanted the fading hegemony of the empire and the papacy and obliterated many of the local feudal jurisdictions that had covered Europe, although within states power continued to be monopolized by elites drawing their strength from both landed and mercantile wealth.

If there was a Renaissance “rediscovery of the world and of man,” as the 19th-century historians Jules Michelet (in the seventh volume of his History of France) and Jacob Burckhardt (in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy [1860]) asserted, it can be found mainly in literature and art, influenced by the latest and most successful of a long series of medieval Classical revivals.

For all but exceptional individuals and a few marginal groups, the standards of behaviour continued to arise from traditional social and moral codes. Identity derived from class, family, occupation, and community, although each of these social forms was itself undergoing significant modification. Thus, for example, while there is no substance to Burckhardt’s notion that in Italy women enjoyed perfect equality with men, the economic and structural features of Renaissance patrician families may have enhanced the scope of activity and influence of women of that class.

Finally, the older view of the Renaissance centred too exclusively on Italy, and within Italy on a few cities — Florence, Venice, and Rome.

By discarding false dichotomies — Renaissance versus Middle Ages, Classical versus Gothic, modern versus feudal — one is able to grasp more fully the interrelatedness of Italy with the rest of Europe and to investigate the extent to which the great centres of Renaissance learning and art were nourished and influenced by less exalted towns and by changes in the pattern of rural life.

For additional treatment of Renaissance thought and intellectual activity, see humanism and classical scholarship.

Italian language

Italian language (W)

Italian (italiano or lingua italiana) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family. Italian, together with Sardinian, is by most measures the closest language to Vulgar Latin of the Romance languages. Italian is an official language in Italy, Switzerland (where it is the first language in Canton Ticino and in the districts of Moesa and Bernina in Canton Graubünden), San Marino and Vatican City. It has an official minority status in western Istria (Croatia and Slovenia). It formerly had official status in Albania, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro (Kotor) and Greece (Ionian Islands and Dodecanese), and is generally understood in Corsica (also due to the similarities with the Corsican language) and Savoie. It also used to be an official language in the former Italian East Africa and Italian North Africa, where it plays a significant role in various sectors. Italian is also spoken by large expatriate communities in the Americas and Australia. Many speakers of Italian are native bilinguals of both Italian (either in its standard form or regional dialects) and other regional languages.

Italian is a major European language, being one of the official languages of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and one of the working languages of the Council of Europe. It is the fourth most widely spoken first language in the European Union with 69 million native speakers (13% of the EU population) and it is spoken as a second language by 16 million EU citizens (3%). Including Italian speakers in non-EU European countries (such as Switzerland and Albania) and on other continents, the total number of speakers is around 90 million. Italian is the main working language of the Holy See, serving as the lingua franca (common language) in the Roman Catholic hierarchy as well as the official language of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. Italian is known as the language of music because of its use in musical terminology and opera. Its influence is also widespread in the arts and in the luxury goods market.

Italian was adopted by the state after the Unification of Italy, having previously been a literary language based on Tuscan as spoken mostly by the upper class of Florentine society. Its development was also influenced by other Italian languages and to some minor extent, by the Germanic languages of the post-Roman invaders. The incorporation into Italian of learned words from its own ancestor language, Latin, is another form of lexical borrowing through the influence of written language, scientific terminology and the liturgical language of the Church.

Throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period, most literate Italians were also literate in Latin; and thus they easily adopted Latin words into their writing — and eventually speech — in Italian. Its vowels are the second-closest to Latin after Sardinian. As in most Romance languages, stress is distinctive but, unlike most other Romance languages, Italian retains Latin's contrast between short and long consonants. Almost all words and syllables finish with pure vowels, a factor that makes Italian words extremely easy to use in rhyming. Italian has a 7 vowel sound system ('e' and 'o' have mid-low and mid-high sounds); Classical Latin had 10, 5 with short and 5 with long sounds.

Origins

Origins (W)

Origins

During the Middle Ages, the established written language in Europe was Latin, though the great majority of people were illiterate, and only a handful were well versed in the language. In the Italian peninsula, as in most of Europe, most would instead speak a local vernacular. These dialects, as they are commonly referred to, evolved from Vulgar Latin over the course of centuries, unaffected by formal standards and teachings. They are not in any sense "dialects" of standard Italian, which itself started off as one of these local tongues, but sister languages of Italian. Mutual intelligibility with Italian varies widely, as it does with Romance languages in general. The Romance dialects of Italy can differ greatly from Italian at all levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, pragmatics) and are classified typologically as distinct languages.

The standard Italian language has a poetic and literary origin in the writings of Tuscan writers of the 12th century, and, even though the grammar and core lexicon are basically unchanged from those used in Florence in the 13th century, the modern standard of the language was largely shaped by relatively recent events. However, Romance vernacular as language spoken in the Apennine peninsula has a longer history. In fact, the earliest surviving texts that can definitely be called vernacular (as distinct from its predecessor Vulgar Latin) are legal formulae known as the Placiti Cassinesi from the Province of Benevento that date from 960-963, although the Veronese Riddle, probably from the 8th or early 9th century, contains a late form of Vulgar Latin that can be seen as a very early sample of a vernacular dialect of Italy.

The language that came to be thought of as Italian developed in central Tuscany and was first formalized in the early 14th century through the works of Tuscan writer Dante Alighieri, written in his native Florentine. Dante's epic poems, known collectively as the Commedia, to which another Tuscan poet Giovanni Boccaccio later affixed the title Divina, were read throughout the peninsula and his written dialect became the “canonical standard” that all educated Italians could understand. Dante is still credited with standardizing the Italian language. In addition to the widespread exposure gained through literature, the Florentine dialect also gained prestige due to the political and cultural significance of Florence at the time and the fact that it was linguistically an intermediate between the northern and the southern Italian dialects. Thus the dialect of Florence became the basis for what would become the official language of Italy.

🛑 KLASIK LATİNCE VE VULGAR LATİNCE

Vulgar Latince Klasik Latince’den “çok az” ayrım gösterir.
Doğu Roma İmparatorluğunda 7’nci yüzyılda Heraclius Yunanca’yı resmi devlet dili yaptı.

Vulgar Latin

Vulgar Latin (W)

Vulgar Latin or Sermo Vulgaris ("common speech"), also Colloquial Latin, or Common Romance (particularly in the late stage), was a range of non-standard sociolects of Latin spoken in the Mediterranean region during and after the classical period of the Roman Empire. It is distinct from Classical Latin, the standard and literary version of the language. Compared to Classical Latin, written documentation of Vulgar Latin appears less standardized. Works written in Latin during classical times and the earlier Middle Ages used prescribed Classical Latin rather than Vulgar Latin, with very few exceptions (most notably sections of Gaius Petronius' Satyricon), thus Vulgar Latin had no official orthography of its own.

By its nature, Vulgar Latin varied greatly by region and by time period, though several major divisions can be seen. Vulgar Latin dialects began to significantly diverge from Classical Latin by the third century during the classical period of the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, throughout the sixth century, the most widely spoken dialects were still similar to and mostly mutually intelligible with Classical Latin. In terms of regional differences for the whole Latin period, “we can only glimpse a tiny amount of divergence with the actual written data. In texts of all kinds, literary, technical, and all others, the written Latin of the first five or six centuries A.D. looks as if it were territorially homogeneous, even in its 'vulgar' register. It is only in the later texts, of the seventh and eighth centuries, that we are able to see in the texts geographical differences that seem to be the precursors of similar differences in the subsequent Romance languages."

In the Eastern Roman Empire, Latin gradually faded as the court language over the course of the 6th century; it was used in Justinian's court, but during the reign of Heraclius in the early 7th century, Greek (which was already widely spoken in the eastern portions of the Roman empire from its inception) was made the official language. The Vulgar Latin spoken in the Balkans north of Greece became heavily influenced by Greek and Slavic (Vulgar Latin already had Greek loanwords before the Roman Empire) and also became radically different from Classical Latin and from the proto-Romance of Western Europe.

Thus the Latin of classical antiquity changed from being a "living natural mother tongue" to being a language foreign to all, which could not be used or understood even by Romance-speakers except as a result of deliberate and systematic study. If a date is wanted “we could say Latin ‘died’ in the first part of the eighth century,” and after a long period 650-800 A.D. of rapidly accelerating changes. Even after the end of Classical Latin, people had no other names for the languages they spoke than Latin, lingua romana, or lingua romana rustica (to distinguish it from formal Latin) for 200-300 years. Modern people call these languages proto-Romance. The Romance languages, such as Catalan, French, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish all evolved from Vulgar Latin and not from Classical Latin.

🛑 FREDERICK ARTZ — “Orta Çağların Tini”

İtalyan hümanizminin ilk çağı, on dördüncü yüzyıl, bir buluş ve esin dönemi idi. Devim gelişmeye başladıktan sonra, Petrarch (ö. 1374) tarafından dramatik bir biçimde ileriye götürüldü. Petrarch Cicero’nun iki konuşmasını ve Atticus’a Mektuplar’ ını buldu ve öteki yitik çalışmalar için manastır ve katedral kütüphanelerini arayıp tarama için çılgınca bir çabayı başlattı. Birçok klasiksel çalışma yalnızca birkaç ya da giderek tek bir eşleminin saklanmış olması, hemen hemen hiç kimse tarafından okunmamış olmaları ve kültürel akışın içinde olmamaları anlamında “yitik” idi. Petrarch boş yere ona Yunanca öğretebilecek birini bulmaya çalıştı, ama bir öğretmen bulduğu zaman da dili iyice öğrenecek denli dayanç gösteremedi. Bununla birlikte, yanında Homeros’un bir kitabını tıpkı herhangi birinin bir aziz kalıntısını taşıyabileceği gibi taşımayı sürdürdü. Petrarch’ın antikçağ uygarlığı için coşkusu sınırsız idi. “Beni ilgilendiren konular arasında özellikle antikçağ üzerinde uğraştım, çünkü bizim kendi çağımız her zaman beni itmiştir, öyle ki, benim için değerli olanların sevgisi olmasaydı, bizim kendi dönemimizde olmaktan çok başka bir dönemde doğmuş olmayı yeğlerdim.”13 Daha sonra başka birçoklarının yaptığı gibi, ortaçağ tini ile bölümsel bir kopuş için antikçağda üzerine dayanacağı büyük bir yetke buldu. Latin yazınında insan yaşamındaki iyi şeyler için doğal ve toptan bir haz, dengeli bir dünyasal bilgelik ve altın orta noktanın tinini görüyordu. Düzyazıda Cicero’ya ve şiirde Virgil’e öykündü, ve sonraki zamanların onu Latince yazıları ile, ve herşeyden önce bitirilmemiş Latince epiği Afrika ile anacağını düşündü. Petrarch kendisinin sonraki kuşakların daha çok yeğledikleri anadil düzyazılarında büyük Latin yazarlardan sözcükler, tümce yapısı yöntemleri, deyimler ve öyküler ödünç aldı ve onlara Avrupa yazınında yeni bir yaşam verdi.

Petrarch’ta klasiksel incelemelerin Avrupa’yı kasıp kavuracak bir yenidendirileştirilmesi görülebilir. Niccolò Pisano gibi, ve daha sonra Brunelleschi, Donatello, ve on beşinci yüzyıl İtalyan ressamları gibi, klasiksel kavramları yeniden-etkinleştirdi. Panofsky’nin dediği gibi: “Karolen elyazmalarındaki Jupiterler ve Perseuslar görünürde yeterince klasikseldirler, ama gene de özgür benlikler kazanmayı başaramamışlardır. Yerleşik bir bağlamın hapishanesinde tıpkı bir parça reçineye yakalanmış bir sinek gibi sınırlıdırlar. Karolenciler klasiksel kavramları kurtardılar, ama onları ancak alıntılar yoluyla kullanabildiler. Onları etkinleştirmek güçlerinin ve isteklerinin ötesinde idi. Bu etkinleştirme süreci on ikinci yüzyıl ile başladı. Ama bununla klasiksel geleneğin kişilerini ortaçağ dekorları içinde saray kadınları ve şovalyeler olarak çağdaş giysiler ile giydirme davranışı da geldi. Bunu durdurmak Mantegna, Pollaiuolo ve başka kararlı klasikçilerin çabaları ile başarıldı.”14 Aynı şey ilim ve yazın alanında da oldu. Her yerde klasiksel kavramlar alıntı konumundan alınarak bir büyüme, değişme ve çoğalma şansına kavuşturuldu. Öte yandan, her zaman anımsamak gerek ki hümanistler ilgilerinin özeğini değiştirmede ortaçağ düşüncesi ile hiçbir temel kopuş yapmadılar. On dördüncü yüzyıldan on yedinci yüzyıla dek klasiksel hümanizm temel olarak Hıristiyan, skolastik ve ortaçağlı kalmayı sürdürdü. Değişen yalnızca vurgu idi.

Petrarch

Petrarch (1304-1374) (W)

Laura strappa il cuore a Petrarca, affresco tratto da un verso del Canzoniere conservato nella Casa di Francesco Petrarca. (Laura rips Petrarch's heart, a fresco taken from a verse of the Canzoniere preserved in the House of Francesco Petrarca.)

Francesco Petrarca (Italian: [franˈtʃesko peˈtrarka]; July 20, 1304 – July 18/19, 1374), commonly anglicized as Petrarch (/ˈpiːtrɑːrk, ˈpɛ-/), was a scholar and poet of Renaissance Italy who was one of the earliest humanists. His rediscovery of Cicero’s letters is often credited with inventing the 14th-century Renaissance. Petrarch is often considered the founder of Humanism. In the 16th century, Pietro Bembo created the model for the modern Italian language based on Petrarch’s works, as well as those of Giovanni Boccaccio, and, to a lesser extent, Dante Alighieri. Petrarch would be later endorsed as a model for Italian style by the Accademia della Crusca.

Petrarch's sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyrical poetry. He is also known for being the first to develop the concept of the“Dark Ages.”

Biography

“Six Tuscan Poets,” 1544, Giorgio Vasari, (Italian (Florence), 1511-1574)

Petrarch was born in the Tuscan city of Arezzo July 20 in 1304. He was the son of Ser Petracco and his wife Eletta Canigiani. His given name was Francesco Petracco. The name was Latinized to Petrarca. Petrarch's younger brother was born in Incisa in Val d'Arno in 1307. Dante was a friend of his father.

Petrarch spent his early childhood in the village of Incisa, near Florence. He spent much of his early life at Avignon and nearby Carpentras, where his family moved to follow Pope Clement V who moved there in 1309 to begin the Avignon Papacy. He studied law at the University of Montpellier (1316-20) and Bologna (1320-23) with a lifelong friend and schoolmate called Guido Sette. Because his father was in the legal profession (a notary), he insisted that Petrarch and his brother study law also. Petrarch however, was primarily interested in writing and Latin literature and considered these seven years wasted. Additionally, he proclaimed that through legal manipulation his guardians robbed him of his small property inheritance in Florence, which only reinforced his dislike for the legal system. He protested, “I couldn’t face making a merchandise of my mind,” as he viewed the legal system as the art of selling justice.

Petrarch was a prolific letter writer and counted Boccaccio among his notable friends to whom he wrote often.

With his first large-scale work, Africa, an epic in Latin about the great Roman general Scipio Africanus, Petrarch emerged as a European celebrity. On April 8, 1341, he became the second poet laureate since antiquity and was crowned by Roman Senatori Giordano Orsini and Orso dell'Anguillara on the holy grounds of Rome's Capitol.

He traveled widely in Europe, served as an ambassador, and has been called “the first tourist” because he traveled just for pleasure, and the reason he climbed Mont Ventoux. During his travels, he collected crumbling Latin manuscripts and was a prime mover in the recovery of knowledge from writers of Rome and Greece. He encouraged and advised Leontius Pilatus's translation of Homer from a manuscript purchased by Boccaccio, although he was severely critical of the result. Petrarch had acquired a copy, which he did not entrust to Leontius, but he knew no Greek; Homer, Petrarch said, "was dumb to him, while he was deaf to Homer". In 1345 he personally discovered a collection of Cicero’s letters not previously known to have existed, the collection Epistulae ad Atticum, in the Chapter Library (Biblioteca Capitolare) of Verona Cathedral.

Disdaining what he believed to be the ignorance of the centuries preceding the era in which he lived, Petrarch is credited or charged with creating the concept of a historical "Dark Ages".

“Six Tuscan Poets,” 1544, Giorgio Vasari, (Italian (Florence), 1511-1574).

Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) (W)

Giovanni Boccaccio (16 June 1313 – 21 December 1375) was an Italian writer, poet, correspondent of Petrarch, and an important Renaissance humanist. Boccaccio wrote a number of notable works, including The Decameron and On Famous Women. He wrote his imaginative literature mostly in the Italian vernacular, as well as other works in Latin, and is particularly noted for his realistic dialogue which differed from that of his contemporaries, medieval writers who usually followed formulaic models for character and plot.

Biography

The details of Boccaccio's birth are uncertain. He was born in Florence or in a village near Certaldo where his family was from. He was the son of Florentine merchant Boccaccino di Chellino and an unknown woman; he was likely born out of wedlock. Boccaccio's stepmother was called Margherita de' Mardoli.

Boccaccio grew up in Florence. His father worked for the Compagnia dei Bardi and, in the 1320s, married Margherita dei Mardoli, who was of a well-to-do family. Boccaccio may have been tutored by Giovanni Mazzuoli and received from him an early introduction to the works of Dante. In 1326, his father was appointed head of a bank and moved with his family to Naples. Boccaccio was an apprentice at the bank but disliked the banking profession. He persuaded his father to let him study law at the Studium (the present-day University of Naples), where he studied canon law for the next six years. He also pursued his interest in scientific and literary studies.

His father introduced him to the Neapolitan nobility and the French-influenced court of Robert the Wise (the king of Naples) in the 1330s. At this time, he fell in love with a married daughter of the king, who is portrayed as "Fiammetta" in many of Boccaccio's prose romances, including Il Filocolo (1338). Boccaccio became a friend of fellow Florentine Niccolò Acciaioli, and benefited from his influence as the administrator, and perhaps the lover, of Catherine of Valois-Courtenay, widow of Philip I of Taranto. Acciaioli later became counselor to Queen Joanna I of Naples and, eventually, her Grand Seneschal.

It seems that Boccaccio enjoyed law no more than banking, but his studies allowed him the opportunity to study widely and make good contacts with fellow scholars. His early influences included Paolo da Perugia (a curator and author of a collection of myths called the Collectiones), humanists Barbato da Sulmona and Giovanni Barrili, and theologian Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro.

Alphabetical listing of selected works

Amorosa visione (1342)
Buccolicum carmen (1367–1369)
Caccia di Diana (1334–1337)
Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine (Ninfale d'Ameto, 1341–1342)
Corbaccio (around 1365, this date is disputed)
De Canaria (within 1341–1345)
De Casibus Virorum Illustrium (c. 1360). Facsimile of 1620 Paris ed., 1962, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, ISBN 978-0-8201-1005-9.
De mulieribus claris (1361, revised up to 1375)
The Decameron (1349–52, revised 1370–1371)
Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (1343–1344)
Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante (1373–1374)
Filocolo (1336–1339)
Filostrato (1335 or 1340)
Genealogia deorum gentilium libri (1360, revised up to 1374)
Ninfale fiesolano (within 1344–46, this date is disputed)
Rime (finished 1374)
Teseida delle nozze di Emilia (before 1341)
Trattatello in laude di Dante (1357, title revised to De origine vita studiis et moribus viri clarissimi Dantis Aligerii florentini poetae illustris et de operibus compositis ab eodem)
Zibaldone Magliabechiano (within 1351–1356)

🛑 KARAKTERİSTİKLER

Dante bir Katolik idi.
21’inci yüzyılda dünyada 1 Milyarın üzerinde Katolik vardır.
Başlıca Katolik boşinançları alegorikleştiren Dante “Kutsal Roma İmparatorluğu”nun aklayıcısı idi ve Haçlı Seferlerine yüreğinde katıldı.
Bir ortaçağlı olan Dante Avrupa’nın modernleşmesine hiçbir katkıda bulunmasa da, belli bir sanatçı kesimi Dante’yi modernleştirdi ve bu tutum yaygınlaştı.
Monkey see, monkey do.
Dante’de sanat henüz güzel sanat değildir, groteskin alanı içerisinde kalır. Bu düzeye dek içerikte estetik bir değerden yoksundur ve klasik ile karşıtlık içinde bir boşinanç kültürüne aittir.
Dante her insan gibi doğal olarak moral yargılarda bulundu. Bu onu ‘ahlak felsefecisi’ yapmadı. Yalnızca grotesk-alegorik moral yargılarda bulunan bir sanatçı yaptı.
Dante erken Orta Çağlarda linguistik bir orman olan İtalya’da vulgar Florentin lehçesinin şiirsel anlatıma yetenekli olduğunu ve İtalyanca’nın Latince’den daha az saygın olmayabileceğini gösterdi.
Ama doğmakta olan müzikal İtalyanca’ya karşın,
Provençal* Güney Fransa’da bir azınlık tarafından konuşulan bir lehçe.

ve eski Fransızca Marco Polo ve başka birçokları tarafından yeğlendi, ve felsefe, bilim ve yasanın dili kozmopolitan Latince olarak kaldı. (L)
Dante’nin imgelemi düşüncesinden daha güçlü idi ve onunla aynı ruhu paylaşan birçok sanatçıyı klasiğe ya da romantizme doğru değil,
grotesk bir düşlemciliğe
doğru esinlendirdi.

Dante moral olarak Katolik Kilisesine bağlı kaldı; politik olarak iyi bir imparatorluk dileğinde bulundu; ve bu ilkeler onu
“Katolik bir imparatorluk” “The Paradiso is not monotonous. It is as various as any poem. And take the Comedy as a whole, you can compare it to nothing but the entire dramatic work of Shakespeare. The comparison of the Vita Nuova with the Sonnets is another, and interesting, occupation. Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.” — T.S. Eliot.

formülüne götürdü.
Popüler bir anlatım ile, Dante’nin insanı düşünmeye “zorladığı” söylenir. Zorlanan değil, ama özgür olan insan düşünebilir ve onun böyle bir yetkeye gereksinimi yoktur.
Dante papanın ve rahiplerin tinsel yetkesini doğrular.
Dante’nin tutumu ile karşıtlık içinde, inanç saltık olarak içsel bir konudur ve bir yetke tarafından dışarıdan dayatılması olanaklı değildir.
Kurumsal Kiliseyi insan ve Tanrı arasındaki zorunlu aracı olarak kabul etmede Dante din kavramının bütünüyle uzağına düşer.

La Divina Commedia Orta Çağların en büyük şiiri olarak kabul edilir (yapıtın 100 kadar modern İngilizce çevirisi vardır).

De Monarchia (LINK)

İtalya 13’üncü yüzyıl.

İtalya Krallığı ve “Kutsal Roma İmparatorluğu” The Kingdom of Italy and the Holy Roman Empire

İtalya 1300.

951’de İtalya ve Almanya tahtları birleşti. Yeni ülkenin egemeni I. Otto Charlemagne’ın imparatorluğunu birleştirdiğini ileri sürdü ve 962’de Kutsal Roma İmparatoru sanını aldı. Papalık ancak 999'da sonlanacak olan bir yozlaşma dönemine girdi. Bu arada Makedon Hanedanı altında yeniden güçlenen gerçek Roma İmparatorluğunun güney İtalya’da egemen olduğu topraklar önemli ölçüde genişledi. Öte yandan, 902’de Sicilya bütünüyle Arap denetimi altına alındı.

Yüksek Orta Çağlar (10-13’üncü Yüzyıllar)

11’inci yüzyılda Orta Çağların en karanlık döneminin sona erdi. Tecim özellikle denizlerde olmak üzere yavaş yavaş toparlandı. Papalık yeniden yetkesini kazanarak hem dinsel hem de dünyasal sorunlarda Almanlar ile uzun sürecek bir savaşıma girişti. 12’nci yüzyılda Kutsal Roma İmparatorluğu denetiminde olan İtalyan kentleri Almanları İtalya’dan atmayı umut eden gerçek Roma İmparatorluğunun desteği ile özerkliklerini kazandılar.

11’inci yüzyılda Normanlar Güney İtalya’da Lombardların ve Roma İmparatorluğunun topraklarını ele geçirdiler. Aynı yüzyılda Normanlar Sicilya’daki Arap egemenliğine de son verdiler. 1158’de Roma İmparatorluğu İtalya’yı terk etti.

1194’te Kutsal Roma İmparatorluğu Sicilya Krallığını yendi.

🛑 Dante Alighieri, De Monarchia

De Monarchia (1312-13) Kutsal Roma İmparatorluğu ve Papalık arasındaki ilişkiyi ele alır.
Hem tekerk hem de papa güç ve yetkelerini doğrudan Tanrıdan türetir.
Dante’nin düşüncesine göre papa insanın öte-dünyasal yaşamının egemeni olmalı, ve tekerk insanın dünyasal egemeni olmalıdır.

	BOOK I, CHAPTER VII: The relation of kingdoms and nations to the monarch should be that of humanity to God.
	CHAPTER IV: Because the Roman Empire was aided by miracles it was willed of God

🛑 FREDERICK ARTZ — Dante Üzerine / “Orta Çağların Tini”

s. 252-253:

“Aynı zamanda, papalığın istemleri bir dizi bakış açısından sert saldırılara uğradı. Dante De Monarchia’da (1313) imparatorun bağımsızlığından yana eski uslamlamaları yeniden-diriltti. Çalışma yeni çok az şey kapsar ve, ortaçağ politik kuramlarının çoğu gibi, edimsel koşullara çok az ilgisi vardır; hiç kuşkusuz savunduğu ortaçağ imparatorluğu onu savunanların imgelemleri dışında hiçbir yerde varolmuş değildir. Dante bir dizi olanaksız kuramı eşit ölçüde olanaksız bir başka dizinin karşısına koyar. Eski Roma modeli üzerine birleşik ve evrensel bir tekerkliğin insan gönencinin gelişimi için zorunlu temel olduğunu gösteren uslamlamalar ile başlar. Bu evrensel tekerkliğin içerisinde çeşitli tüze ve töre dizgelerinin varolmasına izin verilir, ama dünyaya uyum, barış ve düzen getirmek için son başvuru konumu ancak tekerkin dünyasında bulunabilir. Dante’nin uslamlaması burada kendi zamanının İtalyan iç politikasındaki anarşi tarafından etkilenir. Dante bundan sonra, Roma tarih ve tüzesinden yararlanarak, Roma halkının dünyayı yönetme hakkını Tanrının istenci yoluyla kazandığını gösterir. Roma halkının “Tanrının yargısı yoluyla utku kazandığını” tanıtlamak için çok sayıda ve çok zayıf uslamlamayı biraraya sıralayarak Kutsal Roma İmparatorluğunun eski Roma İmparatorluğunun doğrudan ardılı olduğunu göstermeye geçer. Çalışmanın üçüncü bölümü Kutsal Roma İmparatorluğunun erkini yalnızca Tanrıdan aldığını tanıtlamaya, ve imparatorun haklarını papadan türettiğini savunacak olanları acı sözler ile püskürtmeye çalışır. Bryce Dante’nin incelemesinden peygamberce bir bildirim olmaktan çok bir yazıt olarak söz eder, ama çalışma imparatorlukçu gelenek için yazılan savunmalar arasında en iyi bilineni olduğu için ilginçtir. “Civitas dei [Tanrının kenti] kavramını yaşama geçiren evrensel bir imparatorluk idealinde,” der Figgis, “skolastik uslamlamasında, Roma için saygısında, De Monarchia bir sonsözdür, yeryüzünde Tanrının Krallığı anlayışının en son ve en soylu anlatımıdır — bir anlatım ki Orta Çağlara bir romans havası vermiş ve pislik içindeki bir yabanıllığı insan sorunlarının özünde yatan değerleri sezmesiyle küçümsenmekten kurtarmıştır.”12

🎨 Dante, Virgil, and demons

Dante and Virgil beset by demons, passing through Hell (illustration by Gustave Doré for an 1861 edition of Dante’s Inferno; The Divine Comedy)

Dante / ITALIAN POET (B)

Dante / ITALIAN POET (1265-1321) (B)

Dante.

Dante, in full Dante Alighieri, (born c. May 21-June 20, 1265, Florence, Italy—died September 13/14, 1321, Ravenna), Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia (The Divine Comedy).

Dante’s Divine Comedy, a landmark in Italian literature and among the greatest works of all medieval European literature, is a profound Christian vision of humankind’s temporal and eternal destiny. On its most personal level, it draws on Dante’s own experience of exile from his native city of Florence. On its most comprehensive level, it may be read as an allegory, taking the form of a journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise. The poem amazes by its array of learning, its penetrating and comprehensive analysis of contemporary problems, and its inventiveness of language and imagery. By choosing to write his poem in the Italian vernacular rather than in Latin, Dante decisively influenced the course of literary development. (He primarily used the Tuscan dialect, which would become standard literary Italian, but his vivid vocabulary ranged widely over many dialects and languages.) Not only did he lend a voice to the emerging lay culture of his own country, but Italian became the literary language in western Europe for several centuries.

In addition to poetry Dante wrote important theoretical works ranging from discussions of rhetoric to moral philosophy and political thought. He was fully conversant with the classical tradition, drawing for his own purposes on such writers as Virgil, Cicero, and Boethius. But, most unusual for a layman, he also had an impressive command of the most recent scholastic philosophy and of theology. His learning and his personal involvement in the heated political controversies of his age led him to the composition of De monarchia, one of the major tracts of medieval political philosophy.

Early Life And The Vita Nuova — Dante’s Intellectual Development And Public Career — Exile, The Convivio, And The De Monarchia — The Divine Comedy — Legacy And Influence

Early Life And The Vita Nuova — Dante’s Intellectual Development And Public Career — Exile, The Convivio, And The De Monarchia — The Divine Comedy — Legacy And Influence

Early Life And The Vita Nuova

Most of what is known about Dante’s life he has told himself. He was born in Florence in 1265 under the sign of Gemini (between May 21 and June 20) and remained devoted to his native city all his life. Dante describes how he fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines, a banished Florentine party supporting the imperial cause. He also speaks of his great teacher Brunetto Latini and his gifted friend Guido Cavalcanti, of the poetic culture in which he made his first artistic ventures, his poetic indebtedness to Guido Guinizelli, the origins of his family in his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, whom the reader meets in the central cantos of the Paradiso (and from whose wife the family name, Alighieri, derived), and, going back even further, of the pride that he felt in the fact that his distant ancestors were descendants of the Roman soldiers who settled along the banks of the Arno.

Yet Dante has little to say about his more immediate family. There is no mention of his father or mother, brother or sister in The Divine Comedy. A sister is possibly referred to in the Vita nuova, and his father is the subject of insulting sonnets exchanged in jest between Dante and his friend Forese Donati. Because Dante was born in 1265 and the exiled Guelfs, to whose party Dante’s family adhered, did not return until 1266, Dante’s father apparently was not a figure considerable enough to warrant exile. Dante’s mother died when he was young, certainly before he was 14. Her name was Bella, but of which family is unknown. Dante’s father then married Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi and they produced a son, Francesco, and a daughter, Gaetana. Dante’s father died prior to 1283, since at that time Dante, having come into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father. The elder Alighieri left his children a modest yet comfortable patrimony of property in Florence and in the country. About this time Dante married Gemma Donati, to whom he had been betrothed since 1277.

Dante’s life was shaped by the long history of conflict between the imperial and papal partisans called, respectively, Ghibellines and Guelfs. Following the middle of the 13th century the antagonisms were brutal and deadly, with each side alternately gaining the upper hand and inflicting gruesome penalties and exile upon the other. In 1260 the Guelfs, after a period of ascendancy, were defeated in the Battle of Montaperti (Inferno X, XXXII), but in 1266 a force of Guelfs, supported by papal and French armies, was able to defeat the Ghibellines at Benevento, expelling them forever from Florence. This meant that Dante grew up in a city brimming with postwar pride and expansionism, eager to extend its political control throughout Tuscany. Florentines compared themselves with Rome and the civilization of the ancient city-states.

Not only did Florence extend its political power, but it was ready to exercise intellectual dominance as well. The leading figure in Florence’s intellectual ascendancy was a returning exile, Brunetto Latini. When in the Inferno Dante describes his encounter with his great teacher, this is not to be regarded as simply a meeting of one pupil with his master but rather as an encounter of an entire generation with its intellectual mentor. Latini had awakened a new public consciousness in the prominent figures of a younger generation, including Guido Cavalcanti, Forese Donati, and Dante himself, encouraging them to put their knowledge and skill as writers to the service of their city or country. Dante readily accepted the Aristotelian assumption that man is a social (political) being. Even in the Paradiso (VIII.117) Dante allows as being beyond any possible dispute the notion that things would be far worse for man were he not a member of a city-state.

A contemporary historian, Giovanni Villani, characterized Latini as the “initiator and master in refining the Florentines and in teaching them how to speak well, and how to guide our republic according to political philosophy [la politica].” Despite the fact that Latini’s most important book, Li Livres dou Trésor (1262–66; The Tresor), was written in French (Latini had passed his years of exile in France), its culture is Dante’s culture; it is a repository of classical citation. The first part of Book II contains one of the early translations in a modern European vernacular of Aristotle’s Ethics. On almost every question or topic of philosophy, ethics, and politics Latini freely quotes from Cicero and Seneca. And, almost as frequently, when treating questions of government, he quotes from the Book of Proverbs, as Dante was to do. The Bible as well as the writings of Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca, as represented in Latini’s work, were the mainstays of Dante’s early culture.

Of these Rome presents the most inspiring source of identification. The cult of Cicero began to develop alongside that of Aristotle; Cicero was perceived as not only preaching but as fully exemplifying the intellectual as citizen. A second Roman element in Latini’s legacy to become an important part of Dante’s culture was the love of glory, the quest for fame through a wholehearted devotion to excelling. For this reason, in the Inferno (XV) Latini is praised for instructing Dante in the means by which man makes himself immortal, and in his farewell words Latini commits to Dante’s care his Tresor, through which he trusts his memory will survive.

Dante was endowed with remarkable intellectual and aesthetic self-confidence. By the time he was 18, as he himself says in the Vita nuova, he had already taught himself the art of making verse (chapter III). He sent an early sonnet, which was to become the first poem in the Vita nuova, to the most famous poets of his day. He received several responses, but the most important one came from Cavalcanti, and this was the beginning of their great friendship.

As in all meetings of great minds the relationship between Dante and Cavalcanti was a complicated one. In chapter XXX of the Vita nuova Dante states that it was through Cavalcanti’s exhortations that he wrote his first book in Italian rather than in Latin. Later, in the Convivio, written in Italian, and in De vulgari eloquentia, written in Latin, Dante was to make one of the first great Renaissance defenses of the vernacular. His later thinking on these matters grew out of his discussions with Cavalcanti, who prevailed upon him to write only in the vernacular. Because of this intellectual indebtedness, Dante dedicated his Vita nuova to Cavalcanti—to his best friend (primo amico).

Later, however, when Dante became one of the priors of Florence, he was obliged to concur with the decision to exile Cavalcanti, who contracted malaria during the banishment and died in August 1300. In the Inferno (X) Dante composed a monument to his great friend, and it is as heartrending a tribute as his memorial to Latini. In both cases Dante records his indebtedness, his fondness, and his appreciation of their great merits, but in each he is equally obliged to record the facts of separation. In order to save himself, he must find (or has found) other, more powerful aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual sponsorship than that offered by his old friends and teachers.

One of these spiritual guides, for whom Cavalcanti evidently did not have the same appreciation, was Beatrice, a figure in whom Dante created one of the most celebrated fictionalized women in all of literature. In keeping with the changing directions of Dante’s thought and the vicissitudes of his career, she, too, underwent enormous changes in his hands — sanctified in the Vita nuova, demoted in the canzoni (poems) presented in the Convivio, only to be returned with more profound comprehension in The Divine Comedy as the woman credited with having led Dante away from the “vulgar herd.”

La vita nuova (c. 1293; The New Life) is the first of two collections of verse that Dante made in his lifetime, the other being the Convivio. Each is a prosimetrum — that is, a work composed of verse and prose. In each case the prose is a device for binding together poems composed over about a 10-year period. The Vita nuova brought together Dante’s poetic efforts from before 1283 to roughly 1292-93; the Convivio, a bulkier and more ambitious work, contains Dante’s most important poetic compositions from just prior to 1294 to the time of The Divine Comedy.

Raffaello Sorbi, “Dante incontra Beatrice” (LINK)

🔎

The Vita nuova, which Dante called his libello, or small book, is a remarkable work. It contains 42 brief chapters with commentaries on 25 sonnets, one ballata, and four canzoni; a fifth canzone is left dramatically interrupted by Beatrice’s death. The prose commentary provides the frame story, which does not emerge from the poems themselves (it is, of course, conceivable that some were actually written for other occasions than those alleged). The story is simple enough, telling of Dante’s first sight of Beatrice when both are nine years of age, her salutation when they are 18, Dante’s expedients to conceal his love for her, the crisis experienced when Beatrice withholds her greeting, Dante’s anguish that she is making light of him, his determination to rise above anguish and sing only of his lady’s virtues, anticipations of her death (that of a young friend, the death of her father, and Dante’s own premonitory dream), and finally the death of Beatrice, Dante’s mourning, the temptation of the sympathetic donna gentile (a young woman who temporarily replaces Beatrice), Beatrice’s final triumph and apotheosis, and, in the last chapter, Dante’s determination to write at some later time about her “that which has never been written of any woman.”

Yet with all of this apparently autobiographical purpose the Vita nuova is strangely impersonal. The circumstances it sets down are markedly devoid of any historical facts or descriptive detail (thus making it pointless to engage in too much debate as to the exact historical identity of Beatrice). The language of the commentary also adheres to a high level of generality. Names are rarely used — Cavalcanti is referred to three times as Dante’s “best friend”; Dante’s sister is referred to as “she who was joined to me by the closest proximity of blood.” On the one hand Dante suggests the most significant stages of emotional experience, but on the other he seems to distance his descriptions from strong emotional reactions. The larger structure in which Dante arranged poems written over a 10-year period and the generality of his poetic language are indications of his early and abidingambition to go beyond the practices of local poets.

Dante’s Intellectual Development And Public Career

Profile portrait in tempera by Sandro Botticelli, 1495.

A second contemporary poetic figure behind Dante was Guido Guinizelli, the poet most responsible for altering the prevailing local, or “municipal,” kind of poetry. Guinizelli’s verse provided what Cavalcanti and Dante were looking for—a remarkable sense of joy contained in a refined and lucid aesthetic. What increased the appeal of his poetry was its intellectual, even philosophical, content. His poems were written in praise of the lady and of gentilezza, the virtue that she brought out in her admirer. The conception of love that he extolled was part of a refined and noble sense of life. It was Guinizelli’s influence that was responsible for the poetic and spiritual turning point of the Vita nuova. As reported in chapters XVII to XXI, Dante experienced a change of heart, and rather than write poems of anguish, he determined to write poems in praise of his lady, especially the canzone “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” (“Ladies Who Have Understanding of Love”). This canzone is followed immediately by the sonnet “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa” (“ Love and the Noble Heart Are the Same Thing”), the first line of which is clearly an adaptation of Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore” (“In Every Noble Heart Love Finds Its Home”). This was the beginning of Dante’s association with a new poetic style, the dolce stil nuovo (“the sweet new style”), the significance of which — the simple means by which it transcended the narrow range of the more regional poetry—he dramatically explains in the Purgatorio (XXIV).

This interest in philosophical poetry led Dante into another great change in his life, which he describes in the Convivio. Looking for consolation following the death of Beatrice, Dante reports that he turned to philosophy, particularly to the writings of Boethius and Cicero. But what was intended as a temporary reprieve from sorrow became a lifelong avocation and one of the most crucial intellectual events in Dante’s career. The donna gentile of the Vita nuova was transformed into Lady Philosophy, who soon occupied all of Dante’s thoughts. He began attending the religious schools of Florence in order to hear disputations on philosophy, and within a period of only 30 months “the love of her [philosophy] banished and destroyed every other thought.” In his poem “Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete” (“ You Who Through Intelligence Move the Third Sphere”) he dramatizes this conversion from the sweet old style, associated with Beatrice and the Vita nuova, to the rigorous, even severe, new style associated with philosophy. This period of study gave expression to a series of canzoni that were eventually to form the poetic basis for the philosophic commentary of the Convivio.

Another great change was Dante’s more active political involvement in the affairs of the commune. In 1295 he became a member of the guild of physicians and apothecaries (to which philosophers could belong), which opened his way to public office. But he entered the public arena at a most perilous time in the city’s politics. As it had been during the time of the Guelf and Ghibelline civil strife, in the 1290s Florence once again became a divided city. The ruling Guelf class of Florence became divided into a party of “ Blacks,” led by Corso Donati, and a party of “ Whites,” to which Dante belonged. The Whites gained the upper hand and exiled the Blacks.

There is ample information concerning Dante’s activities following 1295. In May 1300 he was part of an important embassy to San Gimignano, a neighbouring town, whose purpose it was to solidify the Guelf league of Tuscan cities against the mounting ambitions of the new and embattled pope Boniface VIII. When Dante was elected to the priorate in 1300, he presumably was already recognized as a spokesman for those in the commune determined to resist Boniface’s policies. Dante thus experienced a complete turnabout in his attitudes concerning the extent of papal power. The hegemony of the Guelfs — the party supporting the pope — had been restored in Florence in 1266 by an alliance forged between the forces of France and the papacy. By 1300, however, Dante had come to oppose Boniface’s territorial ambitions, and this in turn provided the intellectual motivation for another, even greater change: Dante, the Guelf moderate, would in time, through his firsthand experience of the ill effects of papal involvement in political matters, become in the Convivio, in the later polemical work the Monarchia, and most importantly throughout The Divine Comedy, one of the most fervently outspoken defenders of the position that the empire does not derive its political authority from the pope.

Events, moreover, propelled Dante into further opposition to papal policies. A new alliance was formed between the papacy, the French (the brother of King Philip IV, Charles of Valois, was acting in concert with Boniface), and the exiled Black Guelfs. When Charles of Valois wished permission to enter Florence, the city itself was thrown into political indecision. In order to ascertain the nature of the pope’s intentions, an embassy was sent to Rome to discuss these matters with him. Dante was one of the emissaries, but his quandary was expressed in the legendary phrase “If I go, who remains; if I remain, who goes?” Dante was outmaneuvered. Boniface dismissed the other two legates and detained Dante. In early November 1301 the forces of Charles of Valois were permitted entry to Florence. That very night the exiled Blacks surreptitiously reentered Florence and for six days terrorized the city. Dante learned of the deception at first in Rome and then more fully in Siena. In January 1302 he was called to appear before the new Florentine government and, failing to do so, was condemned, along with three other former priors, for crimes he had not committed. Again failing to appear, on March 10, 1302, Dante and 14 other Whites were condemned to be burned to death.

Thus Dante suffered the most decisive crisis of his life. In The Divine Comedy he frequently and powerfully speaks of this rupture; indeed, he makes it the central dramatic act toward which a long string of prophecies points. But it is also Dante’s purpose to show the means by which he triumphed over his personal disaster, thus making his poem into a true “divine comedy.”

Exile, The Convivio, And The De Monarchia

Information about Dante’s early years in exile is scanty; nevertheless, enough is known to provide a broad picture. It seems that Dante at first was active among the exiled White Guelfs in their attempts to seek a military return. These efforts proved fruitless. Evidently Dante grew disillusioned with the other Florentine outcasts, the Ghibellines, and was determined to prove his worthiness by means of his writings and thus secure his return. These are the circumstances that led him to compose Il convivio (c. 1304-07; The Banquet).

Dante projected a work of 15 books, 14 of which would be commentaries on different canzoni. He completed only four of the books. The finished commentaries in many ways go beyond the scope of the poems, becoming a compendium of instruction (though they also show his lack of formal training in philosophy). Dante’s intention in the Convivio, as in The Divine Comedy, was to place the challenging moral and political issues of his day into a suitable ethical and metaphysical framework.

Book I of the Convivio is in large part a stirring and systematic defense of the vernacular. (The unfinished De vulgari eloquentia [c. 1304-07; Concerning Vernacular Eloquence], a companion piece, presumably written in coordination with Book I, is primarily a practical treatise in the art of poetry based upon an elevated poetic language.) Dante became the great advocate of its use, and in the final sentence of Book I he accurately predicts its glorious future:

“This shall be the new light, the new sun, which shall rise when the worn-out one shall set, and shall give light to them who are in shadow and in darkness because of the old sun, which does not enlighten them.”

Ary Scheffer — “Dante and Beatrice.”

The revolution Dante described was nothing less than the twilight of the predominantly clerical Latin culture and the emergence of a lay, vernacular urban literacy. Dante saw himself as the philosopher-mediator between the two, helping to educate a newly enfranchised public readership. The Italian literature that Dante heralded was soon to become the leading literature and Italian the leading literary language of Europe, and they would continue to be that for more than three centuries.

In the Convivio Dante’s mature political and philosophical system is nearly complete. In this work Dante makes his first stirring defense of the imperial tradition and, more specifically, of the Roman Empire. He introduces the crucial concept of horme — that is, of an innate desire that prompts the soul to return to God. But it requires proper education through examples and doctrine. Otherwise it can become misdirected toward worldly aims and society torn apart by its destructive power. In the Convivio Dante establishes the link between his political thought and his understanding of human appetite: given the pope’s craving for worldly power, at the time there existed no proper spiritual models to direct the appetite toward God; and given the weakness of the empire, there existed no law sufficient to exercise a physical restraint on the will. For Dante this explains the chaos into which Italy had been plunged, and it moved him, in hopes of remedying these conditions, to take up the epic task of The Divine Comedy.

But a political event occurred that at first raised tremendous hope but then plunged Dante into still greater disillusionment. In November 1308 Henry, the count of Luxembourg, was elected king of Germany, and in July 1309 the French pope, Clement V, who had succeeded Boniface, declared Henry to be king of the Romans and invited him to Rome, where in time he would be crowned Holy Roman emperor in St. Peter’s Basilica. The possibility of once again having an emperor electrified Italy; and among the imperial proponents was Dante, who saw approaching the realization of an ideal that he had long held: the coming of an emperor pledged to restore peace while also declaring his spiritual subordination to religious authority. Within a short time after his arrival in Italy in 1310 Henry VII’s great appeal began to fade. He lingered too long in the north, allowing his enemies to gather strength. Foremost among the opposition to this divinely ordained moment, as Dante regarded it, was the commune of Florence.

During these years Dante wrote important political epistles — evidence of the great esteem in which he was held throughout Italy, of his personal authority, as it were — in which he exalted Henry, urging him to be diligent, and condemned Florence. In subsequent action, however, which was to remind Dante of Boniface’s duplicity, Clement himself turned against Henry. This action prompted one of Dante’s greatest polemical treatises, his De monarchia (c. 1313; On Monarchy), in which he expands the political arguments of the Convivio. In the embittered atmosphere caused by Clement’s deceit, Dante turned his argumentative powers against papal insistence on its superiority over the political ruler — that is, against the argument that the empire derived its political authority from the pope. In the final passages of the Monarchia, Dante writes that the ends designed by Providence for humanity are twofold: one end is the bliss of this life, which is conveyed in the figure of the earthly paradise, and the other is the bliss of eternal life, which is embodied in the image of a heavenly paradise.

Yet despite their different ends, these two purposes are not unconnected. Dante concludes his Monarchia by assuring his reader that he does not mean to imply “that the Roman government is in no way subject to the Roman pontificate, for in some ways our mortal happiness is ordered for the sake of immortal happiness.” Dante’s problem was that he had to express in theoretical language a subtle relationship that might be better conveyed by metaphoric language and historical example. Surveying the history of the relationship between papacy and empire, Dante pointed with approval to specific historical examples, such as Constantine’s good will toward the church. Dante’s disappointment in the failed mission of Henry VII derived from the fact that Henry’s original sponsor was apparently Pope Clement and that conditions seemed to be ideal for reestablishing the right relationship between the supreme powers.

The Divine Comedy

Dante and Virgil beset by demons, passing through Hell, illustration by Gustave Doré for an 1861 edition of Dante's Inferno (The Divine Comedy).

Dante’s years of exile were years of difficult peregrinations from one place to another — as he himself repeatedly says, most effectively in Paradiso [XVII], in Cacciaguida’s moving lamentation that “bitter is the taste of another man’s bread and … heavy the way up and down another man’s stair.” Throughout his exile Dante nevertheless was sustained by work on his great poem. The Divine Comedy was possibly begun prior to 1308 and completed just before his death in 1321, but the exact dates are uncertain. In addition, in his final years Dante was received honourably in many noble houses in the north of Italy, most notably by Guido Novello da Polenta, the nephew of the remarkable Francesca, in Ravenna. There at his death Dante was given an honourable burial attended by the leading men of letters of the time, and the funeral oration was delivered by Guido himself.

The plot of The Divine Comedy is simple: a man, generally assumed to be Dante himself, is miraculously enabled to undertake an ultramundane journey, which leads him to visit the souls in Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. He has two guides: Virgil, who leads him through the Inferno and Purgatorio, and Beatrice, who introduces him to Paradiso. Through these fictional encounters taking place from Good Friday evening in 1300 through Easter Sunday and slightly beyond, Dante learns of the exile that is awaiting him (which had, of course, already occurred at the time of the writing). This device allowed Dante not only to create a story out of his pending exile but also to explain the means by which he came to cope with his personal calamity and to offer suggestions for the resolution of Italy’s troubles as well. Thus, the exile of an individual becomes a microcosm of the problems of a country, and it also becomes representative of the fall of humankind. Dante’s story is thus historically specific as well as paradigmatic.

The basic structural component of The Divine Comedy is the canto. The poem consists of 100 cantos, which are grouped together into three sections, or canticles, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Technically there are 33 cantos in each canticle and one additional canto, contained in the Inferno, which serves as an introduction to the entire poem. For the most part the cantos range from about 136 to about 151 lines. The poem’s rhyme scheme is the terza rima (aba, bcb, cdc, etc.). Thus, the divine number of three is present in every part of the work.

Dante’s Inferno differs from its great classical predecessors in both position and purpose. In Homer’s Odyssey (Book XII) and Virgil’s Aeneid (Book VI) the visit to the land of the dead occurs in the middle of the poem because in these centrally placed books the essential values of life are revealed. Dante, while adopting the convention, transforms the practice by beginning his journey with the visit to the land of the dead. He does this because his poem’s spiritual pattern is not classical but Christian: Dante’s journey to Hell represents the spiritual act of dying to the world, and hence it coincides with the season of Christ’s own death. (In this way, Dante’s method is similar to that of Milton in Paradise Lost, where the flamboyant but defective Lucifer and his fallen angels are presented first.) The Inferno represents a false start during which Dante, the character, must be disabused of harmful values that somehow prevent him from rising above his fallen world. Despite the regressive nature of the Inferno, Dante’s meetings with the roster of the damned are among the most memorable moments of the poem: the Neutrals, the virtuous pagans, Francesca da Rimini, Filipo Argenti, Farinata degli Uberti, Piero delle Vigne, Brunetto Latini, the simoniacal popes, Ulysses, and Ugolino della Gherardesca impose themselves upon the reader’s imagination with tremendous force.

The visit to Hell is, as Virgil and later Beatrice explain, an extreme measure, a painful but necessary act before real recovery can begin. This explains why the Inferno is both aesthetically and theologically incomplete. For instance, readers frequently express disappointment at the lack of dramatic or emotional power in the final encounter with Satan in canto XXXIV. But because the journey through the Inferno primarily signifies a process of separation and thus is only the initial step in a fuller development, it must end with a distinct anticlimax. In a way this is inevitable because the final revelation of Satan can have nothing new to offer: the sad effects of his presence in human history have already become apparent throughout the Inferno.

In the Purgatorio the protagonist’s painful process of spiritual rehabilitation commences; in fact, this part of the journey may be considered the poem’s true moral starting point. Here the pilgrim Dante subdues his own personality in order that he may ascend. In fact, in contrast to the Inferno, where Dante is confronted with a system of models that needs to be discarded, in the Purgatorio few characters present themselves as models; all of the penitents are pilgrims along the road of life. Dante, rather than being an awed if alienated observer, is an active participant. If the Inferno is a canticle of enforced and involuntary alienation, in which Dante learns how harmful were his former allegiances, in the Purgatorio he comes to accept as most fitting the essential Christian image of life as a pilgrimage. As Beatrice in her magisterial return in the earthly paradise reminds Dante, he must learn to reject the deceptive promises of the temporal world.

Raffaello Sorbi, “L’incontro di Dante e Beatrice” (LINK)

🔎

Despite its harsh regime, the Purgatorio is the realm of spiritual dawn, where larger visions are entertained. Whereas in only one canto of the Inferno (VII), in which Fortuna is discussed, is there any suggestion of philosophy, in the Purgatorio, historical, political, and moral vistas are opened up. It is, moreover, the great canticle of poetry and the arts. Dante meant it literally when he proclaimed, after the dreary dimensions of Hell: “But here let poetry rise again from the dead.” There is only one poet in Hell proper and not more than two in the Paradiso, but in the Purgatorio the reader encounters the musicians Casella and Belacqua and the poet Sordello and hears of the fortunes of the two Guidos, Guinizelli and Cavalcanti, the painters Cimabue and Giotto, and the miniaturists. In the upper reaches of Purgatory, the reader observes Dante reconstructing his classical tradition and then comes even closer to Dante’s own great native tradition (placed higher than the classical tradition) when he meets Forese Donati, hears explained—in an encounter with Bonagiunta da Lucca—the true resources of the dolce stil nuovo, and meets with Guido Guinizelli and hears how he surpassed in skill and poetic mastery the reigning regional poet, Guittone d’Arezzo. These cantos resume the line of thought presented in the Inferno (IV), where among the virtuous pagans Dante announces his own program for an epic and takes his place, “sixth among that number,” alongside the classical writers. In the Purgatorio he extends that tradition to include Statius (whose Thebaid did in fact provide the matter for the more grisly features of the lower inferno), but he also shows his more modern tradition originating in Guinizelli. Shortly after his encounter with Guinizelli comes the long-awaited reunion with Beatrice in the earthly paradise. Thus, from the classics Dante seems to have derived his moral and political understanding as well as his conception of the epic poem—that is, a framing story large enough to encompass the most important issues of his day, but it was from his native tradition that he acquired the philosophy of love that forms the Christian matter of his poem.

This means of course that Virgil, Dante’s guide, must give way to other leaders, and in a canticle generally devoid of drama the rejection of Virgil becomes the single dramatic event. Dante’s use of Virgil is one of the richest cultural appropriations in literature. To begin, in Dante’s poem he is an exponent of classical reason. He is also a historical figure and is presented as such in the Inferno (I): “…once I was a man, and my parents were Lombards, both Mantuan by birth. I was born sub Julio, though late in his time, and I lived in Rome under the good Augustus, in the time of the false and lying gods.” Virgil, moreover, is associated with Dante’s homeland (his references are to contemporary Italian places), and his background is entirely imperial. (Born under Julius Caesar, he extolled Augustus Caesar.) He is presented as a poet, the theme of whose great epic sounds remarkably similar to that of Dante’s poem: “I was a poet and sang of that just son of Anchises who came from Troy after proud Ilium was burned.” So, too, Dante sings of the just son of a city, Florence, who was unjustly expelled, and forced to search, as Aeneas had done, for a better city, in his case the heavenly city.

Virgil is a poet whom Dante had studied carefully and from whom he had acquired his poetic style, the beauty of which has brought him much honour. But Dante had lost touch with Virgil in the intervening years, and when the spirit of Virgil returns it is one that seems weak from long silence. But the Virgil that returns is more than a stylist; he is the poet of the Roman Empire, a subject of great importance to Dante, and he is a poet who has become a saggio, a sage, or moral teacher.

Though an exponent of reason, Virgil has become an emissary of divine grace, and his return is part of the revival of those simpler faiths associated with Dante’s earlier trust in Beatrice. And yet, of course, Virgil by himself is insufficient. It cannot be said that Dante rejects Virgil; rather, he sadly found that nowhere in Virgil’s work—that is, in his consciousness—was there any sense of personal liberation from the enthrallment of history and its processes. Virgil had provided Dante with moral instruction in survival as an exile, which is the theme of his own poem as well as Dante’s, but he clung to his faith in the processes of history, which, given their culmination in the Roman Empire, were deeply consoling. Dante, on the other hand, was determined to go beyond history because it had become for him a nightmare.

In the Paradiso true heroic fulfillment is achieved. Dante’s poem gives expression to those figures from the past who seem to defy death. Their historical impact continues and the totality of their commitment inspires in their followers a feeling of exaltation and a desire for identification. In his encounters with such characters as his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida and Saints Francis, Dominic, and Bernard, Dante is carried beyond himself. The Paradiso is consequently a poem of fulfillment and of completion. It is the fulfillment of what is prefigured in the earlier canticles. Aesthetically it completes the poem’s elaborate system of anticipation and retrospection.

Legacy And Influence

Dante Reading from the Divine Comedy, painting by Domenico di Michelino, 1465; in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence.

The recognition and the honour that were the due of Dante’s Divine Comedy did not have to await the long passage of time: by the year 1400 no fewer than 12 commentaries devoted to detailed expositions of its meaning had appeared. Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a life of the poet and then in 1373-74 delivered the first public lectures on The Divine Comedy (which means that Dante was the first of the moderns whose work found its place with the ancient classics in a university course). Dante became known as the divino poeta, and in a splendid edition of his great poem published in Venice in 1555 the adjective was applied to the poem’s title; thus, the simple Commedia became La divina commedia, or The Divine Comedy.

Even when the epic lost its appeal and was replaced by other art forms (the novel, primarily, and the drama) Dante’s own fame continued. In fact, his great poem enjoys the kind of power peculiar to a classic: successive epochs have been able to find reflected in it their own intellectual concerns. In the post-Napoleonic 19th century, readers identified with the powerful, sympathetic, and doomed personalities of the Inferno. In the early 20th century they found the poem to possess an aestheticpower of verbal realization independent of and at times in contradiction to its structure and argument. Later readers have been eager to show the poem to be a polyphonic masterpiece, as integrated as a mighty work of architecture, whose different sections reflect and, in a way, respond to one another. Dante created a remarkable repertoire of types in a work of vivid mimetic presentations, as well as a poem of great stylistic artistry in its prefigurations and correspondences. Moreover, he incorporated in all of this important political, philosophical, and theological themes and did so in a way that shows moral wisdom and lofty ethical vision.

Dante’s Divine Comedy is a poem that has flourished for more than 650 years. In the simple power of its striking imaginative conceptions it has continued to astonish generations of readers; for more than a hundred years it has been a staple in all higher educational programs in the Western world; and it has continued to provide guidance and nourishment to the major poets of our own times. William Butler Yeats called Dante “the chief imagination of Christendom,” and T.S. Eliot elevated Dante to a preeminence shared by only one other poet in the modern world, William Shakespeare: “[They] divide the modern world between them. There is no third.” In fact, they rival one another in their creation of types that have entered into the world of reference and association of modern thought. Like Shakespeare, Dante created universal types from historical figures, and in so doing he considerably enhanced the treasury of modern myth.

WRITTEN BY: Ricardo J. Quinones

Dante Alighieri (W)

Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321) (W)

Profile portrait in tempera by Sandro Botticelli, 1495.

Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri (Italian: [duˈrante deʎʎ aliˈɡjɛːri]; Latin: Dantes), commonly known by his name of art Dante Alighieri or simply as Dante (Italian: [ˈdante]; English: /ˈdɑːnteɪ/, UK also /ˈdænti, -teɪ/; c. 1265-1321), was an Italian poet during the Late Middle Ages. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa (modern Italian: Commedia) and later christened Divina by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered the most important poem of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language.

In the late Middle Ages, most poetry was written in Latin, making it accessible only to the most educated readers. In De vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular), however, Dante defended the use of the vernacular in literature. He would even write in the Tuscan dialect for works such as The New Life (1295) and the Divine Comedy; this highly unorthodox choice set a precedent that important later Italian writers such as Petrarch and Boccaccio would follow.

Dante was instrumental in establishing the literature of Italy, and his depictions of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven provided inspiration for the larger body of Western art. He is cited as an influence on John Milton, Geoffrey Chaucer and Alfred Tennyson, among many others. In addition, the first use of the interlocking three-line rhyme scheme, or the terza rima, is attributed to him. In Italy, he is often referred to as il Sommo Poeta ("the Supreme Poet") and il Poeta; he, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are also called "the three fountains" or "the three crowns".

Life — Education and poetry — Florence and politics — Exile and death

Life

Dante Alighieri (detail from a fresco in the Podestà Chapel in the Palazzo del Bargello) by Giotto.

Dante was born in Florence, Republic of Florence, present-day Italy. The exact date of his birth is unknown, although it is generally believed to be around 1265.
...

Giovanni Boccaccio described Dante's appearance and demeanor as follows: “the poet was of middle height, and in his later years he walked somewhat bent over, with a grave and gentle gait. He was clad always in most seemly attire, such as befitted his ripe years. His face was long, his nose aquiline, and his eyes big rather than small. His jaws were large, and his lower lip protruded. He had a brown complexion, his hair and beard were thick, black, and curly, and his countenance was always melancholy and thoughtful.”

Dante claimed that his family descended from the ancient Romans (Inferno, XV, 76), but the earliest relative he could mention by name was Cacciaguida degli Elisei (Paradiso, XV, 135), born no earlier than about 1100. Dante's father, Alighiero or Alighiero di Bellincione, was a White Guelph who suffered no reprisals after the Ghibellines won the Battle of Montaperti in the middle of the 13th century. This suggests that Alighiero or his family may have enjoyed some protective prestige and status, although some suggest that the politically inactive Alighiero was of such low standing that he was not considered worth exiling.

Dante’s family was loyal to the Guelphs, a political alliance that supported the Papacy and which was involved in complex opposition to the Ghibellines, who were backed by the Holy Roman Emperor. The poet’s mother was Bella, likely a member of the Abati family. She died when Dante was not yet ten years old, and Alighiero soon married again, to Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi. It is uncertain whether he really married her, since widowers were socially limited in such matters, but this woman definitely bore him two children, Dante's half-brother Francesco and half-sister Tana (Gaetana). When Dante was 12, he was promised in marriage to Gemma di Manetto Donati, daughter of Manetto Donati, member of the powerful Donati family. Contracting marriages at this early age was quite common and involved a formal ceremony, including contracts signed before a notary. But by this time Dante had fallen in love with another, Beatrice Portinari (known also as Bice), whom he first met when he was only nine. Years after his marriage to Gemma he claims to have met Beatrice again; he wrote several sonnets to Beatrice but never mentioned Gemma in any of his poems. The exact date of his marriage is not known: the only certain information is that, before his exile in 1301, he had three children (Pietro, Jacopo and Antonia).

Dante fought with the Guelph cavalry at the Battle of Campaldino (June 11, 1289). This victory brought about a reformation of the Florentine constitution. To take any part in public life, one had to enroll in one of the city's many commercial or artisan guilds, so Dante entered the Physicians' and Apothecaries' Guild. In the following years, his name is occasionally recorded as speaking or voting in the various councils of the republic. A substantial portion of minutes from such meetings in the years 1298-1300 was lost, however, so the true extent of Dante's participation in the city's councils is uncertain.

Gemma bore Dante several children. Although several others subsequently claimed to be his offspring, it is likely that only Jacopo, Pietro, Giovanni, and Antonia were his actual children. Antonia later became a nun, taking the name Sister Beatrice.

Education and poetry

Not much is known about Dante’s education; he presumably studied at home or in a chapter school attached to a church or monastery in Florence. It is known that he studied Tuscan poetry and that he admired the compositions of the Bolognese poet Guido Guinizelli — whom in Purgatorio XXVI he characterized as his "father" — at a time when the Sicilian school (Scuola poetica Siciliana), a cultural group from Sicily, was becoming known in Tuscany. His interests brought him to discover the Provençal poetry of the troubadours, such as Arnaut Daniel, and the Latin writers of classical antiquity, including Cicero, Ovid and especially Virgil.

Florence and politics

Dante, like most Florentines of his day, was embroiled in the Guelph-Ghibelline conflict. He fought in the Battle of Campaldino (June 11, 1289), with the Florentine Guelphs against Arezzo Ghibellines; then in 1294 he was among the escorts of Charles Martel of Anjou (grandson of Charles I of Anjou) while he was in Florence. To further his political career, he became a pharmacist. He did not intend to practice as one, but a law issued in 1295 required nobles aspiring to public office to be enrolled in one of the Corporazioni delle Arti e dei Mestieri, so Dante obtained admission to the Apothecaries' Guild. This profession was not inappropriate since at that time books were sold from apothecaries' shops. As a politician, he accomplished little but held various offices over some years in a city rife with political unrest.

After defeating the Ghibellines, the Guelphs divided into two factions: the White Guelphs (Guelfi Bianchi) — Dante's party, led by Vieri dei Cerchi — and the Black Guelphs (Guelfi Neri), led by Corso Donati. Although the split was along family lines at first, ideological differences arose based on opposing views of the papal role in Florentine affairs, with the Blacks supporting the Pope and the Whites wanting more freedom from Rome. The Whites took power first and expelled the Blacks. In response, Pope Boniface VIII planned a military occupation of Florence. In 1301, Charles of Valois, brother of King Philip IV of France, was expected to visit Florence because the Pope had appointed him peacemaker for Tuscany. But the city's government had treated the Pope's ambassadors badly a few weeks before, seeking independence from papal influence. It was believed that Charles had received other unofficial instructions, so the council sent a delegation to Rome to ascertain the Pope's intentions. Dante was one of the delegates.

Exile and death

Pope Boniface quickly dismissed the other delegates and asked Dante alone to remain in Rome. At the same time (November 1, 1301), Charles of Valois entered Florence with the Black Guelphs, who in the next six days destroyed much of the city and killed many of their enemies. A new Black Guelph government was installed, and Cante dei Gabrielli da Gubbio was appointed podestà of the city. In March 1302, Dante, a White Guelph by affiliation, along with the Gherardini family, was condemned to exile for two years and ordered to pay a large fine. Dante was accused of corruption and financial wrongdoing by the Black Guelphs for the time that Dante was serving as city prior (Florence's highest position) for two months in 1300. The poet was still in Rome in 1302 where the Pope, who had backed the Black Guelphs, had "suggested" that Dante stay. Florence under the Black Guelphs therefore considered Dante an absconder. Dante did not pay the fine, in part because he believed he was not guilty and in part because all his assets in Florence had been seized by the Black Guelphs. He was condemned to perpetual exile; if he returned to Florence without paying the fine, he could have been burned at the stake. (In June 2008, nearly seven centuries after his death, the city council of Florence passed a motion rescinding Dante's sentence.)

He took part in several attempts by the White Guelphs to regain power, but these failed due to treachery. Dante, bitter at the treatment he received from his enemies, also grew disgusted with the infighting and ineffectiveness of his erstwhile allies and vowed to become a party of one. He went to Verona as a guest of Bartolomeo I della Scala, then moved to Sarzana in Liguria. Later he is supposed to have lived in Lucca with a woman called Gentucca, who made his stay comfortable (and was later gratefully mentioned in Purgatorio, XXIV, 37). Some speculative sources claim he visited Paris between 1308 and 1310, and other sources even less trustworthy took him to Oxford: these claims, first occurring in Boccaccio's book on Dante several decades after his death, seem inspired by readers who were impressed with the poet's wide learning and erudition. Evidently, Dante's command of philosophy and his literary interests deepened in exile and when he was no longer busy with the day-to-day business of Florentine domestic politics, and this is evidenced in his prose writings in this period, but there is no real evidence that he ever left Italy. Dante's Immensa Dei dilectione testante to Henry VII of Luxembourg confirms his residence "beneath the springs of Arno, near Tuscany" in March 1311.

In 1310, Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII of Luxembourg marched into Italy at the head of 5,000 troops. Dante saw in him a new Charlemagne who would restore the office of the Holy Roman Emperor to its former glory and also retake Florence from the Black Guelphs. He wrote to Henry and several Italian princes, demanding that they destroy the Black Guelphs. Mixing religion and private concerns in his writings, he invoked the worst anger of God against his city and suggested several particular targets that were also his personal enemies. It was during this time that he wrote De Monarchia, proposing a universal monarchy under Henry VII.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Works

The Divine Comedy describes Dante’s journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso); he is first guided by the Roman poet Virgil and then by Beatrice, the subject of his love (and of another of his works, La Vita Nuova).

Of the books, Purgatorio is arguably the most lyrical of the three, referring to more contemporary poets and artists than Inferno; Paradiso is the most heavily theological, and the one in which, many scholars have argued, the Divine Comedy's most beautiful and mystic passages appear (e.g., when Dante looks into the face of God: "all'alta fantasia qui mancò possa"—"at this high moment, ability failed my capacity to describe," Paradiso, XXXIII, 142).

Dante Alighieri, attributed to Giotto, in the chapel of the Bargello palace in Florence. This oldest picture of Dante was painted just prior to his exile and has since been heavily restored.

With its seriousness of purpose, its literary stature and the range — both stylistic and thematic — of its content, the Comedy soon became a cornerstone in the evolution of Italian as an established literary language. Dante was more aware than most early Italian writers of the variety of Italian dialects and of the need to create a literature and a unified literary language beyond the limits of Latin writing at the time; in that sense, he is a forerunner of the Renaissance, with its effort to create vernacular literature in competition with earlier classical writers. Dante's in-depth knowledge (within the limits of his time) of Roman antiquity, and his evident admiration for some aspects of pagan Rome, also point forward to the 15th century. Ironically, while he was widely honored in the centuries after his death, the Comedy slipped out of fashion among men of letters: too medieval, too rough and tragic, and not stylistically refined in the respects that the high and late Renaissance came to demand of literature.

He wrote the Comedy in a language he called "Italian", in some sense an amalgamated literary language mostly based on the regional dialect of Tuscany, but with some elements of Latin and other regional dialects. He deliberately aimed to reach a readership throughout Italy including laymen, clergymen and other poets. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression. In French, Italian is sometimes nicknamed la langue de Dante. Publishing in the vernacular language marked Dante as one of the first in Roman Catholic Western Europe (among others such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio) to break free from standards of publishing in only Latin (the language of liturgy, history and scholarship in general, but often also of lyric poetry). This break set a precedent and allowed more literature to be published for a wider audience, setting the stage for greater levels of literacy in the future. However, unlike Boccaccio, Milton or Ariosto, Dante did not really become an author read all over Europe until the Romantic era. To the Romantics, Dante, like Homer and Shakespeare, was a prime example of the "original genius" who sets his own rules, creates persons of overpowering stature and depth, and goes far beyond any imitation of the patterns of earlier masters; and who, in turn, cannot truly be imitated. Throughout the 19th century, Dante's reputation grew and solidified; and by 1865, the 600th anniversary of his birth, he had become established as one of the greatest literary icons of the Western world.

New readers often wonder how such a serious work may be called a “comedy.” In the classical sense the word comedy refers to works which reflect belief in an ordered universe, in which events tend toward not only a happy or amusing ending but one influenced by a Providential will that orders all things to an ultimate good. By this meaning of the word, as Dante himself wrote in a letter to Cangrande I della Scala, the progression of the pilgrimage from Hell to Paradise is the paradigmatic expression of comedy, since the work begins with the pilgrim's moral confusion and ends with the vision of God.

Dante's other works include Convivio ("The Banquet"), a collection of his longest poems with an (unfinished) allegorical commentary; De Monarchia, a summary treatise of political philosophy in Latin which was condemned and burned after Dante's death by the Papal Legate Bertrando del Poggetto, which argues for the necessity of a universal or global monarchy in order to establish universal peace in this life, and this monarchy's relationship to the Roman Catholic Church as guide to eternal peace; De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), on vernacular literature, partly inspired by the Razos de trobar of Raimon Vidal de Bezaudun; and La Vita Nuova ("The New Life"), the story of his love for Beatrice Portinari, who also served as the ultimate symbol of salvation in the Comedy. The Vita Nuova contains many of Dante's love poems in Tuscan, which was not unprecedented; the vernacular had been regularly used for lyric works before, during all the thirteenth century. However, Dante's commentary on his own work is also in the vernacular — both in the Vita Nuova and in the Convivio — instead of the Latin that was almost universally used.

📹 A Brief History of Dante Alighieri (VİDEO)

A Brief History of Dante Alighieri (LINK)

May he forever ring throughout the ages.

Renaissance humanism

Renaissance humanism (W)

Renaissance humanism is the study of classical antiquity, at first in Italy and then spreading across Western Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The term humanism is contemporary to that period, while Renaissance humanism is a retronym used to distinguish it from later humanist developments.

Renaissance humanism was a response to the utilitarian approach and what came to be depicted as the “narrow pedantry” associated with medieval scholasticism. Humanists sought to create a citizenry able to speak and write with eloquence and clarity and thus capable of engaging in the civic life of their communities and persuading others to virtuous and prudent actions. This was to be accomplished through the study of the studia humanitatis, today known as the humanities: grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy.

According to one scholar of the movement,

“Early Italian humanism, which in many respects continued the grammatical and rhetorical traditions of the Middle Ages, not merely provided the old

Trivium The trivium is the lower division of the seven liberal arts and comprises grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

Etymologically, the Latin word trivium means “the place where three roads meet” (tri + via); hence, the subjects of the trivium are the foundation for the quadrivium, the upper division of the medieval education in the liberal arts, which comprised arithmetic (numbers as abstract concepts), geometry (numbers in space), music (numbers in time), and astronomy (numbers in space and time). Educationally, the trivium and the quadrivium imparted to the student the seven liberal arts of classical antiquity.

with a new and more ambitious name (Studia humanitatis), but also increased its actual scope, content and significance in the curriculum of the schools and universities and in its own extensive literary production. The studia humanitatis excluded logic, but they added to the traditional grammar and rhetoric not only history, Greek, and moral philosophy, but also made poetry, once a sequel of grammar and rhetoric, the most important member of the whole group.”

Humanism was a pervasive cultural mode and not the program of a small elite, a program to revive the cultural legacy, literary legacy, and moral philosophy of classical antiquity. There were important centres of humanism in Florence, Naples, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Mantua, Ferrara, and Urbino.

Italian humanism

Italian humanism (B)

The notion that ancient wisdom and eloquence lay slumbering in the Dark Ages until awakened in the Renaissance was the creation of the Renaissance itself. The idea of the revival of Classical antiquity is one of those great myths, comparable to the idea of the universal civilizing mission of imperial Rome or to the idea of progress in a modern industrial society, by which an era defines itself in history. Like all such myths, it is a blend of fact and invention. Classical thought and style permeated medieval culture in ways past counting. Most of the authors known to the Renaissance were known to the Middle Ages as well, while the Classical texts “discovered” by the humanists were often not originals but medieval copies preserved in monastic or cathedral libraries. Moreover, the Middle Ages had produced at least two earlier revivals of Classical antiquity. The so-called Carolingian Renaissance of the late 8th and 9th centuries saved many ancient works from destruction or oblivion, passing them down to posterity in its beautiful minuscule script (which influenced the humanist scripts of the Renaissance). A 12th-century Renaissance saw the revival of Roman law, Latin poetry, and Greek science, including almost the whole corpus of Aristotelian writings known today.

Growth of literacy

Nevertheless, the Classical revival of the Italian Renaissance was so different from these earlier movements in spirit and substance that the humanists might justifiably claim that it was original and unique. During most of the Middle Ages, Classical studies and virtually all intellectual activities were carried on by churchmen, usually members of the monastic orders. {!} In the Italian cities, this monopoly was partially breached by the growth of a literate laity with some taste and need for literary culture. New professions reflected the growth of both literary and specialized lay education — the dictatores,or teachers of practical rhetoric, lawyers, and the ever-present notary (a combination of solicitor and public recorder). These, and not Burckhardt’s wandering scholar-clerics, were the true predecessors of the humanists.

In Padua a kind of early humanism emerged, flourished, and declined between the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Paduan classicism was a product of the vigorous republican life of the commune, and its decline coincided with the loss of the city’s liberty. A group of Paduan jurists, lawyers, and notaries — all trained as dictatores — developed a taste for Classical literature that probably stemmed from their professional interest in Roman law and their affinity for the history of the Roman Republic. The most famous of these Paduan classicists was Albertino Mussato, a poet, historian, and playwright, as well as lawyer and politician, whose play Ecerinis, modeled on the work of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, has been called the first Renaissance tragedy. By reviving several types of ancient literary forms and by promoting the use of Classical models for poetry and rhetoric, the Paduan humanists helped make the 14th-century Italians more conscious of their Classical heritage; in other respects, however, they remained close to their medieval antecedents, showing little comprehension of the vast cultural and historical gulf that separated them from the ancients.

Language and eloquence

It was Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch, who first understood fully that antiquity was a civilization apart and, understanding it, outlined a program of Classically oriented studies that would lay bare its spirit. The focus of Petrarch’s insight was language: if Classical antiquity was to be understood in its own terms, it would be through the speech with which the ancients had communicated their thoughts. This meant that the languages of antiquity had to be studied as the ancients had used them and not as vehicles for carrying modern thoughts. Thus, grammar, which included the reading and careful imitation of ancient authors from a linguistic point of view, was the basis of Petrarch’s entire program.

From the mastery of language, one moved on to the attainment of eloquence. For Petrarch, as for Cicero, eloquence was not merely the possession of an elegant style, nor yet the power of persuasion, but the union of elegance and power together with virtue. One who studied language and rhetoric in the tradition of the great orators of antiquity did so for a moral purpose — to persuade men and women to the good life — for, said Petrarch in a dictum that could stand as the slogan of Renaissance humanism, “it is better to will the good than to know the truth.”

The humanities

To will the good, one must first know it, and so there could be no true eloquence without wisdom. According to Leonardo Bruni, a leading humanist of the next generation, Petrarch “opened the way for us to show in what manner we might acquire learning.” Petrarch’s union of rhetoric and philosophy, modeled on the Classical ideal of eloquence, provided the humanists with an intellectual dignity and a moral ethos lacking to the medieval dictatores and classicists. It also pointed the way toward a program of studies — the studia humanitatis — by which the ideal might be achieved. As elaborated by Bruni, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and others, the notion of the humanities was based on Classical models — the tradition of a liberal arts curriculum conceived by the Greeks and elaborated by Cicero and Quintilian. Medieval scholars had been fascinated by the notion that there were seven liberal arts, no more and no less, although they did not always agree as to which they were. The humanists had their own favourites, which invariably included grammar, rhetoric, poetry, moral philosophy, and history, with a nod or two toward music and mathematics. They also had their own ideas about methods of teaching and study. They insisted upon the mastery of Classical Latin and, where possible, Greek, which began to be studied again in the West in 1397, when the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras was invited to lecture in Florence. They also insisted upon the study of Classical authors at first hand, banishing the medieval textbooks and compendiums from their schools. This greatly increased the demand for Classical texts, which was first met by copying manuscript books in the newly developed humanistic scripts and then, after the mid-15th century, by the method of printing with movable type, first developed in Germany and rapidly adopted in Italy and elsewhere. Thus, while it is true that most of the ancient authors were already known in the Middle Ages, there was an all-important difference between circulating a book in many copies to a reading public and jealously guarding a single exemplar as a prized possession in some remote monastery library.

The term humanist (Italian umanista, Latin humanista) first occurs in 15th-century documents to refer to a teacher of the humanities. Humanists taught in a variety of ways. Some founded their own schools — as Vittorino da Feltre did in Mantua in 1423 and Guarino Veronese in Ferrara in 1429 — where students could study the new curriculum at both elementary and advanced levels. Some humanists taught in universities, which, while remaining strongholds of specialization in law, medicine, and theology, had begun to make a place for the new disciplines by the late 14th century. Still others were employed in private households, as was the poet and scholar Politian (Angelo Poliziano), who was tutor to the Medici children as well as a university professor.

Formal education was only one of several ways in which the humanists shaped the minds of their age. Many were themselves fine literary artists who exemplified the eloquence they were trying to foster in their students. Renaissance Latin poetry, for example, nowadays dismissed — usually unread — as imitative and formalistic, contains much graceful and lyrical expression by such humanists as Politian, Giovanni Pontano, and Jacopo Sannazzaro. In drama, Politian, Pontano, and Pietro Bembowere important innovators, and the humanists were in their element in the composition of elegant letters, dialogues, and discourses. By the late 15th century, humanists were beginning to apply their ideas about language and literature to composition in Italian as well as in Latin, demonstrating that Vulgar Latin could be as supple and as elegant in poetry and prose as was Classical Latin.

The Piano: Invented in Florence.

In the late 1600s, Tuscany - and particularly Florence - had already been for two centuries a global hub of invention, arts and culture. The Medici rulers of the Tuscan state have gone down in history as ruthless and notorious rulers, but ironically as patrons of some of the most influential thinkers in history, including Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Galileo. However, one of the lesser known inventors sponsored by the Medici family was Bartolomeo Cristofori, the musical genius who invented the piano, right at the Pitti Palace.

Cristofori was born in Padova and was already inventing unusual instruments like the upright harpsichord by the time he was spotted by Fedinando de' Medici (Grand Prince of Tuscany) during a visit to Venice. Ferdinando was an avid musician and lover of the arts, who was looking to employ a person to maintain his large collection of instruments at the Pitti Palace. Once he took on Cristofori and began to value the man's genius qualities, the Grand Prince granted him a large annex to the palace to use as an invention studio. It was here that Cristofori experimented and improved on keyboards he had previously conceptualized and eventually led to the invention of the piano in the year 1700.

The popularity of the piano wasn't an instant success, however. It wasn't until 1711 when a review of the instrument by an Italian critic was translated into German that the new invention started to be noticed in northern Europe, and instrument-makers began to improve on the original design. By the mid 1700s, the piano was perfected and began to take off in popularity when musicians like Bach and eventually Mozart composed pieces that would immortalize the instrument.

Only three original Cristofori pianos are in existence today, and can be found in Rome, Leipzeig and at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

(LINK)

Florence

Florence (W)

Florence was a centre of medieval European trade and finance and one of the wealthiest cities of that era. It is considered by main academics the birthplace of the Renaissance, and has been called "the Athens of the Middle Ages". Its turbulent political history includes periods of rule by the powerful Medici family and numerous religious and republican revolutions. From 1865 to 1871 the city served as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy (established in 1861). The Florentine dialect forms the base of Standard Italian and it became the language of culture throughout Italy due to the prestige of the masterpieces by Dante Alighieri, Petrarch, Giovanni Boccaccio, Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini.

History

Florence originated as a Roman city, and later, after a long period as a flourishing trading and banking medieval commune, it was the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, it was politically, economically, and culturally one of the most important cities in Europe and the world from the 14th to 16th centuries.

The language spoken in the city during the 14th century was, and still is, accepted as the Italian language. Almost all the writers and poets in Italian literature of the golden age are in some way connected with Florence, leading ultimately to the adoption of the Florentine dialect, above all the local dialects, as a literary language of choice.

Starting from the late Middle Ages, Florentine money — in the form of the gold florin — financed the development of industry all over Europe, from Britain to Bruges, to Lyon and Hungary. Florentine bankers financed the English kings during the Hundred Years War. They similarly financed the papacy, including the construction of their provisional capital of Avignon and, after their return to Rome, the reconstruction and Renaissance embellishment of Rome.

Florence was home to the Medici, one of European history's most important noble families. Lorenzo de’ Medici was considered a political and cultural mastermind of Italy in the late 15th century. Two members of the family were popes in the early 16th century: Leo X and Clement VII. Catherine de Medici married King Henry II of France and, after his death in 1559, reigned as regent in France. Marie de' Medici married Henry IV of France and gave birth to the future King Louis XIII. The Medici reigned as Grand Dukes of Tuscany, starting with Cosimo I de' Medici in 1569 and ending with the death of Gian Gastone de' Medici in 1737.

Roman origins

The Etruscans initially formed in 200 BC the small settlement of Fiesole (Faesulae in Latin), which was destroyed by Lucius Cornelius Sulla in 80 BC in reprisal for supporting the populares faction in Rome. The present city of Florence was established by Julius Caesar in 59 BC as a settlement for his veteran soldiers and was named originally Fluentia, owing to the fact that it was built between two rivers, which was later changed to Florentia ("flowering"). It was built in the style of an army camp with the main streets, the cardo and the decumanus, intersecting at the present Piazza della Repubblica. Situated along the Via Cassia, the main route between Rome and the north, and within the fertile valley of the Arno, the settlement quickly became an important commercial centre.

In centuries to come, the city experienced turbulent periods of Ostrogothic rule, during which the city was often troubled by warfare between the Ostrogoths and the Byzantines, which may have caused the population to fall to as few as 1,000 people. Peace returned under Lombard rule in the 6th century. Florence was conquered by Charlemagne in 774 and became part of the Duchy of Tuscany, with Lucca as capital. The population began to grow again and commerce prospered. In 854, Florence and Fiesole were united in one county.

Culture

Art
Florence was the birthplace of High Renaissance art, which lasted from 1450-1527. While Medieval art focused on basic story telling of the Bible, Renaissance art focused on naturalism and human emotion. Medieval art was abstract, formulaic, and largely produced by monks whereas Renaissance art was rational, mathematical, individualistic, consisted of linear perspective and shading (Chiaroscuro) and produced by specialists (Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael). Religion was important, but with this new age came the humanization of religious figures in art, such as Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Ecce Homo (Bosch, 1470s), and Madonna Della Seggiola; People of this age began to understand themselves as human beings, which reflected in art. The Renaissance marked the rebirth of classical values in art and society as people studied the ancient masters of the Greco-Roman world; Art became focused on realism as opposed to idealism.

🎨 Medici family members

Medici family members placed allegorically in the entourage of a king from the Three Wise Men in the Tuscan countryside in a Benozzo Gozzoli fresco, c. 1459. (W)

The House of Medici

Founder: Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici

Motto: Festina lente; ("Make haste slowly")

Final head: Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici

Final ruler: Gian Gastone de' Medici

Countries: Republic of Florence, Duchy of Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Papal States, Duchy of Urbino

Places of origin: Mugello, Tuscia (present-day Tuscany)

Together, Medicis have tens of thousands of living descendants today, including all of the Roman Catholic royal families of Europe — but they are not patrilineal Medici. Patrilineal descendants today: 0; Total descendants today: about 40,000.

Young Maria de’ Medici by da Santi di Tito

The Medici Dynasty Show celebrates the birthday of Marie de’ Medici, better known as Marie, Regent Queen of France. Exiled by her own son, and painted 24 times by the great painter, Peter Paul Rubens, who was Queen Marie de’ Medici?

The daughter of Francis de Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his wife Joanna of Austria, she was born in 1575 and married during an elaborate celebration in Florence to King Henry IV in 1600. Her groom was not actually present for the wedding, instead marrying her by proxy. She was his second wife, and though she gave him five children their marriage was difficult and unhappy, with Marie fighting constantly with Henry’s many mistresses. When her husband was assassinated in 1610, Marie became Regent Queen of France, set to rule until her son Louis XIII came of age.

(LINK)

“Nozze di Maria de’ Medici con Enrico IV” – Jacopo di Chimenti da Empoli.

Her time as Regent Queen was famously unstable, and she struggled to maintain her power and influence.She aligned herself with a favoured italian, Concino Concini, whose wife Leonora, a dear friend of Marie’s, had a scandalous reputation that did not help public perception of Marie. In the end, her own son rose up against her at only age 15 and their fight is legendary in the books of history. In 1617, Louis XIII confronted his mother, ending with both Concini dead and Marie arrested. In 1619, she escaped and it was only through the grace of Bishop Richelieu that she was reconciled with her son.

She had a vision for a great palace in Luxembourg, one that would rival the Medici owned Palazzo Pitti in Florence. Built on the banks of the Siene, Salomon de Brosse created the new palace for her, creating a vast quadrangular Palace reminiscent of the castle of Vernueil, with decorative elements that invoke Tuscan splendour throughout. It was during its completion (finished in 1623) that Marie commissioned the painter Peter Paul Rubens to depict her life in a great cycle of 24 paintings that would begin with her birth and end with her reconciliation with her son. They were completed in 1625, and are famed throughout the world.

(LINK)

House of Medici (W)

House of Medici (15th century- ...) (W)

The House of Medici was an Italian banking family and political dynasty that first began to gather prominence under Cosimo de' Medici in the Republic of Florence during the first half of the 15th century. The family originated in the Mugello region of Tuscany, and prospered gradually until it was able to fund the Medici Bank. This bank was the largest in Europe during the 15th century, and it facilitated the Medicis' rise to political power in Florence, although they officially remained citizens rather than monarchs until the 16th century.

The Medici produced four Popes of the Catholic Church —

Pope Leo X (1513-1521),
Pope Clement VII (1523-1534),
Pope Pius IV (1559-1565) and
Pope Leo XI (1605)

and two queens of France —

Catherine de’ Medici (1547-1589) and
Marie de’ Medici (1600-1630).

In 1532, the family acquired the hereditary title Duke of Florence. In 1569, the duchy was elevated to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany after territorial expansion. The Medicis ruled the Grand Duchy from its inception until 1737, with the death of Gian Gastone de' Medici. The grand duchy witnessed degrees of economic growth under the early grand dukes, but was bankrupt by the time of Cosimo III de' Medici (r. 1670-1723).

The Medicis' wealth and influence was initially derived from the textile trade guided by the wool guild of Florence, the Arte della Lana. Like other families ruling in Italian signorie, the Medicis dominated their city's government, were able to bring Florence under their family's power, and created an environment in which art and humanism flourished. They and other families of Italy inspired the Italian Renaissance, such as the Visconti and Sforza in Milan, the Este in Ferrara, the Borgia in Rome, and the Gonzaga in Mantua.

The Medici Bank, from when it was created in 1397 to its fall in 1494, was one of the most prosperous and respected institutions in Europe, and the Medici family was considered the wealthiest in Europe for a time. From this base, they acquired political power initially in Florence and later in wider Italy and Europe. They were among the earliest businesses to use the general ledger system of accounting through the development of the double-entry bookkeeping system for tracking credits and debits.

The Medici family bankrolled the invention of the piano and opera, funded the construction of Saint Peter Basilica and Santa Maria del Fiore, and patronized Leonardo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli and Galileo. They were also protagonists of the counter-reformation, from the beginning of the reformation through the Council of Trent and the French wars of religion.

Portrait of Virginia de' Medici (1568-1615)

The young woman portrayed here is Virginia de' Medici (1568-1615), daughter of Grand Duke Cosimo I of Tuscany. She is dressed in opulent clothes and sumptuous jewelry, indicating her status as a member of one of the wealthy, prominent families in Florence. Beside a pearl ensemble with a single-strand necklace of large pearls, matching earrings, and pearls woven into her hair, she wears a large collar with intricate gold segments decorated with pearls and gemstones. There are at least four versions of this portrait; one that is seemingly nearly identical in style to the Walters' portrait was on the market in 2016 and attributed to the Florentine painter Giovanni Maria Butteri (1540-1606), who worked with Alessandro Allori. Butteri's best known portrait is a group portrait dated 1574 of several members of the Medici family; the hard surfaces are very similar to those in the present painting.

CREATOR: Giovanni Maria Butteri (Italian, ca. 1540-1606 or 1608).
PERIOD ca. 1590, Renaissance.

(LINK)

Medici family (B)

Medici family, French Médicis, Italian bourgeois family that ruled Florence and, later, Tuscany, during most of the period from 1434 to 1737, except for two brief intervals (from 1494 to 1512 and from 1527 to 1530). It provided the church with four popes (Leo X, Clement VII, Pius IV, and Leon XI) and married into the royal families of Europe (most notably in France, in the persons of Queens Catherine de Médicis and Marie de Médicis).

Three lines of Medici successively approached or acquired positions of power. The line of Chiarissimo II failed to gain power in Florence in the 14th century. In the 15th century the line of Cosimo the Elder set up a hereditary principate in Florence but without legal right or title, hence subject to sudden overthrow; crowns burgeoned, however, on the last branches of their genealogical tree, for two of them were dukes outside Florence, their last heir in a direct line became queen of France (Catherine de Médicis), and their final offspring, Alessandro, was duke of Florence. In the 16th century a third line renounced republican notions and imposed its tyranny, and its members made themselves a dynasty of grand dukes of Tuscany.

Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449-1492) (B)

Lorenzo de’ Medici, by name Lorenzo the Magnificent, Italian Lorenzo il Magnifico, (born January 1, 1449, Florence [Italy] — died April 9, 1492, Careggi, near Florence), Florentine statesman, ruler, and patron of arts and letters, the most brilliant of the Medici. He ruled Florence with his younger brother, Giuliano (1453-78), from 1469 to 1478 and, after the latter’s assassination, was sole ruler from 1478 to 1492.

Sack of Rome (1527)

Sack of Rome (1527) (W)

The Sack of Rome on 6 May 1527 was a military event carried out in Rome (then part of the Papal States) by the mutinous troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. It marked a crucial imperial victory in the conflict between Charles and the League of Cognac (1526-1529) — the alliance of France, Milan, Venice, Florence and the Papacy.

The sack of Rome in 1527, by Johannes Lingelbach, 17th century.

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) (W)

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (14/15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519), more commonly Leonardo da Vinci or simply Leonardo, was an Italian polymath of the Renaissance whose areas of interest included invention, drawing, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography. He has been variously called the father of palaeontology, ichnology, and architecture, and he is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. Sometimes credited with the inventions of the parachute, helicopter, and tank, he epitomised the Renaissance humanist ideal.

Many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the "Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man", an individual of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination," and he is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent in recorded history, and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, while the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci notes that, while there is much speculation regarding his life and personality, his view of the world was logical rather than mysterious, although the empirical methods he employed were unorthodox for his time.

Leonardo was born out of wedlock to notary Piero da Vinci and a peasant woman named Caterina in Vinci in the region of Florence, and he was educated in the studio of Florentine painter Andrea del Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna, and Venice, and he spent his last years in France at the home awarded to him by Francis I of France.

Leonardo is renowned primarily as a painter. The Mona Lisa is the most famous of his works and the most parodied portrait, and The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time. His drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro coin, textbooks, and T-shirts. His painting Salvator Mundi sold for $450.3 million at a Christie's auction in New York on 15 November 2017, the highest price ever paid for a work of art. Perhaps 15 of his paintings have survived.

Nevertheless, these few works compose a contribution to later generations of artists rivalled only by that of his contemporary Michelangelo, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting.

Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised flying machines, a type of armoured fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, an adding machine, and the double hull. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or even feasible during his lifetime, as the modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. Some of his smaller inventions, however, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire. He made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, geology, optics, and hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings and they had no direct influence on subsequent science.

Sandro Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) (W)

Botticelli’s “Adoration of the Magi”

🔎

Botticelli’s “Adoration of the Magi”, where Cosimo de Medici is pictured washing the feet of baby Jesus. This picture could have been called “The Adoration of the Medici” (as Niall Ferguson observed in “The ascent of Money”

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi (c. 1445 – May 17, 1510), known as Sandro Botticelli (Italian: [ˈsandro bottiˈtʃɛlli]), was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine School under the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later in his Vita of Botticelli as a “golden age.” Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then, his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting.

As well as the small number of mythological subjects which are his best known works today, he painted a wide range of religious subjects and also some portraits. He and his workshop were especially known for their Madonna and Childs, many in the round tondo shape. Botticelli's best-known works are The Birth of Venus and Primavera, both in the Uffizi in Florence. He lived all his life in the same neighbourhood of Florence, with probably his only significant time elsewhere the months he spent painting in Pisa in 1474 and the Sistine Chapel in Rome in 1481-82.

Only one of his paintings is dated, though others can be dated from other records with varying degrees of certainty, and the development of his style traced with confidence. He was an independent master for all the 1470s, growing in mastery and reputation, and the 1480s were his most successful decade, when all his large mythological paintings were done, and many of his best Madonnas. By the 1490s his style became more personal and to some extent mannered, and he could be seen as moving in a direction opposite to that of Leonardo da Vinci (seven years his junior) and a new generation of painters creating the High Renaissance style as Botticelli returned in some ways to the Gothic style.

He has been described as "an outsider in the mainstream of Italian painting", who had a limited interest in many of the developments most associated with Quattrocento painting, such as the realistic depiction of human anatomy, perspective, and landscape, and the use of direct borrowings from classical art. His training enabled him to represent all these aspects of painting, without adopting or contributing to their development.

Michelangelo

Michelangelo (W)

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni or more commonly known by his first name Michelangelo ( 6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564) was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet of the High Renaissance born in the Republic of Florence, who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Considered by many the greatest artist of his lifetime, and by some the greatest artist of all time, his artistic versatility was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival, the fellow Florentine and client of the Medici, Leonardo da Vinci.

A number of Michelangelo's works of painting, sculpture and architecture rank among the most famous in existence. His output in these fields was prodigious; given the sheer volume of surviving correspondence, sketches and reminiscences, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. He sculpted two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, before the age of thirty. Despite holding a low opinion of painting, he also created two of the most influential frescoes in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, and The Last Judgment on its altar wall. His design of the Laurentian Library pioneered Mannerist architecture. At the age of 74, he succeeded Antonio da Sangallo the Younger as the architect of St. Peter's Basilica. He transformed the plan so that the western end was finished to his design, as was the dome, with some modification, after his death.

Michelangelo was the first Western artist whose biography was published while he was alive. In fact, two biographies were published during his lifetime. One of them, by Giorgio Vasari, proposed that Michelangelo's work transcended that of any artist living or dead, and was "supreme in not one art alone but in all three".

In his lifetime, Michelangelo was often called Il Divino ("the divine one"). His contemporaries often admired his terribilità—his ability to instil a sense of awe. Attempts by subsequent artists to imitate Michelangelo's impassioned, highly personal style resulted in Mannerism, the next major movement in Western art after the High Renaissance.

Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) (W)

Oil painting of Niccolò Machiavelli by Cristofano dell'Altissimo.

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527) was an Italian diplomat, politician, historian, philosopher, humanist, writer, playwright and poet of the Renaissance period. He has often been called the father of modern political science. For many years he served as a senior official in the Florentine Republic with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry. His personal correspondence is renowned by historians and scholars. He worked as secretary to the Second Chancery of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512, when the Medici were out of power. He wrote his best-known work The Prince (Il Principe) in 1513, having been exiled from city affairs.

Machiavellianism is widely used as a negative term to characterize unscrupulous politicians of the sort Machiavelli described most famously in The Prince. Machiavelli described immoral behavior, such as dishonesty and the killing of innocents, as being normal and effective in politics. He even encouraged it in many situations. The book gained notoriety due to claims that it teaches “evil recommendations to tyrants to help them maintain their power.”

The term Machiavellian often connotates political deceit, deviousness, and realpolitik. On the other hand, many commentators, such as Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, have argued that Machiavelli was more of a republican, even when writing The Prince, and his writings gave inspiration to Enlightenment proponents of modern democratic political philosophy. In one place, for example, Machiavelli noted his admiration for the selfless Roman dictator Cincinnatus.

The Prince

Machiavelli's best-known book Il Principe contains several maxims concerning politics. Instead of the more traditional target audience of a hereditary prince, it concentrates on the possibility of a "new prince". To retain power, the hereditary prince must carefully balance the interests of a variety of institutions to which the people are accustomed. By contrast, a new prince has the more difficult task in ruling: He must first stabilise his newfound power in order to build an enduring political structure.

Machiavelli suggests that the social benefits of stability and security can be achieved in the face of moral corruption. Machiavelli believed that public and private morality had to be understood as two different things in order to rule well. As a result, a ruler must be concerned not only with reputation, but also must be positively willing to act immorally at the right times. Machiavelli believed as a ruler, it was better to be widely feared than to be greatly loved; A loved ruler retains authority by obligation while a feared leader rules by fear of punishment. As a political theorist, Machiavelli emphasized the occasional need for the methodical exercise of brute force or deceit including extermination of entire noble families to head off any chance of a challenge to the prince's authority.

Scholars often note that Machiavelli glorifies instrumentality in state building, an approach embodied by the saying “The ends justify the means.” This quote has been disputed and may not come from Niccolò Machiavelli or his writings. Violence may be necessary for the successful stabilisation of power and introduction of new legal institutions. Force may be used to eliminate political rivals, to coerce resistant populations, and to purge the community of other men strong enough of a character to rule, who will inevitably attempt to replace the ruler. Machiavelli has become infamous for such political advice, ensuring that he would be remembered in history through the adjective, "Machiavellian".

Due to the treatise's controversial analysis on politics, the Catholic Church banned The Prince, putting it on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Humanists also viewed the book negatively, including Erasmus of Rotterdam. As a treatise, its primary intellectual contribution to the history of political thought is the fundamental break between political realism and political idealism, due to it being a manual on acquiring and keeping political power. In contrast with Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli insisted that an imaginary ideal society is not a model by which a prince should orient himself.

Concerning the differences and similarities in Machiavelli's advice to ruthless and tyrannical princes in The Prince and his more republican exhortations in Discourses on Livy, some have concluded that The Prince, although written as advice for a monarchical prince, contains arguments for the superiority of republican regimes, similar to those found in the Discourses. In the 18th century, the work was even called a satire, for example by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. More recently, commentators such as Leo Strauss and Harvey Mansfield have agreed that sections of The Princecan be read as having deliberately ironic statements throughout the book. However, this is not to say that they thought it was a joke.

Other interpretations include for example that of Antonio Gramsci, who argued that Machiavelli's audience for this work was not even the ruling class but the common people because the rulers already knew these methods through their education.

Erasmus

Erasmus (1486-1536) (W)

Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (28 October 1466 – 12 July 1536), known as Erasmus or Erasmus of Rotterdam, was a Dutch Christian humanist who is widely considered to have been the greatest scholar of the northern Renaissance. Originally trained as a Catholic priest, Erasmus was an important figure in classical scholarship who wrote in a pure Latin style. Among humanists he enjoyed the sobriquet “Prince of the Humanists,” and has been called "the crowning glory of the Christian humanists.”

Using humanist techniques for working on texts, he prepared important new Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament, which raised questions that would be influential in the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation. He also wrote On Free Will, In Praise of Folly, Handbook of a Christian Knight, On Civility in Children, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, Julius Exclusus, and many other works.

Erasmus lived against the backdrop of the growing European religious Reformation. While he was critical of the abuses within the Catholic Church and called for reform, he nonetheless kept his distance from Luther, Henry VIII and John Calvin and continued to recognise the authority of the pope, emphasizing a middle way with a deep respect for traditional faith, piety and grace, and rejecting Luther’s emphasis on faith alone.

Erasmus remained a member of the Roman Catholic Church all his life, remaining committed to reforming the church and its clerics' abuses from within. He also held to the doctrine of free will, which some Reformers (Calvinists) rejected in favor of the doctrine of predestination. His middle road (“via media”) approach disappointed, and even angered, scholars in both camps.

Erasmus died suddenly in Basel in 1536 while preparing to return to Brabant and was buried in Basel Minster, the former cathedral of the city. A bronze statue of Erasmus was erected in 1622 in his city of birth, replacing an earlier work in stone.

Early Middle Ages

Early Middle Ages (W)

Charlemagne and Pope Adrian I

Historians typically regard the Early Middle Ages or Early Medieval Period, sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages, as lasting from the 5th or 6th century to the 10th century CE. They marked the start of the Middle Ages of European history. The alternative term “Late Antiquity” emphasizes elements of continuity with the Roman Empire, while "Early Middle Ages" is used to emphasize developments characteristic of the earlier medieval period. As such the concept overlaps with Late Antiquity, following the decline of the Western Roman Empire, and precedes the High Middle Ages (c. 11th to 13th centuries).

The period saw a continuation of trends evident since late classical antiquity, including population decline, especially in urban centres, a decline of trade, a small rise in global warming and increased migration.

In the 19th century the Early Middle Ages were often labelled the "Dark Ages", a characterization based on the relative scarcity of literary and cultural output from this time. However, the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantine Empire, continued to survive, though in the 7th century the Rashidun Caliphate and the Umayyad Caliphate conquered swathes of formerly Roman territory.

Many of the listed trends reversed later in the period. In 800 the title of “Emperor” was revived in Western Europe with Charlemagne, whose Carolingian Empire greatly affected later European social structure and history. Europe experienced a return to systematic agriculture in the form of the feudal system, which adopted such innovations as three-field planting and the heavy plough. Barbarian migration stabilized in much of Europe, although the Viking expansion greatly affected Northern Europe.

Migration period

Migration period
Alternative Titles: Early Middle Ages, Late Antiquity [or Dark Ages] (B)

Migration period, also called Dark Ages or Early Middle Ages, the early medieval period of western European history—specifically, the time (476-800 CE) when there was no Roman (or Holy Roman) emperor in the West or, more generally, the period between about 500 and 1000, which was marked by frequent warfare and a virtual disappearance of urban life. The name of the period refers to the movement of so-called barbarian peoples — including the Huns, Goths, Vandals, Bulgars, Alani, Suebi, and Franks — into what had been the Western Roman Empire. The term “Dark Ages” is now rarely used by historians because of the value judgment it implies. Though sometimes taken to derive its meaning from the dearth of information about the period, the term’s more usual and pejorative sense is of a period of intellectual darkness and barbarity. See Middle Ages; Germanic peoples.

Dark Ages (historiography)

Dark Ages (historiography) (W)

The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages, that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.

The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light" (abundance of records). The concept of a "Dark Age" originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as “dark” compared to the light of classical antiquity.

The phrase "Dark Age" itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries. The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance; this became especially popular during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment.

As the accomplishments of the era came to be better understood in the 18th and 20th centuries, scholars began restricting the “Dark Ages” appellation to the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th-10th century), and now scholars also reject its usage in this period. The majority of modern scholars avoid the term altogether due to its negative connotations, finding it misleading and inaccurate. The original definition remains in popular use, and popular culture often employs it as a vehicle to depict the Middle Ages as a time of backwardness, extending its pejorative use and expanding its scope.

SİTELER

🛑 “ORTA ÇAĞLAR” TERİMİ BİR YANLIŞ ADLANDIRMADIR

🛑 KLASİĞİN ÖLÜMÜ

🛑 DUYUSAL BİÇİM OLARAK GÜZELLİK

DİZİN

🎨 Death of an Empire

Renaissance of the 12th century

Renaissance of the 12th century (W)

Renaissance (W)

Renaissance (W)

Overview (W)

Origins (W)

Continuity thesis

Continuity thesis (W)

Renaissance (EUROPEAN HISTORY) (B)

Renaissance (EUROPEAN HISTORY) (B)

📹 HISTORY OF IDEAS — The Renaissance (VİDEO)

Italian language

Italian language (W)

Origins

Origins (W)

🛑 KLASIK LATİNCE VE VULGAR LATİNCE

Vulgar Latin

Vulgar Latin (W)

🛑 FREDERICK ARTZ — “Orta Çağların Tini”

Petrarch

Petrarch (1304-1374) (W)

📹 Humanism & Petrarch (VİDEO)

Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) (W)

🛑 KARAKTERİSTİKLER

İtalya Krallığı ve “Kutsal Roma İmparatorluğu” The Kingdom of Italy and the Holy Roman Empire

🛑 Dante Alighieri, De Monarchia

📙 Dante Alighieri, De Monarchia — CONTENTS

Table of Contents:

🛑 FREDERICK ARTZ — Dante Üzerine / “Orta Çağların Tini”

🎨 Dante, Virgil, and demons

Dante and Virgil beset by demons, passing through Hell (illustration by Gustave Doré for an 1861 edition of Dante’s Inferno; The Divine Comedy)

Dante / ITALIAN POET (B)

Dante / ITALIAN POET (1265-1321) (B)

Dante Alighieri (W)

Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321) (W)

📹 A Brief History of Dante Alighieri (VİDEO)

Renaissance humanism

Renaissance humanism (W)

Italian humanism

Italian humanism (B)

The Piano: Invented in Florence.

Florence

Florence (W)

🎨 Medici family members

The House of Medici

Young Maria de’ Medici by da Santi di Tito

“Nozze di Maria de’ Medici con Enrico IV” – Jacopo di Chimenti da Empoli.

House of Medici (W)

House of Medici (15th century- ...) (W)

Portrait of Virginia de' Medici (1568-1615)

Medici family (B)

Sack of Rome (1527)

Sack of Rome (1527) (W)

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) (W)

Sandro Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) (W)

Michelangelo

Michelangelo (W)

Niccolò Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) (W)

Erasmus

Erasmus (1486-1536) (W)

Early Middle Ages

Early Middle Ages (W)

Migration period

Migration period Alternative Titles: Early Middle Ages, Late Antiquity [or Dark Ages] (B)

Dark Ages (historiography)

Dark Ages (historiography) (W)

Migration period
Alternative Titles: Early Middle Ages, Late Antiquity [or Dark Ages] (B)