(2025-07-28) Was The Renaissance Real

Adam Gopnik: Was the Renaissance Real? We celebrate the period as a golden age of cultural rebirth. But two new books argue that the Renaissance, as we imagine it, is little more than myth.

The things we admire about fifteenth-century Florence might actually reflect the values of mid-nineteenth-century Britain.

With minimal ingenuity, any historical period can be made to dissolve into the ones around it.

Take the rock revolution—that great shift which, emerging in the mid-nineteen-fifties and established by the mid-sixties, definitively separated the Broadway-and-jazz-based tunes that had previously dominated popular music from the new sound

It was in the record business’s interest to convince the teen-agers to whom it was selling music that their music was nothing like their parents’ music. But the rock revolution can easily look more artifactual than authentic.

To anyone who grew up in the period, this is a bit absurd. Of course the rock revolution was real; of course the rock era was an era, with signatures and styles all its own.

Still, attempts to dissolve a period, however unpersuasive, can be instructive, because they make you think hard about what a period style is.

As with rock music, so with the Renaissance. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, many educated Europeans and Americans shifted their model of a great-good-place-back-then from ancient Greece and Rome to Renaissance Italy. This reëvaluation coincided with nineteenth-century aestheticism—the idea that art could rival faith as a reason for living—and with a revived appreciation of material progress.

Renaissance people didn’t just think things; they made things. And so celebrating the Renaissance became a way to pay respect to prosperity and materialism. When Walter Pater published “The Renaissance,” in 1873, he was implicitly aligning Botticelli with William Morris and the craft revival.

Yet doubts, of the kind that halo the rock revolution, have always hovered around the idea of the Renaissance. If it was really a rebirth of a classical past, why are its greatest monuments all Catholic affirmations of faith?

Perhaps the Renaissance appeals to the modern imagination because it was an invention of the modern imagination.

Two new books from university presses take up this debate for the twenty-first century. Bernd Roeck’s “The World at First Light” (Princeton), translated, from the German, by Patrick Baker

Seen from Roeck’s vast aerial perspective, the period vanishes into the whole of history—much as Manhattan shrinks to just another island in a satellite view. The Renaissance, in his telling, fades into the medieval world that spawned it and the Enlightenment that followed it.

Meanwhile, Ada Palmer’s “Inventing the Renaissance” (Chicago), at a mere six hundred and fifty pages, announces its thesis in its title. Hers is less macro-dissolution than a series of micro-disillusions: she goes deep into the minutiae of the lives of Renaissance luminaries to show that, far from being idealists reaching for the rebirth of a better world, they were the usual human mixture of self-promotion, self-delusion, and fakery. The Renaissance cities, far from being principalities of prosperity and enlightened rule, were desperately poor, violent, and anarchic. They turned to antiquity more for consolation than for confident renewal.

The Renaissance, in Palmer’s view, was a series of idiosyncratic local arrangements

Roeck’s Renaissance begins in the twelfth century—the high Middle Ages, in our usual accounting—and carries the story through the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the Baroque. A professor emeritus of history at the University of Zurich, Roeck has written a book with an almost comically wide reach, in the spirit more of Jared Diamond’s “Guns, Germs, and Steel” than of a conventional cultural history.

The book’s scope is partly academic mission creep. Roeck seems to know of every human being and social movement in Europe through those six centuries, and he wants to write about them all.

Inevitably, a net this large hauls in a lot of sardines along with tuna. In Roeck, everything comes in for scrutiny—and “everything” is not really a subject

But a thesis does in time emerge, and it is that the Renaissance was neither the last effusion of the antique past nor a beautiful preliminary to modernity; it was modernity itself. The key ideas, social practices, and convictions that made the scientific revolution began here. The version of the Renaissance beloved of Pater or John Ruskin—a lyrical overture to beauty and communal order, refined by classical aestheticism—is, on this view, sentimental.

What marks a “Renaissance man” is not multifariousness of pursuits but, rather, an intensity of purpose so great that it has an appetite for all sides of a single activity.

This combination of practical skill and intellectual ambition inspired the scientific revolution.

And, though democratic states were still a distant prospect, democratic habits flourished within trade guilds, faculties, and even monasteries.

Roeck goes on to address the great question of why Europe became the center of prosperity and innovation on the planet.

happened not in spite of the era’s religious warfare but, in part, because of it. By fusing spiritual and temporal power, the period’s absurd-seeming battles over mystical doctrine—was the blood truly present in the chalice, or merely indicated in it?—were inseparable from struggles for worldly authority. The result was an enduring instability, which, however brutal, prevented the dead calm of enforced harmony. Roeck contrasts this, in a grand Spenglerian manner, with the East Asian spiritualities that, he insists, tended to make a neater division between what was owed to the divine and what belonged to the state.

Palmer, a historian at the University of Chicago, has no such Spenglerian horizons but instead drills down into the lives of her favorite subjects—which include herself.

Palmer’s personal voice is part of an academic trend toward making scholarship more confessional and transparent. “Now you understand my biases,” she tells us, after recounting her own history as a student. Still, the key to first-person address, as that great Renaissance master Michel de Montaigne understood, is not to subtract complication but to supply it, registering doubt, hesitation, and irony even while developing an argument. Palmer manages this at times, but too often the self-presentation feels obstructive, like a friend sending selfies from Florence.

There is a constant paradox of art-making: as an art form accelerates its pace of change, its content grows more nostalgic. This is evident in the work of the other great warp-speed era, French avant-garde painting between 1870 to 1914. As painting raced from sunlit Impressionism to Cubist abstraction in a single generation, its subjects looked backward: to Gothic cathedrals, to a bohemian café-table culture already passing away

This, surely, is the true originality of the Renaissance: for the first—and perhaps the only—time, the arts, especially painting, eclipsed science and philosophy as the main site of intellectual energy and advancement.

Yet many are the charms of Palmer’s book. She argues, in contradiction to Roeck, against what she sees as the nineteenth-century idea that each age has a defining spirit, and that the Renaissance was “one great movement growing toward its mature form (modernity), reducing other modes of thought to remnants.” The Renaissance, she insists, was, in fact, plural, and “our modern age is just as plural.” Or perhaps the pluralism of Renaissance civilization is exactly what makes us see it as having begun the modernity we share.

On certain subjects, though, Palmer seems weirdly off base.

It soon becomes evident that these blind spots are a consequence of how historians of ideas, like Roeck and Palmer, relegate the visual arts to the background—treating them as illustrations of intellectual change rather than as engines of it.

If the Enlightenment aimed to grasp the world as it is, the Renaissance balanced the world as it once was with the world it was becoming. That double consciousness is what gives the pictures, and their period, their grace. Botticelli’s people have “the wistfulness of exiles,” in Pater’s beautiful phrase. Their melancholia was the uncertainty inherent in a time of enormous change

The painterly resources available to Raphael were vastly larger than those available to an artist a scant half century before, as the musical and lyrical resources available to a pop musician in 1970 were incommensurable with those available to a pop musician in 1960. Style is necessarily hybrid, but there are times when cultural speed really does get supercharged, in ways that draw on the past to create something new. If we’re trying to come up with a word for such times, it isn’t crazy to call the world they make reborn.