The Thirteenth Century Proto-Renaissance
To make history more approachable, it is often separated into certain definable epochs. This helps us to identify similarities between actions and works of art in a specific period as distinguished from an earlier or later period. The problem with identifying united movements within history is that human behavior is not linear. Eleventh century architects, for example, did not know that they were supposed to be Romanesque. We soon see that different historical movements overlap each other. Where the Renaissance is concerned, this overlap has been difficult to tie down. It is usually defined as taking place in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries. Much of the artwork, however, from the Fourteenth century fits well into the modernistic Renaissance movements.
One way that Fourteenth century art coincides with Renaissance art is in its literature. Humanism was the major influence on the written word at the time. It emphasized a revival of classical learning in Greece and Rome. Marsilio Ficino, for example, emphasized the teachings of the Greek philosopher Plotinus, who taught that human reason existed in an eternal sphere, and meditative philosophical reasoning would lead eventually to oneness with that sphere. This emphasis on Greco-Roman thinking and literature permeated the age. That restoration of classical thinking, however, predates Ficino by nearly a century.
One Fourteenth century writer who shared Ficino’s love for Greco-Roman thought was Dante Alighieri 1265-1321. In the “Inferno” section of his Divine Comedy, Dante is led by the great Roman poet Virgil, author of The Aeneid to the lowest level of hell. The presence of Virgil alone is enough to indicate that Dante had an appreciation for classical thought every bit as much as Ficino. The experiences of Dante and Virgil in hell, however, make this reverence even more pronounced. Early on the journey Virgil and Dante are faced with a group of men who, “have not sinned. But their great worth alone was not enough, for they did not know Baptism” (Alighieri 1475) . These are the great writers, thinkers, and leaders in Greek and Roman history. Dante could not place them in Paradise, because they were never baptized, but could not place them in hell either because of his great love for them. So they exist in limbo, neither happy nor sad. Even this state of non-punishment it horrible for Dante to hear: “The words I heard weighed heavy on my heart; to think that souls as virtuous as these were suspended in that limbo forever!” (Alighieri 1476) . Dante, then, fits quite well as a Fourteenth century author into the tradition of Renaissance appreciation for classical writing.
Humanism was not only concerned with revering and replicating Greco-Roman art. The Renaissance artists, as humanists, exhibited a heightened appreciation for life here on earth, as opposed to emphasizing only that life that awaits Christians in heaven. They therefore took the experience, however mundane or crude, of every person to be valuable, and portrayed it. An example is the painting Tempest by Giorgione. This painting does not quite make it clear why we are observing the scene, or exactly what is happening in it. We see a nursing mother and proudly postured young man in the foreground and a growing tempest in the background. They are plainly dressed people, realized with complete naturalism. This scene, to Giorgione, is worthy of depiction without knowing much else about the figures, because it is a part of the complex human experience. That humanistic awareness influenced artists in the Fourteenth century as well. This was particularly true of Fourteenth century literature. An example is Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. In this book Boccaccio tells the story of a group of young boys and girls who escape from the horror of the plague in the city to the quiet and ease of the country, and entertain each other with ten interesting tales. They are not all tales about leaders of armies or governments, but peasants. The emphasis of the tale is not in describing the most romantic or grand achievements, but in the textured and accurate portrayal of every day events. The following passage is exemplary:
Whilst Pinuccio and the girl were thus employed, a cat, somewhere in the house, happened to knock something over, causing the man’s wife to wake up with a start. Being anxious to discover what it was, she got up and groped her way naked in the dark towards that part of the house from which the noise had come. Meanwhile Adriano also happened to get up, not for the same reason, but in order to answer the call of nature (1632) .
What follows is an increasingly ridiculous situation of unfaithful lovers discovering each other in various degrees of compromising situations. The experience of being scared awake by a cat, or groping about blindly to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, are the memorable aspects of the tale. Boccaccio portrays such events without flinching, because they matter as human experiences. It is that humanistic emphasis throughout Fourteenth century literature that makes it a part of the Renaissance movement.
More than anything else, historians are most in awe of Renaissance artists because of their mastery of scientific portraiture. In no previous movement is the concept of perspective so articulately summarized and accomplished. There are, however, Fourteenth century precedents in the area of perspective. Most notably the Limbourg brothers. In one work, The Temptation of Christ from Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc du Berry, perspective is quite pronounced. The vanishing point of the piece is in a valley between the precipice from which Christ looks on the wealth of the world and a mountain in the distance topped by a castle. This vanishing point, contrary to Renaissance traditions, places emphasis on Mehun-sur-Yevre, the residence of the Duke du Berry. The enormous turret of that castle is directly below the vanishing point, and the majesty of the edifice trumps the forlorn looking Christ above and to the right of it. While the emphasis is on the edifice, rather than on Christ, the use of perspective places this Fourteenth century piece squarely in the artistic traditions of the Renaissance.
No doubt there are many artistic productions from the Fourteenth century that contradict the opinion that in the Fourteenth century there was a kind of proto-Renaissance. Many artistic productions of this Gothic were no doubt in the Medieval, rather than the Renaissance, tradition. The majority of artistic works in that century, however, give the impression that the Fourteenth century was a modernistic period that foreshadowed the Renaissance.
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