Renaissance Reflections

So farewell to Florence. 

A 7am flight out of Pisa was perhaps a mistake!  My final blog from Italy might be a little long, serious, and not fully researched – but what can you expect on a coach at 4am in the morning?

I came to Florence because it is home to one of the great art galleries of Europe.  But what I found was a city utterly immersed in the Renaissance period it gave birth to.  In the Uffizi there is a small section, so isolated I missed it on my first three visits (Sophie found it from her wheelchair) labelled “non-Italian Art”.  Everything else is Italian and even then there is little of quality outside the late Gothic to Renaissance period (e.g. their Caravaggio collection, one of my favourite artists, is disappointing).

So what have I learnt of the Renaissance?  Well one impression is that it is a very contained period in both art and theology – following on from the post-Schism development of Western theology and more immediately the writings of Dante, we find a period of new thinking centred on Italy and combining Christian tradition, classical philosophy & sculpture and a confidence in humanist discovery.   

But eighty years after its beginnings the enigmatic figure of Savonarola emerged as a new leader (based in the monastery of San Marco in which Fran Angelic had produced such moving frescos).

Savonarola saw the Renaissance, like the Roman Empire before it, sinking into decadence.  So he initiated a new era of Christian morality, begun with a ‘bonfire of the vanities’ in place of the pre-Lent festivities of 1495.  While his efforts were successful for a while, the people eventually tired of this religious austerity and he was executed for heresy / martyred (depending on your point of view) in 1498.  While probably mad, Savonarola may have correctly recognised that Renaissance thought lacked direction.  In Germany in 1517 Martin Luther reached a similar conclusion.  But his solution was a ‘return’ to ‘sola scriptura’ (scripture alone).  In much the same way the Renaissance had ‘returned’ to ancient Greek texts, so Luther ‘returned’ to Christian scripture, without the filters of official Church teaching.  Both theology & art began to engage with these new ideas (both in the Reformation of Northern Europe and the Counter-Reformation of the South). 

And no-one painted Jesus holding goldfinches anymore...

 

Dante outside Santo Spirito (or as Cheryl & Abi christened him - the miserable man!)

 

 

Footnote:  My Italian adventure might be over but I will continue to post reflections and the fruit of my research over the next couple of weeks.  Appropriately my next stop is Liverpool (courtesy of the Diocesan Conference) and the Pre-Raphaelites.