In Our Time - The Renaissance

Episode Date: June 8, 2000

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Renaissance, which was first given its role as the birth place of modern man by the nineteenth century historian Jacob Burckhardt. At the start of his immensely influential Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, he wrote “In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness - that which was turned within as that which was turned without - lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues…In Italy this veil first melted into air” But is the Renaissance really a cultural miracle, and is it fair to think of medieval thought as being ‘obscured by a veil’? Should we even call the period around the fifteenth century the Renaissance when the very word implies that culture, for a thousand years, has been dead? What if our idea of the Renaissance is completely wrong? With Francis Ames-Lewis, Professor of History of Art, Birkbeck College; Peter Burke, Professor of Cultural History and Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge; Dr Evelyn Welch, Reader in the History of Art, University of Sussex.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the Renaissance was first given its role as a birthplace of modern man by the 19th century Swiss historian Jacob Burkhart. At the start of his immensely influential civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy,

he wrote, In the Middle Ages, both sides of human consciousness, that which was turned within, as that which was turned without, lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, childish prepossession, through which the world and history was seen as clad in strange shoes. In Italy, this veil first melted into air. But is there a renaissance really a cultural miracle,

and is it fair to think of medieval thought as being obscured by a veil? Should we even call the period around the 15th century the Renaissance when the very word implies that culture for a thousand years was moribund? And is it all too exclusively European? With me to discuss the value and importance of a period that's often defined as the high point of European culture is Peter Burke, Professor of Cultural History at Cambridge University, Dr. Evelyn Welsh,

reader in the history of art at Sussex University, and Professor Francis Ames Lewis, author of a new book, The Intellectual Life, of the Early Renaissance artist. Peter Burke, can you outline for us the traditional Burckhardt view of the Renaissance, which still holds sway in the popular idea of the Renaissance in modern culture? Yes, and then it would be the Renaissance miracle to take up the word you've already used. So there's this extraordinary flourishing of talent,

more specifically greater innovation than before, and that would link up with Burkhart's idea that individualism was... crucial in that passage you just quoted, that people in the Middle Ages identify themselves only as part of a collective, a guild or a city, whereas, according to Burkhart and so many people following him, you have the rise of individualism afterwards and people write autobiographies and they become more competitive one another. I think that, in a nutshell, would be the traditional view, with which in many ways I don't agree. Are there any other reasons why I think it was once regarded not only as the beginning of the individual

and the end of the Middle Ages and the start and modernity, but as a breakthrough in consciousness in the way we thought about ourselves even. Well, that was one of the senses of individualism, that people start to introspect. That's the idea that why else would they write autobiographies. And another important element in the traditional picture is the discovery of the world, that is painters using a more realistic style,

historians telling much more the story of what actually happened rather than something of a more fairy tale kind. So I think all those elements come together and make the Renaissance a kind of cultural revolution. The Renaissance is a French word invented by the French historian, Jules Michelet. What, in his opinion, was being reborn? He used the phrase,

the discovery of the world, the discovery of man. So I think that like Borkhart, who seems to have borrowed his phrase, those two great historians whose work is full of insights, they share this extremely simple and inaccurate view of the Renaissance with which most scholars today want to quarrel. Francis Ames-Lusse, would you agree with that? Yes, on the whole I would, but there are other meanings, there are the values to the term Renaissance,

which relate, in a sense, to the concept which existed, certainly in the early Renaissance already, i.e. the revival of a golden age, and the golden age of antiquity in particular. So this seems to me to be an important aspect, which we need to bear in mind when thinking about the Renaissance. Would you say that you are still broadly in agreement with Michelin Burkhart, that this was the rediscovery, this was the launch pad for the modern world,

in individualism and so on? Yes, I would broadly agree with that. And what was going on, in your view, you've written this wonderful book, The Intellectual Life, of the earlier Renaissance artist. What was key to that? Can we find a key? Is that too simplistic?

Well, the key was the extent to which the painter and the sculptor was being encouraged by humanists, particularly Leon Batista Alberti, to think of their production, their work, as being with status on the level of poetry or rhetoric and looking back to antiquity, just in the way as the poets and the rhetoricians at the time did,

to rediscover, to refine the roots in Roman art and architecture that could inform their work. Why should they be encouraged to think of their work in the same way as poetry and rhetoric? were thought of. What was important that they think of their work, artists and sculptors in that way? Again, partly to do with attitudes to painters and sculptors in the classical world. Pliny has large numbers of anecdotes about Greek and Roman artists, which demonstrates that they were regarded very highly in terms of their intellectual status,

as well as in terms of their production. And I think there was a feeling that because that was the position of, the painter and sculptor in the ancient world, the Renaissance, or the 15th century painter and sculptor, deserved to consider himself, and I say himself advisedly, consider himself as on an intellectual level with other artists and poets.

The retrieval of classical learning was an essential ingredient, wasn't it? Yes. And actually going to Rome as it existed then and copying... copying the buildings into drawing, which then became paintings and so on. That was a very key part of it. And the manuscripts which came through Greek scholars coming to Europe at that time and so on. Well, yes, the process of learning and understanding Greek culture

was immensely eased by the introduction of Greek. But for the artists, it was, of course, principally, yes, the Roman tradition, the artefacts, the objects, the buildings that they could see in Italy. which really affected their understanding of the ancient world. And to go to Rome was, and always has been since, an ideal for the artist. Having we've had the Berkartian view outlined by Peter Burke, who's actually said that he finds it great to disagree with about it, which we'll come to, and reinforced by Francis.

What's your view of this so-called rebirth, leaping consciousness, change in the mind of man, introduction of the individual? My view is there's a whole lot of Hocom. The problem is the Renaissance is a label. It's a label we all use, very simply because it takes a lot of time to say England between 1580 and 1630, Italy between 1,3, 1,500 and 1570. The Renaissance is a useful, compact definition, but it carries with it an enormous lot of intellectual baggage.

And we've just been hearing some of that baggage that comes with it. It's quite problematic because, I completely agree with Francis, if you're looking at an interest in modelling yourself, writing about art, recreation of the nude, for example, on Roman antiquity, then you can find it. But it's a bit like intellectual train spotting, looking in the past for one very distinct angle,

or perhaps today looking at an Oxford College and at the intellectual life of that Oxford College and saying, well, that constitutes the entire intellectual life of that country, that nation, that community. I think we have to be very careful not to use what is a narrow definition, which is absolutely accurate. There's no question about this fascination with the revival of the Latin language and the fascination with the Roman sense of the body. You can really find that, but not to expand that to say, well, this is the beginning of a new era. So you think the idea of beginning in itself is entirely wrong.

Is it the idea of beginning that you disagree with or the idea of beginning then? Are you for gradualism in everything? The search for origins is something we all try to do. But if we had a bunch of medievalists or businessmenists around here, we'd probably be looking to run out the door in a minute or two because they'd either be beating us up for claiming that our period was in some way better or superior to their period, or pointing out quite rightly that you can find these same sorts of origins in other places and other times.

If we had somebody who was working on Chinese art, they would very simply point to the invention of printing in China, many centuries before the inventing of printing in Europe. So we have to be very careful about this really rather, in the end, fruitless search for origins and talk about, well, what does it mean at that particular moment in that particular place? But doesn't there come a time when... I don't agree with you that search for origins is fruitless. It's one of the most fascinating things that people go in for it.

But that's as maybe. Don't you think there comes a time when a cluster becomes an event? When you have Galileo and Erasmus and Michelangelo and Leonardo and later on to Shakespeare, and it leads to the age of enlightenment? Don't you think that when you get that cluster of such power going on, then something new is happening because of its force? You don't get the same force going through.

Chinese culture after the invention of printing, do you? Yes, you do. I mean, I don't want to get into Chinese art, which isn't one of my specialities. But what about Chinese literature, Chinese drama, Chinese music, Chinese science? Absolutely. If you read Needham's work on Chinese technology in terms of ceramic technology, in terms of technological invention, but we're getting into a debate about better, best.

And I think what's happening is in our desire to create periods, and to make history, if you like, assimilatable, all that, these places, all this information, we need to manage it. So if we want to get away from turning it into beginning, not so good, getting better, now we're at the high point, which is in fact how many historians from Plutarch onwards have worked, we have to look at ways of appreciating different places, different people, different times. You say I got it wrong about China. fine, you know a lot more about China and I do. And you, Peter Burke, that's one of the points you make, that our idea of our Nasos ignores the fact that printing was invented, not only China and Korea.

Maccabelli was a great thinker, but there was a great thinker in 14th century North Africa. And so it goes on. Are you saying that the whole thing is an overestimate of the European place in world culture, as well as whether we've got it wrong in itself, Peter Burke? If by the whole thing you mean the rhetoric of the Renaissance, as one commonly reads it in history books. Absolutely. I want to search for a way of talking about this period

in the history of European culture, which will not implicitly knock the achievements of the Muslim world or China or Japan or whatever. I think it's perfectly possible to do this because there are so many different ways to achieve. But we have to escape this rhetoric of the human spirit being reborn and so on. Rhetoric which we've inherited from the period itself,

because the humanists who were very well trained in rhetoric knew a great deal about self-presentation and we ought to take what they say very seriously because it's part of our data. We want to understand how they experience their world but we don't have to take what they say literally indeed we mustn't. Historians can never take what contemporaries say literally.

I think the humanists really believed that a miracle was occurring and they really thought the Middle Ages which is a term they invented was barbarous But we don't have to think this. I mean, I happen to be an enthusiast for Gothic architecture. Many people are today. I think there's no incompatibility with that enthusiasm and another enthusiasm for the Renaissance,

or an enthusiasm for China and the great novels and so on. We simply have to find a different rhetoric, which is not saying that this is a crucial part of the triumphant rise of Western civilisation. Francis, do you see it retreating on the world scale, in view of what Evelyn Peter has said, and finding its place in the sort of Toinbiasque view of the study of history, that this is not a little local difficulty,

but a little local event. Yes, I think that the way of perceiving it is right, that it was a localised event, crucial, obviously, for the Western tradition and for our position and our intellectual development in the West, but clearly only one of a number of similar sorts of events happening throughout the last 2,000 years or more in various different areas of the globe.

And you're absolutely sure, Evelyn, you could sit down and say, look, you take China over the last 600 years and bat by bat, as much and as interesting is going on as went on in Western Europe. I'd love to take you up on that. I think the important thing is to work out how we define genius, how we define achievement.

And if you cut the cake in a certain sort of way to say that the definition of genius is great Ciceronian Latin. It's very easy to say that that only happens in Italy around, let's say, the late 14th century with Petrach. If you cut it in a different way, which is perhaps to talk about ceramic technology, then you might come up with a very, very different story indeed. Peter Burke, why do you think that the beginnings,

I hesitate to talk about this, looking to you have been by beginnings, but I'll risk the word. What the heck, I'll risk the word. Why do you think that the beginnings of the Renaissance are seen by Burkart, and as seen also by Francis in his book, is so firmly set in Italy? I think two reasons. For one thing, if we define the Renaissance as the revival of interest in classical antiquity,

it was a great help that so much in the way of the physical remains of classical antiquity were there in Italy. Of course, there are the Greek ones. but Athens was in the Ottoman Empire, it was much less accessible to Western Europeans. But the other point I'd like to put stress on is a social one. And that is that from the year 1,000 on, slowly, and from the 14th, 15th century faster,

Italy was becoming urbanised. Not that more than 10% of the population lived in these towns, but that's a lot for the period. as Italy became more urbanized, the example of classical antiquity became more relevant to the elites because ancient Greece and Rome were urban cultures. And a lot of what the philosophers and writers of ancient Greece and Rome say, it makes better sense in an urban context. And so if you like, the example of classical antiquity became much more relevant than it had been

in Italy and in a certain period. I would go along with that, but I think there are certainly two other factors that immediately occur to me. One is economic development and that it was in Italy that industrialisation developed during the late 13th and into the 14th century, and trade and commerce developed so that the wealth, production of wealth, was greater in Italy than elsewhere in Europe. And that naturally encouraged and fostered intellectual activity as well. The other factor is to do with the quality of the information that we have, in a sense, looking at it from our perspective, that we simply don't have the sort of information about, shall we say, the Netherlands in the 15th century, which is immensely important area in terms of trade, commerce, and artistic activity. We don't have the information that compares with the documentary and archival material that we have for particularly Florence but elsewhere in Italy as well, marvelous archives that have been preserved. So history goes where the material is?

Very much. Where you've got the evidence, then you can start generating a sense of the history of the period or interpreting the evidence. And that's why in my book, despite my attempts to bring in Yanfanaic and Roger van der Weiden as best I could, because it seems to me that they are crucially important.

Roger van der Viden is arguably a much more important artist than any Italian artist on the European stage during the 15th century. Yet it's very difficult to bring them in because we simply don't know enough about them. Emily, can you give us some idea of where this impulse for classical learning came from and where you see it stirred? We can see it with Petrarch already in the middle of the 14th century and he's writing in a beautiful classical Latin and massively admired for that. But what's going on in the culture that there is this turning back to that?

I mean, Peter has expressed it in terms of urban for urban and so on. Is there anything else? There's a great moral and philosophical dissatisfaction with the current age. What's extraordinary is we consider the Renaissance to be a period of innovation. But in fact, those innovators thought that their own contemporary period was a horrid time. And they really would have rather been born a thousand years or over a thousand years earlier. So they're looking for truth. They're looking to go back to, if you like, origin, sources.

and they feel if they can get the right best texts and just work out how to use those texts, they'll become better people themselves, they'll have a better urban civic life, and their leaders will become better leaders. So you have Petrach doing things like giving gold antique coins to the Holy Roman Emperor on the coins of Augustus in the hopes that this model of the Emperor Augustus

will become the model for a new European world. political centre. So it's quite politicised and it's not just about intellectual life, it's also about moral, social and civic life. And that is what's fascinating about Italy, is that this isn't just about things of the mind, this is about things of the community and of the world. Peter Burke, would you say they were copying these old forms or they were doing something else with them as well? It was imitation. That's their own word. Like Unileleshikistone, that sort of thing. Because there's plenty of scope for creativity. It's quite hard sometimes from a distance of a few hundred years later

to know how often the difference between the copy, as you call it, in the original is because they didn't quite understand what the original was like and how far they deliberately put in a spin or twist because they wanted to express their own creativity. I think it's a bit of each. And I think this works at the more general level too. There are many times in history when innovation is masked as renovated. because you say we don't like what's happening in the present.

We'll go back to some remote period in the past. The people in the past, of course, can't say we misinterpreted them, they're not there. So there's a... I don't know whether this is at a conscious level or an unconscious level, but I think that we must not take too literally the language of, we're not trying to do anything new. The ancients were wonderful. All we have to do is to go back to them.

I think that's only a part of the truth. And yet what would Michelangelo have felt when, work was thought to be antique. They pleased that he'd shown the ability to bring it off. Can I come in on that? Because I think the fascinating thing is to look at economic value, as Francis has pointed out. One of the reasons that Michael...

Well, at least one of the reasons that Vizari tells us that Michael Andrew was, if you like, faking up antiques, was the price paid for a contemporary work of sculpture or painting compared to the price paid for an antiquity. there was a vast differential and you do have this problem that you have the literary rhetoric of the rise of the status of the art

and the artist and the artwork and the actual salaries that are being paid for the bog standard work of art and the bog standard artist and you there is no match up there so Michael Angelo is trying to make some money do you see that Peter Boe? I don't deny that there was a flourishing fake market

in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries but it's interesting wouldn't be about having a Michael Lynchel of a fake. I've got a fake, it's by Michael Anthony. But the humanists do were sometimes counterfeiting classical texts which they didn't sell.

So I think that the sheer intellectual pleasure of showing that they could write a narration in the style of Cicero and make other people think it was really by Cicero. Does that motivation is there as well? Can I turn to one of the themes in your book Francis, which is the movement of artists, the deliberate, as one can understand it from

your excellent book, the self-conscious movement of artists inspired by humanists, as Peter Berkus pointed out, to establish themselves as intellectuals in order to join the elite part of society in a way. It was to get rid of the slur, as they saw it, of being manual workers, and join those who work by brain instead of by hand. That's very crude. But there was a little. But there that sort of thing, leaving the artisan base, which we think of as the base of the arts in the Middle Ages, to come towards the ad absurd and conceptual base of the 21st century, but they, as it were, moving away from the hands to the head. Can you give us some idea of how that developed and why you think it developed? Well, I think it developed partly through the encouragement that artists received from humanists,

and I think again, particularly of Leon Batista Alberti, who is, fundamentally important in showing the status, demonstrating what the aspirations could be for a painter, for example, through his great della pitura. And I think that the combination between that sort of encouragement and, again, the sense of wishing to revive or reconstruct an ancient world, I think particularly of Montenia in this case,

and the way in which Montenia was so fascinated, so intrigued by the challenge of classical art that he produced works like the triumphs of Caesar at Hampton Court in the Queen's Collection, which is a representation as faithfully as he possibly could an archaeological reconstruction of an ancient procession. So it's this double aim in a sense of Alberti's encouragement to artists to aspire towards intellectual activity

and the artists themselves, wishing to set themselves, as you were saying, on the level of other intellectuals to become courtiers, as Leonardo da Vinci or Raphael aspired to and to some extent did, to move, yes, from the workshop, from the artisanal workshop, towards an artistic production which would set, them on the level of the courtier. Do you think much was lost in that movement, which began then and then, by stops and starts, began to accelerate as the centuries went on, from the artist leaving the artist's own base,

artist in this sense being a painter? I can't see quite what might have been lost. Do you ever? Well, I don't think it actually happened, I'm afraid. Let's get down to the nitty-gritty. Raphael had one of the most efficient and effective workshops of the early 16th century. He was also a fantastic self-promoter. If you wanted spin doctors, you could get spin doctors like nothing on earth in early 16th century Rome,

and Raphael had them lined up. At the same time, he had an extraordinarily effective team, production team, working for him. It was more like putting out a television program doing the Villa Farnizina than a single individual working. kind of isolated and on their own as a genius. So I don't think you get that loss of workshop. What you do is you get a different spin on it. You get the brand name. It's more like Versace or Gucci than it is Galileo, for example.

I think for the sciences, however, it might have been quite different because there you do get the sense of, if you like, the individual, often working in conflict with other kinds of ideas and ideologies. So we mustn't take the artistic model as the single model for thought and progress and genius in this period. But it's a useful one in the sense that one has the idea again. You all will certainly correct me if I'm wrong. In the great medieval building of the great cathedrals and abys and so on,

you had largely anonymous artisan masons building these extraordinary, wonderful structures. And in 1500, without name, in 1500, you've Dura painting a self-portrait in which he portrays himself, not only as an individual and a great artist, but also as divine. I mean, he's in the pose of Christ. I mean, I will correct you, if you like.

The same architects, the Giovanni Pisano, for example, the same sculptors who are working on the Cathedral of Siena are also putting portraits of themselves or inscriptions around their pulpit baptisteries, saying things like, I am the greatest sculptor who ever lived. I'm even better than my dad. So if we define something, self-consciousness as showing off, you can certainly find that in earlier periods and earlier

places. Is there a time when you, when it emerges, though, is it a time when, is it like sort of coming through up the water? Oh, God, it's awfully dark down here. Let me swim faster, swim faster. Exactly. I've discovered. Precisely. I think that there are times when the language and the evidence changes. And one of the problems for historians is Peter's been very sensitively pointing out is how we use that evidence. If someone shouts, I can see again, Eureka, are they actually blind before, or have they come up with a way of making us see again?

Well, I'm going to nag away at this because it's fascinating. Peter, Peter Burke, let's be bluntly then, would you consider Leonardo da Vinci to be a Renaissance man, the sort of artist, man, intellectual, who had not been able to exist in that way before, if Evelyn can stand to one side. One second, you can take the field here. He's the most extraordinary example of a type

which one can find before. I mean, I think the idea of the Universal Mountain was a label which Jakob Burkart pinned on the Renaissance, and I think that's got something to do with the fact that in Burkart's time, the middle of the 19th century, intellectual and cultural fragmentation was taking place, and so there's this nostalgia for a time

when people could have marvelous achievements in all sorts of fields. In fact, I think there were many centuries of non-specialization, and there were all sorts of medieval figures who make contributions in very diverse fields. Leonardo was a particularly spectacular example, and coming at the moment that he did, lent himself to be mythologized maybe more than the others. but he certainly was not the first universal man. Can you give us an example of a previous example? Well, somebody like Roger Bacon,

so that takes us back to the 13th century. For those who don't know the achievements of Roger Bacon, could you whip through them? I suppose he would call him a philosopher, but a philosopher who was interested in nature, who is beginning to conduct experiments, which were not an invention of the scientific revolution of the 17th century, though people did far more of them,

by then. In fact, it would have been normal for a medieval philosopher to be interested in almost the whole range of intellectual subjects and maybe some crafts as well. Francis, given the weight of patronage of the church in the arts, particularly of painting and of a monumental building, do you think that the Renaissance can be seen to have had a dramatic effect there? Well, I'd consider there are major works commissioned by the popes, I'd think it's the private individuals, like the Medici, for example, who were the prominent patrons or the princes in the courts, L'Orovica Gonzaga of Mantua. It's these people who are really forwarding the economic virtues of patronage, the sense of

magnificence in commissioning works. And though obviously there are exceptions to that, in the earlier stage of the Renaissance in the early 15th century, it was much more the individual princes and merchants. A large amount of church furnishing in parish churches right through England, for example, would have been commissioned by or ordered by individuals rather than by the church as a sort of broad concept. Evelyn. I think one of the interesting things is the way we consider the Renaissance in an Italian sense means that those things that are produced in the 15th century for the church

have survived into the 16th century. Whereas, of course, in Northern Europe, they haven't because of the Reformation. And it may in fact be the Reformation, which is more important to our understanding of the past, what survives and what doesn't survives, than this kind of amorphous 19th century notion of the Renaissance. And I would agree with Francis that you can't just call it the Church, because there are many notions of what the Church consists of, particularly by the time you hit the 16th century,

and that you have to match up the sort of notion of spirituality with the notion of the individual commission and the individual gift. But the vast majority of works of art that are commissioned are commissioned for a religious purpose. So it may be more useful to think about religious purposes and religious places than about the church as a great monolith. The thing that Francis is really pointing to very importantly is that if you like the secular side,

the revival of clotheism, classical motifs can't really happen within a sacred setting because it may be considered inappropriate and that's what happens with Michelangelo's last judgment that he gets away with it when he does it but the mood shifts and in fact it's no longer appropriate by the end of the 16th century. Was the quantity of patronage, Peter Burke, at that time,

did that increase dramatically? Francis referred to it and pointed out that it occurred in the smaller churches as well as the great cathedrals, that they're private patrons, putting their money into whatever statuary and paintings of dough for religious purposes. They're doing it. Did the amount of money available increase dramatically and make a real difference? I think the amount of money available increased in Italy in the early 14th century,

but then decreased. I don't think there's a neat correlation between the economic trends and the cultural ones. Indeed, some people have thought that it's hard, times rather than good times economically, which coincide with cultural manifestations. But I'm a bit worried about looking at all this in a patron-led way. I would agree with Francis that the Marquis and indeed the marchioness of Mantua, Isabella Desti, were extremely perceptive and she was a very demanding patron. But the artists didn't come from Mantua. You need another kind of place, like Florence, a big craft industrial scientist.

city because most artists were the sons of artisans. And then the Florentine artists or the artists from other big cities will migrate to the small centres where there are the best patrons. But the patrons never called those artists into existence. They couldn't kind of grow them locally. So we come back to big trends like urbanisation as preconditions for this movement. Can we talk about the... what's being called the spread of an renaissance.

I think it was you, Evelyn, who said it was a bit like a virus. It started in Italy. I'm afraid that was a lot of my accusing terms. Yeah, and then race around Europe. I trust you meant a benevolent virus. I'm sure you did. Again, the idea is that it did, it started off in Italy and like a virus. I think there are a happier phrases.

I think I was actually using that in a very, very problematic way of seeing it. In the traditional way is that it kind of, this infection starts in Florence in the late 40s. century and then spreads to mainly northern Italy. It avoids the South because the South has bad culture down there. And then following the French invasions, it's carried a bit like syphilis, if you like, back into France before spreading to England. And I see that as an extremely problematic version because it implies a blank canvas. This is also how, if you like, late 15th and early 16th century commentators talk about,

They're very worried about contagion, measmas, and they're unclear on how one idea gets from one place to another, or one object from another. Is this spread any different, Peter Burke, from the spread of ideas in 200 years previously, in the Gothic period, for instance? No, I think it's rather similar, but I think the metaphor spread is a bit dangerous too.

Now we've got the oil slick theory of the renaissance instead of the contagion theory. I want to bring in human agency and maybe a way to do it would be to make a rash comparison with the 20th century. That is that people in especially elites, in some European countries, started to think that they were behind Italy

in some important way and they would like to catch up. And then there were wonderful opportunities for expatriates. So Italian artists or indeed humanists who were not doing very well in their own country for whatever reason, discover, that if they went to France or

if they went to Spain, they might get a better welcome. And so even second raider, if they were Italian, could have relatively glorious careers in other places. So they were being called because, for example, a prince in Hungary or France,

France is the first in one case, marchos, the covenos in the other, thought you can't have a proper court if you don't have some Italian art being produced. So I think that would be an account of how other countries

became involved in the movement which really reintroduces human agency both at the level of the patron and at the level of the artist and the artists from France and England and elsewhere will then be making a pilgrimage to

Italy, primarily maybe to study classical antiquity in Rome but also to find out the secrets of the Italian artists Dura in Venice is sniffing round and even reporting how suspicious of him the Venetian artists are in case he's going to discover their trade secrets. How do you see this?

We can't use spread, we can't use virus, we can't use syphilis. How do you see the human agency? Human agency. And Peter has referred back, in fact, to patronage being the agency. Although earlier on in the programme wanting to deny the, or downgrade the patron, nonetheless, I think that his reconstruction is probably broadly correct that there were opportunities at Francois Prémy's Fontébleau

or at Henry VIII's court in London for artists and humanists to find a better lifestyle, better way. And those patrons early in the 16th century wanted Italian culture because they saw that the developments of the 15th century in Italy had provided new impetus, new cultural intellectual impetus, and they wanted to be on that act. So the great princes of the early 16th century were enormously significant in drawing, in attracting Italian artists

and humanists and other intellectuals to their courts. And that's the way in which this process came about. And the philosopher in history of science, Thomas Kuhn, introduced the notion of paradigm, shifts, the idea that progress happens in jerks and bolts. Do you think the Renaissance could be one of those? I'm very attracted by the notion of a paradigm shift. I wouldn't stick this kind of period, the Renaissance, into it, I have to say.

If you look at how other countries organize their history, they often exclude this intermediate transitional phase, the Renaissance. They go from medieval to modern, or they go from middle time to new time, that's in Germany, for example, or in Spain you just go straight into a golden age, which happens 200 years after our so-called Renaissance. So I think we have to be very careful about just assuming that our periodization is the same periodization for all countries and all places.

But the notion of a paradigm shift is quite an interesting one and a useful one because it contradicts that sort of teleology of bad to best. which is rise and declines, which is our other main model. Peter Burke. I think the notion of paradigm shift works particularly well in intellectual history, where people have certain ideas about reality, and then as Kuhn suggests, they notice discrepancies, and then they're forced to revise the paradigm.

I'm not sure it works so well in artistic activity, though others here being art historians might well want, to disagree with me about that. But certainly it gives us some relatively simple language, which, as Evelyn says, is value-free or relatively value-free, they're saying that there's a basic change in assumptions and ideals, and that definitely is something which I believe took place. That part of the Renaissance, I think, has survived the criticisms. Rastus, do you think that the other two are rather hesitating in the face of this tremendous evidence for the concentration of extraordinary lasting

talent across the field. We haven't even talked about science, for instance, which is different from Chinese technology as you believe, may have learned. And that, that, I knew you wouldn't. I just thought it's a little tickle there as we got. Do you think that this is, has been, has been accounted for generously enough in this conversation or there's too much no, it's a big thing, let's pull it down a bit there. Well, my hypothesis certainly is that the

individual artist is striving for improvement, enhancement of his status, both financially but also intellectually and that that is therefore producing major figures like Michelangelo, like Mantegno, like Leonardo da Vinci, who

are moving out of the relative confines of their artistic activity and thinking much more broadly and learning much more broadly and gaining much more knowledge and experience from their intellectual peers. Peter Burke? I think we should use the word renaissance in the plural. I'm not the first person to think that.

We can follow the example of that great comparative historian Arnold Toynbee, whom you were cited at the beginning of the programme. So within Western culture, there was a Carolingian renaissance around the... There was a 12th century renaissance. There was what we call the renaissance, and in other cultures, whether Muslim, Chinese, Japanese, there have been revivals of their traditional culture,

going back to Confucius, Kung Fu Tzu or whatever. That doesn't mean that each of those movements is identical. Each has got its own peculiarities, its own achievements. But I think to regard the renaissance as part of a family of movements, is genuinely illuminating. Well, thank you very much to Peter Burke, to Abin Welsh, and to Francis Ames-Lewis, whose book The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist,

set up this discussion, and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.