The Renaissance and the Classical Tradition Introduction: Veteris Vestigia Flammae? the ‘Rebirths’ of Antiquity

PART ONE

THE RENAISSANCE AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION INTRODUCTION: VETERIS VESTIGIA FLAMMAE? THE ‘REBIRTHS’ OF ANTIQUITY

Luke Houghton

From the fourteenth through the sixteenth century . . . and from one end of Europe to the other, the men of the Renaissance were convinced that the period in which they lived was a ‘new age’ as sharply different from the mediaeval past as the mediaeval past had been from classical antiquity and marked by a concerted effort to revive the culture of the latter. The only question is whether they were right or wrong.1 Any investigation into whether or not there was a Renaissance in western culture between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries must sooner or later confront the issue of what exactly was supposed to have been ‘reborn’. Attempts to define the phenomenon have tended to be generous in scope: Walter Pater, for instance, observed in 1872 that ‘[t]he word Renaissance indeed is now generally used to denote not merely the revival of classical Antiquity which took place in the fifteenth century, and to which the word was first applied, but a whole complex movement, of which that revival of classical Antiquity was but one element or symptom’2—but, as Pater’s summary illustrates, even the broadest formulations rarely lose sight of the common denomina- tor of a renewed interest in and engagement with the culture of the classical past.3 This tendency is generally seen as a symptom or constit- uent of a wider movement rather than its essence:4 it cannot account,

1 Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm, 1960), 36. 2 Walter H. Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London, 1873), 2 (quo- tation from opening essay, dated 1872 in later editions). 3 Note especially the title of Georg Voigt’s influential Die Wiederbelebung des clas- sischen Altertums, oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1859), of which Wallace K. Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought. Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA, 1948), 160, comments ‘the effect of his work as a whole was to identify the rebirth of antiquity indissolubly with the Renaissance as the dominant characteristic of its culture.’ 4 For Jacob Burckhardt, ‘though the essence of the phenomena might still have been the same without the classical revival, it is only with and through this revival that they are actually manifested to us’: The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,