Transcription
Hello, welcome back to our, uh, lecture series on Western Civilization 102. We'll begin our second lecture in this series today, um, very a fascinating lecture, very informative, I hope you enjoy it. Um, the title of this lecture is Reform, Revival, and Renaissance. So definitely a few topics will be covered here by Dr. Robison.
Now, we went through a very rough period with the 14th century. Very bad times. Plague, um, the call the Black Death. I'm sure you know about that or have heard of it. Numerous people died as a result of this Black Death. Mothers would leave their children and and run to the countryside trying to escape it. Massive burials and burnings took place by people trying to, um, escape this plague. Very bad times.
So, we're not only having a plague here in the 14th century, but we also had during this later Middle Ages time, warfare. In fact, the Hundred Years' War will end, as we'll soon discover, in 1453. Didn't last exactly every day for 100 years. It actually was longer than that, and, you know, back and forth, but it's called the Hundred Years' War. It was between England and France. Um, so that ended.
But we also had with the 14th century, we also had rebellions. So internal fighting in places like England and places like France. For example, a little ice age. So we're not seeing as much food grown. It's just not a very good time to live. Priests, the Catholic Church is split. Um, they definitely we're seeing two popes and then three popes.
So, for this lecture, we're going to recover. We're going to come out of that very, very bad time. There will be a recovery. Population will recover, as you'll find out. Um, innovations, as Dr. Robinson will discuss, as well. All right, he will discuss the church. We'll find out if they recovered or not, and what exactly is taking place with the reform efforts and trying to bring the church back up to, uh, a place of respectability, I guess you could say, after that very bad 14th century time period.
Dr. Robinson will discuss different men such as John Wycliffe. He was driven underground. Very famous group, not associated with the Catholic Church, of course, called the Lollards. Jan Hus, not so lucky. He is actually burned at the stake for his beliefs that to go against the church doctrine. Um, very famous figure in church history as well.
Dr. Robinson will also discuss different innovations like printing, which is very important, gunpowder, banking. As you will find out, a very famous event occurring here in this 15th century, the fall of Constantinople. Very pivotal moment in 1453. And he will also discuss, uh, what's called Christian humanism, which people started to believe that man had potential, that with education, you know, with learning, that we have the ability to improve. A very famous Christian humanist, his name is Petrarch. Discuss a little bit about him as well.
Um, and Dr. Robinson discusses the Renaissance, the word Renaissance meaning rebirth, or like I said before, revival, coming out of this very bad later Middle Ages or 14th century. And we'll see that this Renaissance is focused and situated in the state of Italy. So we'll find out different Italian city-states. There's different city-states in Italy. It's not Italy is not one country as we know it now. And so we'll find out how the Renaissance, the different artists that came about here in Italy. I'm sure you've heard of Da Vinci and Donatello. Very famous. Da Vinci, of course, very fascinating man, um, especially with his inventions or his drawings of tanks and helicopters. Truly amazing that he would do it at that time in history.
And we also, uh, Dr. Robinson will also discuss a little bit about discovery in the New World when the coastal city, the the coastal states like England and France and Portugal, when they start sailing across the Atlantic and discovering the Americas, Brazil, um, you know, especially the Portuguese landed in Brazil. And you have Christopher Columbus in the Bahamas. Um, this will take the focus off of Italy and and we'll see a shift, a definite shift from the Renaissance beginning in Italy and of course focusing more into Northern Europe. So, uh, we'll find out about that.
And I hope you enjoy this lecture on Reform, Revival, and Renaissance. Following the crisis of the 14th century, Europe began to experience a recovery of sorts in the 15th century. In 1453, the Hundred Years' War finally came to an end. There is also a decline in plague mortality, which was a welcome relief to Europeans. Population began to recover, growing again for the first time instead of declining in a hundred years. The economy began to recover. There was a political recovery in the sense that a number of talented Renaissance princes appeared around Europe, and there were various innovations that helped to bring Europe a little further into the modern world.
The one area that really did not significantly recover was the church. It still suffered from the damage created by the Avignon Papacy and the Papal Schism, and by the general perception that the church was rife with corruption and superstition. This was accompanied by what might be called a breakdown in universalism. Universalism in the sense that all of Europe had seen itself as part of a single Christian community for much of the Middle Ages, the res publica Christiana, or Western Christendom. But in the 15th century, particularly, a number of things began to break that universalism down.
One of these was, in fact, the failure of reform. There were a number of attempts to reform the church. None of these proved successful, which goes a long way toward explaining why there was a Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. The second reason was the encroachment upon European territory of the religion of Islam in the form of the Ottoman Empire. Once the Turks had established a bridgehead in Southeastern Europe, one could no longer think of Europe as simply a Christian Republic or res publica Christiana.
Yet another thing that challenged that, uh, notion of universalism was the rediscovery of antiquity. That is, the aspect of the Renaissance that was involved with the rediscovery of ancient languages, ancient texts, and more generally ancient civilizations. For a long time, Europeans had tended to think, in spite of their own differences from place to place, that there was basically one way to believe, one way to do things, and so on. Discovery of ancient Rome, of ancient Greece, and of other ancient societies challenged that view. Further so did new discoveries in the world of the present.
15th century explorers from Europe had been exploring down the coast of Africa for some time prior to the 15th century. But in the 15th century came two major new developments. First of all, the discovery of routes to the Far East, where there were, in fact, vibrant civilizations much different from those in the West. The other was the discovery of the New World, where civilization was much less developed on the whole, but where civilizations and belief systems were still different. So, in all of these ways, the universalism, the tendency to see Europe as a single community and as a unique community, as really the only way to have a community, uh, was subject to challenge.
Another problem from within had to do with the political situation in the Middle Ages. The two institutions that seem to represent universalism were, on the one hand, the Holy Roman Empire, and on the other hand, the Papacy. The Holy Roman Emperor, at least in theory, claimed to be sovereign over all of Europe. That was never, in fact, 100% the case, but he certainly enjoyed precedence over much of the rest of Europe for much of the Middle Ages. The Pope, on the other hand, claimed to be the head of all Christianity, and that was not 100% true either. In the High Middle Ages, the Eastern European Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, had ceased to recognize the authority of the Pope. But at least in the West, the Pope had represented a great degree of universalism, even more so than the Emperor.
But for much of the Middle Ages, the Empire and the Papacy, the two greatest representatives of Catholic universalism, had been at war with each other for supremacy, and that war had worn down both the resources and the claims of both Empire and Papacy. Finally, there was also the challenge to this notion of universalism from some rising Western kingdoms, kingdoms that had no intention of allowing the Empire to dictate their policy and were much, much more inclined to allow the Papacy to do so. This especially applies in the case of England, in the case of France, and in the case of the emerging nation of Spain.
Now, looking at the failure of reform, we talked in the previous lecture about the fact that there were a number of practices in the late medieval church that reformers within the church, reformers who were Christians themselves, who were Catholics themselves, found fault with, uh, in the institutional church. Simony, the sale of church offices; pluralism, the holding of more than one church office; absenteeism, holding an office without being present and actually doing the work; too heavy a reliance upon the saints, upon relics, upon pilgrimages, and lastly, upon indulgences.
And in a way, in the 15th century, the, the practice of granting indulgences to individual Christian believers became one of the most serious problems for reformers and became sort of emblematic of what was regarded as the problem of corruption in the church. The indulgence started out as a perfectly innocent practice. As you know, in the Middle Ages, everyone being Catholic, with the exception of a small Jewish minority and the occasional patch of heretics, most people followed the seven sacraments. And in order to go to communion, you were expected to first go to confession.
When you went to confession and confessed your sins, it was normal for the priest to grant you absolution, that is, to grant you on behalf of the church and indirectly on behalf of God, forgiveness for your sins. But as a general rule, there was also a penance to do, a sort of punishment, if you will, for the sins that was to remind you to do better in the future. This might entail saying prayers, a certain number of repetitions of the Lord's Prayer or the Hail Mary. It might involve doing charitable works. It might involve other things. But the point is, that's the normal procedure: confession, absolution, penance.
Once in a while, though, a priest, a confessor priest, might feel that the person confessing had already suffered enough, so to speak, had had felt so repentant about his sin or her sin that there was no need for a penance, and in that case, the priest might grant absolution without giving a penance. That's the original meaning of indulgence. Hard to see very much corrupt or problematic about that.
Now, where the problem began to come in is that often someone who was granted an indulgence in this fashion might demonstrate his gratitude by making a small offering to the church. Now, you see the sequence here: confession, absolution without penance, offering. The offering comes last, but it's very easy in, you know, people's minds to get this mixed up, to begin seeing it as paying for an indulgence, and in fact, that's one of the problems is that some people began to see it that way.
Now, a second issue here has to do with the fact that in the Middle Ages, people did not see heaven and hell as a strict one or the other alternative. It was assumed that most people who made an attempt to live a Christian life were not bad enough to go to hell, but most were not good enough to go straight to heaven either. Consequently, it was believed that most people would spend some time in a state known as Purgatory. If you're Catholic, you'll understand this. If, if not, perhaps not. But in any case, it was believed that most people would spend decades, perhaps centuries in the case of real scoundrels, even millennia in Purgatory. And Purgatory was rumored to be an extremely unpleasant place, in fact, sort of like hell with an exit. Therefore, nobody was eager to go there, and people tried to do many things in this life to reduce the amount of time they might spend there, saying extra prayers, going on pilgrimages, doing other holy works as a way of reducing time.
Now, again, one of the things that accelerated this was The Crusades. When Western Europeans first began going on crusades in the late 11th century with the object of taking back Jerusalem, which had recently been captured by the Islamic Seljuk Turks, the idea began to get around that if you went on crusade to Jerusalem, that you were doing the same thing as going on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, plus you were risking your life in fighting to bring Jerusalem back to the true faith. And this was thought to count as penance. In fact, the church encouraged this notion and suggested that in many cases, you might earn complete absolution from Purgatory altogether in this way.
Now, this got exaggerated in the popular mind as well. There were some people that believed, well, if you go on crusades, you can't possibly go to hell. That's not what the church taught, but it did teach that the church was a particular, or that going on crusade was a particular form of penance, and that therefore you could be granted a very large indulgence for doing that. Where the process starts to get corrupted is that during the later Middle Ages, especially, the church literally did begin selling indulgences. This became particularly a problem while the Papacy was located in Avignon and cut off from its revenues in Rome.
And this happened to coincide with a time when the church articulated a new doctrine where indulgences were concerned, having to do with something called the Treasury of Merit. Basically, this comes down to the theory that if most of us have any chance at all of getting into heaven, then there clearly have been some people, the Virgin Mary, the Apostles, the Saints, and what have you, who were far holier than they needed to be to meet the minimum requirement. And the assumption was that their merit, their virtue, their unused holiness was available in a kind of pool or treasury from which the church could dispense to other people.
And the practice developed of selling indulgences, which granted you a portion of that treasury of merit. And you can see where this might become a problem. You could buy your way out of 10 years in Purgatory, out of 20 years in Purgatory, 50 years, a hundred years, a thousand years, if you'd been a real rascal, and so on. And people did, in fact, buy them, which from the standpoint of reformers was problematic for a couple of reasons. One, it seemed unethical, and two, it seemed to give people a false sense of security about their salvation. The temptation was, of course, to think that you could go and sin freely and just buy enough indulgences to get yourself out of hot water, so to speak.
Where this got even more problematic in the late 15th century was when the church, in the person of Pope Sixtus IV, introduced the idea that not only could you buy indulgences for yourself, but you could also buy them for your deceased relatives. So if you believed your father was in Purgatory, for example, you could buy time for him as well, and for your grandfather, and your great-grandfather. So the potential to continue selling indulgences became greater and greater and greater.
Now, there were a number of attempts in the late 14th and 15th centuries to try to address the problem of corruption in the church, indulgences, and the other issues that I've mentioned. One of these was a movement known as Conciliarism. Conciliarism was an idea built around the notion that there was too much power concentrated in the hands of the Papacy, and that in fact, the church should be governed not by a single monarch-like individual, the Pope, but by a council representing all believers.
This, in fact, is the theory that lay behind the Council of Pisa in 1409, that attempted to end the Papal Schism with such disastrous results, ending up with three popes instead of two. It's the same idea that lay behind the Council of Constance from 1415 to 1417, and that did succeed in ending the Schism but failed to carry out additional reforms, although it had intended to. And this is the theory behind the Council of Basel, which met for much of the period from 1431 to 1445. But by that time, Conciliarism had about played out, and in fact, in the late 15th century, Conciliarism was actually declared to be a heresy. So Conciliarism ended the problem of the Papal Schism, it focused a good deal of attention on reform, but it did not accomplish reform, and it was ultimately driven out of the church.
Another reform movement that attempted to reform the church, beginning in the late 14th century, was associated with an English reformer by the name of John Wycliffe. John Wycliffe, in many senses, was a forerunner of the Protestants of a century and a half later in the things that he believed. He was an Oxford professor of Theology and also a clergyman, but he attacked the institution of the Papacy, questioned its validity, questioned, uh, its need for so much authority, and especially questioned the Pope's right to interfere in secular affairs. He questioned the need to have a separate and exclusive clergy. One of his big ideas was that people should be able to read scripture for themselves and draw their own conclusions, rather than having the clergy extrapolate for them. And so, one of the things he was responsible for was the creation of an English language Bible.
Wycliffe was suspicious of monasticism. He believed that the process of men and women living as monks and nuns was not productive, that it did not increase the chances of salvation, and that those people who were monks and nuns might be more effectively used elsewhere. He was doubtful about some of the sacraments. In fact, Wycliffe was willing to accept only three of the seven sacraments, two of which he could clearly find in scripture: baptism and communion, and the third of which, confession, he believed was a necessary adjunct of communion.
Wycliffe, in fact, had a powerful protector, the son of King Edward III, and lived to an old age and died peacefully in his bed. But he had many followers known as the Lollards, who shared his beliefs and who were, in fact, persecuted in the 15th century. A number of them were burned at the stake for heresy, and ultimately the movement was driven underground. So again, we have a reform movement that focused attention on the need for reform, but was driven out of the church.
Across Europe, in northeastern Europe, in Bohemia, what is nowadays the Czech Republic, a similar movement emerged in the early 15th century under the leadership of a man named John Hus, who had, in fact, been influenced by Wycliffe's teachings. John Hus taught many of the same things. He began to acquire a group of followers known as Hussites. But unfortunately, he was invited to attend the Council of Constance. He was granted safe conduct to do so, and therefore went to Constance believing he would be allowed to explain his positions in safety. Instead, he was arrested, tried, found guilty of heresy, and burned at the stake.
Now, the result of this was that back in Bohemia, it led to a rebellion, a rebellion against both the Emperor, who had nominal authority over Bohemia at the time, and against the Pope. Indeed, there was a war, a lengthy war known as the Hussite War, uh, in the 1420s and 30s, that eventually led to the church recognizing Bohemia as having the right to worship in a different way from the rest of the Catholic Church. So here, in the mid-1430s, you have a sizable state in Eastern Europe, Bohemia, which is really ceased to be part of the res publica Christiana. Another way in which universalism is breaking down.
Yet another form of reform that appeared in the 14th and 15th centuries was something called the Devotio Moderna, or the Modern Devotion. Not modern now, but it was modern then. This was associated with a reformer by the name of Gerard Groote, and the big emphasis of the Devotio Moderna was on individual pietism, that is, on a life dedicated to prayer and contemplation in addition to ordinary day-to-day affairs, that involve focusing on the inner self, looking for, you know, problematic elements within yourself, and also trying to bring out the good in yourself. Uh, people who were followers of the Devotio Moderna were not heretics. They didn't cease going to church. They simply focused more attention on their individual relationship with God, which, if you think about it, sounds rather Protestant in some ways.
Um, an even more famous follower of the Devotio Moderna came along in the 15th century. This was a guy by the name of Thomas à Kempis, who wrote a book called The Imitation of Christ, which set out to tell followers of the Devotio Moderna how to live a more Christ-like life. By the way, The Imitation of Christ is the, is the second highest selling Christian piece of literature in history. The only one that outpaces it is, in fact, the Bible itself.
Now, the problem here is that the Devotio Moderna greatly enhanced the spirituality of individual people, but it did nothing to change the problems within the institutional church. A final example I might mention comes from the end of the 15th century. There was a friar in the town of Florence by the name of Girolamo Savonarola, who attacked luxury, who attacked loose living, who was in, in some ways, kind of a puritanical version of a Dominican friar, very harsh critic of clerical corruption, but also very hostile to the whole direction of the Renaissance. He attracted a lot of followers, but there were many people who felt that his approach was primarily negative. And as a matter of fact, he fell afoul of one of the most powerful Popes of the Renaissance period, Pope Alexander VI, and wound up being convicted of heresy and burned at the stake.
So, the point of all of this is that there are a lot of reform movements in the late 14th and 15th centuries, but none of them succeed. We'll have to see what happens to reform movements in the 16th century.
Now, an aspect of the recovery that was taking place in the 15th century has to do with a lot of innovations that came along in the late 14th and 15th centuries that that began to quote unquote modernize life. One of these is what historians like to call the commercial revolution, that is, a greater emphasis upon commerce, both local and international, a greater reliance upon capital as opposed to land as a form of wealth, a greater interest in investing and banking and what have you. Also, the, the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping, which makes it much easier to keep track of your business.
There also was agricultural innovation in this period. Not exactly an agricultural revolution that would come later, but one of the things that comes with the rediscovery of ancient texts is a rediscovery of ancient texts on farming, and people began to farm a bit more scientifically, particularly in using a three-field system where they planted one field in the spring, another field in the fall, and used another field to pass your sheep and cattle, which of course fertilizes that field in a natural way.
There are also some new inventions this period. In this period, and two that have a particular impact on Europe from this point on. One was the inventing of printing. The invention of printing, the printing press, began arriving in Europe in the latter part of the 15th century, and it absolutely revolutionized the exchange of information. We like to talk about computers creating an information revolution. The printing press did the same thing in the 15th century, and when we get to the 16th century and see Protestants and Catholics clashing, they'll do so in print, and they will have readers all over the place.
The other invention was gunpowder. The introduction of gunpowder changed the nature of warfare. Not first of all in the way you might think. The first effective use of gunpowder was, in fact, in mining, that is, in digging underneath castles and blowing up the walls. But as time went on, gunpowder became better at building cannons. Small personal arms also were introduced, and gunpowder will change the whole nature of war.
Another big development, and one that contributed to the further breakdown of universalism, was, in fact, the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Constantinople was sort of the last outpost of the old Byzantine Empire, or what was left of the old Roman Empire in Eastern Europe. Constantinople, or Istanbul as it is now known, had been the capital of the Byzantine Empire, and in 1453, it fell to the Ottoman Turks, led by a very charismatic and effective ruler named Mehmed, or Muhammad II. Mehmed is interesting in and of himself, in that although he was fairly far removed from Europe, over in Asia Minor, he was very much affected by the Renaissance. He was interested in new technology. He had the world's largest cannon built for the siege of Constantinople, and he was the first Ottoman Sultan to have himself painted in the Renaissance style by a Western artist.
Once he had conquered the rest of the Byzantine Empire, he, in fact, adopted a policy of religious toleration, whereby Greek Orthodox Christians and Jews living in the area were free to practice their religion as they pleased, although they were taxed more. But his presence created a great deal of fear among local Christians, and in particular, a lot of Greek scholars left Greece at this time and came to the West, where they helped to reintroduce study of the Greek language and of Greek ideas into Italy, and then from Italy into the rest of Europe.
This leads us, therefore, to the discovery, or to the discussion of the recovery of antiquity, that is, the recovery of knowledge of the ancient world. By and large, in the Middle Ages, people had known relatively little about the history of ancient Greece and Rome, even less about what came before that, and not even very much about the early history of the church. But in the 14th, and especially the 15th centuries, people began to recover that knowledge. In fact, you know, now when we talk about European history, we talk about the ancient world, we talk about the Renaissance, as we're talking about it now, and we talk about what comes between the Middle Ages. That's a term that was actually invented during the Renaissance by people who saw themselves as modern, but as recovering everything that was good about the ancient world, and who therefore saw what came between as the Middle or the Dark Ages, that we no longer fully accept, but that's where the term comes from.
In any case, one of the things that happens in the 15th century is that there is a great recovery of knowledge in the Western world of two ancient languages. Educated people in Europe already knew Latin, but now it became a requirement that to be truly educated, you must also be able to read Greek, and you must also be able to read Hebrew. These were the three essential languages for a learned person, and this revolutionized scholarship. We have this influx of Greeks and Greek documents into the Western world, thanks to the fall of Constantinople. There also is an abundance of Hebrew material available, uh, in the West, and of course, you know, centuries worth of Latin material.
And in the 15th century, scholars began to go back and look at this, to look at the works of Plato in Greek, to look at various histories in Greek and Latin, and of course, to look at scripture. What language was the Bible written in originally? Well, mostly Hebrew and Greek. And people who could read Hebrew and Greek could go back and read the earliest manuscripts available of all the books of the Bible, and there was tremendous interest in doing this. And so you sort of have the birth of biblical scholarship here, with people going back and trying to find the very earliest, and therefore presumably most authentic, version of every book in scripture.
There was also a rediscovery of ancient art and a rediscovery of ancient science, which has great ramifications for the future. Let me give you some examples of individuals who were major figures, and please understand, these only are a few of many, but they are some of the most prominent. In the 15th century, I'm sorry, in the 14th century, there had been a scholar and poet by the name of Petrarch, who introduced a couple of very important concepts into Western thought. One of these was the idea of Christian humanism. Now, the way a lot of folks in the modern day use the word humanism, they use it to mean someone who is not religious, or someone who is even anti-religious. That's not what it means in this context. Humanism in this context means interested in man, interested in man in the same way that the Greeks were, in the same way that the Romans were, and therefore interested in what the Greeks and the Romans had to say. But it's Christian humanism, so it is the study of man, it is the study of ancient texts and ancient culture from a Christian point of view. Petrarch introduces that idea, and it becomes one of the dominant intellectual strains of Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries.
The other thing he came up with, and this is a revival of a Greek idea here, is the idea that man is the measure of all things. And what this means is that for the first time, people start to study man in his own right, or woman in her own right, humanity in its own right, not just in the context of other things. And this leads to all sorts of interesting developments as well.
Another important figure was a Greek scholar by the name of Manuel Chrysoloras, who actually fled from Constantinople even before the Turks got there, bringing to the West around 1400, uh, knowledge of the ancient poet Homer, the author of The Iliad and The Odyssey, knowledge of Plato's Republic, and wound up having a great many students in the West to whom he taught Greek and Greek literature and philosophy. Another bit later was a Greek name by the name of Georgius Gemistus Plethon, who came over in the late 1430s and brought still more knowledge of Plato along with him. And you have to understand that this is tremendously important. The only Greek philosopher known well in Western Europe in the Middle Ages was Aristotle, and Aristotle was the basis of a great deal of Western thought. Plato and Aristotle don't see eye to eye on everything, and what you have now in the 15th century is a huge debate between Aristotelians, followers of Aristotle, and Platonists, followers of Plato. And both, of course, try to claim that their position is right. Both try to claim that their position better explicates Christianity, but it becomes quite a stiff intellectual debate, and therefore the study of Plato becomes immensely important.
One of the most important students of Plato in this period was a Westerner by the name of Marsilio Ficino, who attempted a kind of Christian Platonic synthesis of thought, which is one of the great intellectual achievements of the Renaissance, but also is very controversial at the time.
With respect to biblical scholarship, one of the most interesting figures is a man by the name of Lorenzo Valla, who lived in the 15th century. He was a biblical scholar, and as such, he tried to read scripture in its earliest forms. And one of the things he began to discover by reading very carefully everything he could get his hands on is that there were a number of doctrines in the present-day church that didn't seem to have a scriptural basis. Furthermore, he studied other texts related to the early history of the church, and he wound up being involved in uncovering one of the great hoaxes in history. This was something called the Donation of Constantine. It was a forged document that was intended to prove that the ancient Emperor Constantine had given all of his power over to the church, which Constantine had not, in fact, done. Lorenzo Valla was able to prove that this was a forgery by showing that it used words that had not existed at the time. For example, if I tried to pass off to you a document as an American Civil War document and it mentioned astronauts, you'd know right away there was a problem with that document. Well, Valla was able to do the same thing.
Once he did this, people wanted to investigate everything to make sure that they had valid documents and the most accurate translations possible. They even did this when it comes to scripture, not out of any disrespect for scripture, but keep in mind how Bibles are made in the Middle Ages. They're copied by hand. Now, if you have time and want to experiment, you can actually sit down and copy out the Bible by hand, and then if you have somebody else who's your friend who's equally dedicated, maybe they can go through and count the mistakes you make. Obviously, this kind of way of transmitting scripture could create some problems. So again, extra emphasis to go back and get the earliest versions possible, to give them the most accurate translations possible, and thereby provide the most accurate Bible possible.
But in the course of doing this, again, it focuses more and more attention on scripture itself. More and more people are going directly to the scriptures for themselves, and that, as we will see, will have great consequences.
I want to change gears a little bit here now and talk a little bit about art. The Renaissance, of course, is famous for its artistic outpouring and for the development of much more realistic, uh, much more sophisticated artworks than had existed in the Middle Ages, when things tended to be fairly flat and disproportionate. Again, I'm giving you only a handful of examples here, but there are two things in particular I want to illustrate, uh, in pointing these out to you. One is how much they are influenced by the revival of antiquity. One of the things that artwork in the Renaissance does is that it puts a lot more emphasis upon getting things accurately, and nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the human form, when it comes to portraying human anatomy accurately. Man is the measure of all things. It also puts more interest, emphasis on perspective, more emphasis upon light, more emphasis on making things look real.
The second thing is, and and this very much points up the kind of fusion that's going on here between ancient pre-Christian ideas and Christianity itself. Almost any artist you look at in this period does a great deal of sacred artwork, sacred painting, sacred sculpture, and what have you. Almost all of them also do what you might call more secular, or if you want to use this bifurcation, sacred and profane. And so, side by side in the works of almost every artist, we find things that are influenced by Christianity and that are influenced by the revival of ancient paganism, not paganism as a religious practice, but images from ancient mythology that are adapted to art, and for that matter, adapted to literature, just as we today might watch a movie about Hercules, for example.
One of the first that I want to mention here is an artist who lived in actually the 14th century. This, this sort of gets started in art pretty early on, by the name of Giotto, or Giotto di Bondone. One of the things that he does is that he introduces space into his paintings. You start to get at least the perception of three dimensions rather than merely two, and there is an emphasis upon perspective. If you look at a lot of early medieval art, the people are usually too big. You'll see these gigantic people and little tiny boats, or gigantic people on little tiny horses, or gigantic people who are taller than the castles they're standing next to, and they also look a little bit like stick figures. Not in the work of Giotto.
The picture I'd like to show you now is from the Scrovegni Chapel. It's part of a whole series of paintings he did for the chapel there. This particular one is the Adoration of the Magi, but if you look at it, you can see all of those things: perspective, emphasis upon space, emphasis upon light, emphasis upon getting the human form right. Like a lot of artists of the Renaissance, Giotto was also an architect, and he was responsible for this figure that you see here, the Campanile di Giotto at the Church of Santa Maria del Fiore. Notice how classical the lines of this are, and what an impressive piece of both architecture and engineering this tower, or campanile, is.
That brings us next to Filippo Brunelleschi, who is primarily an architect. And the next picture you're going to see here is of the Dome of Santa Maria at the same church where you just saw the campanile. Notice that dome. It looks very much like the dome on the United States Capitol that we looked at in the last lecture, and in fact, it owes its inspiration to the ancient Romans, and it transmits the idea of the dome further down the line to subsequent churches all over Europe, to subsequent constructions during the Enlightenment, and in fact, to many of the domes that exist in the modern world. Brunelleschi was also responsible, among many, many other things, for the Pazzi Chapel, a chapel that he designed for the very wealthy and powerful Medici family in Florence. And again, you notice the very classical, simple lines of this, something that is drawn very much from the ancient world.
Renaissance art also produced sculpture, and one of the first great sculptors was the sculptor Donatello. If you look at the next two pairs of images here, on the left, you see an image of Saint George, the patron saint of Britain, uh, or England, rather, the, the saint who is supposed to have slain the dragon. And on the other side, you see a statue or sculpture of David, less famous perhaps than the David of Michelangelo, which we'll see a little bit later, but a famous one nonetheless. Note the careful attention to anatomy. That's one reason that you very often see sculpture, and indeed paintings, that are nude or partly nude during the Renaissance. There's there's nothing salacious about this. It's not meant to appeal to sexual instincts. It's meant to show the human body as it really is, to pay careful attention to anatomy.
The next individual I want to mention is Jan van Eyck, a Flemish painter, that is, one from the Netherlands. A man who perhaps more than anybody else revolutionized the use of light in paintings in this period. In this first one, you can see how light plays all around the figures, uh, here, and with this Madonna and Child. And if you look at some of the, the more middle-class paintings he did, he did quite a large number of paintings of families and what have you, you always see that play into it as well.
Another important artist of the 14th century was Masaccio, another Florentine. Florence was a very big center of art in this period. Uh, here we have Jesus and his disciples, all quite realistic looking, with a great deal of attention to perspective and space and what have you. I also want to mention the architect Bramante and encourage you to have a look at more of his work. I'm showing you only one example of an interior he did at a church in Milan here, another important center of Renaissance patronage, but this is really ingenious architecture, both in its aesthetic design and in the engineering that is necessary to pull it off.
Now, we come to one of the most famous, and and indeed many people's favorite artist of the Renaissance era, the remarkably productive Alessandro Botticelli. Uh, there are still tons of his paintings around today, in spite of the fact that many of them were misguidedly destroyed, buying among among other people, Girolamo Savonarola, who I mentioned earlier. Uh, just to show you that side-by-side juxtaposition of the sacred and profane, here we have first one of his many paintings of the Madonna and Child, all of them absolutely spectacular. On the other hand, if you look at this next picture, his Primavera, this is very clearly a painting with a pagan inspiration.
Then we come to Leonardo da Vinci. And let me just preface my remarks on Da Vinci by saying, The Da Vinci Code is a fun novel to read. Don't believe a word of it. It has nothing to do with the real Da Vinci or with real history. The real Da Vinci was interesting enough without making anything up. He was a painter, he was a sculptor, he was an architect, he was a scientist. He is a great example of a true Renaissance man, that is, somebody who could do everything and do it well. Of course, he is very well known, not least thanks to The Da Vinci Code, for the Vitruvian Man, which you see on your screen right now. What this is, of course, is not some sort of occult symbolism. It's a study of human anatomy, something to which Da Vinci devoted an enormous amount of time, doing very detailed studies of individual limbs, of individual muscles, of the head, and so on.
Of course, perhaps his most famous work is The Last Supper. And again, a good deal of nonsense has been expressed about what The Last Supper actually depicts in the book, in the movie, The Da Vinci Code. Uh, what it more realistically depicts is the Last Supper of Christ with his disciples. And I would be remiss if I didn't show the other most famous, uh, painting of Da Vinci, that is, of course, the Mona Lisa, a woman who continues to bewilder us with her smile. Everybody wants to know what she's smiling about, and nobody does.
One of the most remarkable things about Da Vinci is that he was, in some sense, about four or five hundred years ahead of his time. He had all these ideas for inventions that he simply lacked the technology to build, but he did them on paper. I'm going to give you a couple of examples here of of the many, many examples that exist. One of the things that he designed was a tank, which you see here. May look a little bit more like a flying saucer. Let's not start off in another conspiracy theory there, but it's meant to be a tank, an armored vehicle. He also developed plans for a helicopter. Didn't have the equipment to build one, but he understood the concept.
That next brings us to another particularly, uh, productive and bifurcated sort of Renaissance artist, Raphael. On the one hand, we have one of his many, many religious paintings here, one of the Resurrection of Christ. On the other hand, on the more pagan hands, so to speak, here is his representation of the Three Graces, again with considerable attention to human anatomy.
Nobody, of course, was better at studying human anatomy than Michelangelo. And looking at Michelangelo, of course, inevitably brings us to his statue of David. I don't have any, uh, pictures here of the Sistine Chapel. I recommend that if you can't go see the chapel itself, that you go online and look at the wonderful pictures they have of it there. A small picture simply does not do it justice. But look at the attention to musculature and to detail in this statue of David. It's just amazing.
Here again, we have a man in Michelangelo who mixes the sacred and the profane. On the one hand, you see here his famous Pietà, the Virgin Mary holding the body of the crucified Christ in her lap. On the other hand, we have obviously the most pagan of pagan symbols, the god Bacchus, who shows up south of here in New Orleans every spring around Mardi Gras.
Now, now, nothing talked about artists, I want to say just a little bit about discovery. Discovery is, of course, something you probably talk much more about in American history classes, but it is, of course, an aspect of European history as well. I mentioned at the outset of this lecture that explorers go in two directions in this period. After having explored down the western coast of Africa, one is that the Portuguese, inspired by the example and the patronage of Prince Henry the Navigator, a member of the Portuguese royal family, who was not, in fact, a sailor himself, but who bankrolled these expeditions, uh, managed to work their way down as far as the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa by 1488, in the person of the explorer Bartholomew Diaz.
Once he had reached the southern tip of Africa, the Portuguese realized that it was possible to go around Africa and to perhaps approach the Far East in that way. The Portuguese knew, like most educated people knew, that the Earth is round. The notion that most people in this period thought the Earth was flat is simply erroneous. At any rate, a decade later, Vasco da Gama, in fact, sailing on behalf of Portugal, made it to the southern tip of Africa, sailed up the eastern coast, and made his way over to India, where shortly he would establish trade with the people of India and cut into the valuable Far Eastern trade in spices and silks and other luxury items, helping to make his kingdom extraordinarily rich. From there, explorers would go on to China, onto Japan, and discover yet more civilizations drastically different from what they found at home, and contributing to that breakdown in universalism.
And finally, of course, there is the discovery of the New World. And as everybody knows, that is the work of Christopher Columbus. It is true that Vikings had been to the New World much earlier, but their visit had no long-term consequences. And although there has been a recent book that attempts to demonstrate that the Chinese reached America in 1421, in fact, even the Chinese denounce that idea. There is no hard proof for it. The first person to reach the New World with consequences was the Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus, sailing on behalf of Spain, or to be more precise, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. As you no doubt know, he made his first expedition in 1492, never actually made it to North America, but discovered a number of islands in the Caribbean and touched the coast of South America. Made a total of four voyages, uh, going down to 1504.
And of course, John Cabot, on behalf of the English King Henry VII, discovered the fishing waters off of Newfoundland, which have continued to enrich the English ever since. And in a series of voyages between 1499 and 1504, a rather undistinguished individual by the name of Amerigo Vespucci came along for the ride, so to speak, and wound up publicizing the discoveries in the New World, which wound up taking his name, so that we have North and South America rather than North and South Columbia.
In any case, the discovery of two new continents that nobody even knew existed also drastically altered the way that people thought, particularly when European explorers moved beyond the very primitive cultures they found in the Caribbean islands and made their way further inland, where they found the more elaborate remains of Aztec civilization, the civilization, uh, or the more elaborate relics of the Mayan civilization, the Aztec civilization, the Inca civilization in Peru, and so on. This too helped to bring about an end to universalism.
And the continuing problems in the church, the rising power of monarchy in Europe, and this assault on the idea of a single, unique, only way to do it, universal Christendom, all helped to set the stage later on for the Protestant Reformation.
I hope you enjoyed Dr. Robinson's lecture on Reform, Revival, and Renaissance. I definitely look forward to seeing you for our third lecture in the series for Western Civilization 102. Until next time.