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Were the Renaissance humanists secular? My paintings say otherwise

Chiara Bellandi Contributor
· 4 replies · 194 views
HistoryMedieval ChristianModern EuropeanPlatonism#ficino#renaissance-humanism#secularism#studia-humanitatis
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I restore Renaissance panel paintings in Florence. Visitors to the studio often tell me, kindly, that the Renaissance was when "humanism" replaced religion, when people stopped looking at God and started looking at man. Then they look at what's on my easel, which is almost always a Madonna, a saint or an altarpiece.

The man I know best from that world is Marsilio Ficino, who translated Plato into Latin for the Medici and wrote a long work arguing for the immortality of the soul. He was also a priest. He is called a humanist in every book. So is Petrarch, who wrote about his own spiritual struggles in dialogue with Augustine. So is Erasmus, who edited the Greek New Testament.

So what did "humanism" actually mean in the fifteenth century, and when did it come to mean "without religion"? I'd like to be able to give my visitors a short, accurate answer.

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4 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Giulia Ferrante

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    The short answer for your visitors: Renaissance humanism was a curriculum, not a worldview.

    The studia humanitatis were a group of subjects: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy, studied through classical Latin and, increasingly, Greek texts. An umanista in fifteenth-century Italian slang was someone who taught them, much as a legista taught law. The aim was eloquence and practical wisdom, recovered from the ancients and put to use in civic and Christian life. Almost all the humanists were believing Christians, many of them clergy. Erasmus's edition of the Greek New Testament (1516) and Thomas More, who was later canonised, are about as far from secular as you can get.

    The abstract noun "humanism" itself is much later. It was coined in Germany in the early nineteenth century, for an educational ideal based on the classics. The sense of a worldview without religion, "secular humanism", is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century development. Reading it back into Ficino makes the period unintelligible, as your easel shows every day.

Other answers

  1. Rafael Moreno Gálvez

    Contributor

    Spain gives a good example of humanist method serving faith directly. At Alcalá, under Cardinal Cisneros, scholars prepared the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, setting the Hebrew, Greek and Latin texts side by side. That is humanist philology, the return to the sources in the original languages, put to work on scripture. Nobody involved thought they were leaving God behind.

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  2. Mona Fathy

    Contributor

    One thing worth adding for your visitors, Chiara. A programme of literary and ethical formation through classical texts, rhetoric and history, aimed at the cultivated whole person, had flourished in Arabic as adab centuries before Petrarch. It is almost never called humanism, which says more about the history of the word than about the thing. I'm starting a separate thread about it.

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  3. Chiara Bellandi

    Contributor

    Thank you, Giulia. "A curriculum, not a worldview" is exactly the sentence I needed, and I'll add that the word itself is nineteenth century. Mona, I'll look for your thread. The longer I work on these panels, the more I suspect we invented the Renaissance we wanted.

    Helpful · 3