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Volume
II, Issue 10
February 2000 |
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All the Time in the World by Anne M Carley By the late Middle Ages in Europe, the innovations that would flower in the Renaissance had begun to take shape: some individuals - secular individuals - could travel, purchase merchandise with money they earned, learn about new things, study the past, and distinguish themselves one from another in the world. Cities were growing, as were universities. At first the rinascimento of the Fourteenth Century was of the artifacts of Ancient Greece and Rome, and then their culture and ideas, first ignored and later lost during the Middle Ages. As the new era gathered steam, historians began to tie the word "renaissance" to developments throughout Europe and Britain in empirical science, mathematical perspective in art and architecture, geographic exploration, secularism, humanism, the growth of cities and the rise of mercantile wealth and commerce. Many hundreds of years later, we're hearing the term again, in flurries of self-definition. Maybe we're just flattering ourselves, or maybe there is something to the comparison. Now we buzz with a self-conscious sense of excitement - a kind of keyed-up, hopeful, uncertainty. Maybe we are becoming aware, as they may have done then, of potential: long-stored possibility, containable no longer. Now, as then, knowledge itself, now known as information, can translate to wealth and power. What we know, however, is framed in a haze - we see and experience only enough to realize we know very little, and are using clumsy tools. A cycle coming around in our time? As in the late Middle Ages, once again we find ourselves exhilarated by the power new science and knowledge can wield. Distinguishing marks may be different: monks then, scientists and mathematicians (perhaps "monkish"?) now; abbeys then, university research centers (funded with corporate and government support) now. What other characteristics do our era and theirs share? Learning directly about the human body, by dissecting dead ones, was an enormously important frontier crossed during the Renaissance, toward progress in scientific theory, research and medicine. Fear, superstition, and religious authority had to be overcome, first. Now perhaps our comparable fears are of bodies and laboratories together: cloning - making a living mammal conceived in a laboratory, and biotechnology - the joining of living cells with silicon chips to create thinking machines capable of subtlety and intuition. With the benefit of those intervening centuries to demonstrate that progress is inexorable, we can be confident those practices will develop, in spite of principled opposition and genuine fear. Exploration then meant braving uncharted oceans and eventually circumnavigating the globe. In our time, tiring of earth and our continual exploitation of it, we have ventured outward, off the globe to see what we can see. Whether of the world or of space, these explorations deliver vast opportunities for science and commerce, gradually transforming society with newly developed applied technologies, but. as importantly, with an open-endedness of outlook, hope for the future. Agrarian economies dwindled while urban centers developed, creating the possibility of wealth without real estate (and resulting as well in urban poverty). For our part, we may be saying in a few years that our "brick-and-mortar" methods of commerce - still similar in some ways to the methods developed in the Renaissance - are fading, transfers of cash to be replaced by transfers of information: intangible, invisible and so swift that virtual fortunes are regularly made, and lost. Patronage - from the Church, from monarchs, and, by the Renaissance, also from the titled and wealthy - built the towers and paid for the stonecutters and architects of Europe's monuments. Patrons these days can include corporations and governments as well as individuals, often supporting an artist or cultural institution for the duration of one project, and no more. The extravagant displays of wealth and ingenuity, once seen in cathedrals, now appear more often in entertainment. Movie stars and successful production companies now underwrite splashy new buildings, and commission works of art. They fill their new buildings with their art collections, along with unique handcrafted furniture, handwoven rugs, and high-tech amenities. There was a time when the then-skyscraper Woolworth Building in lower Manhattan was dubbed "the Cathedral of Commerce." No more. If we are seeing new three-dimensional cathedrals these days, they are more likely to show up in Florida or California (or outside Paris), in a movie studio's theme park. And supreme excess exists in the digital world, where imagined edifices can be as large as their creators want them to appear.
Siena Duomo (constructed 13th - 14th Centuries) entrance detail Medieval imagery intentionally, at least at first, rejected lifelike representation - too Roman - in favor of the non-physical, floating, otherworldly, and spiritual. (When Rome fell, its dissolution into chaos had left little fodder for nostalgia.) As early as the Fifteenth Century the mathematical and artistic breakthroughs by Brunelleschi and others returned, in a spirit of hope, to emphasize tangible, earthly mass, and explore the laws of structure. Physical reality once again became important, as important as symbolism. The differences between two and three dimensions could be collapsed for the viewer of a Renaissance painting, who was led into it as though the painting were a window on a far deeper reality, beyond. Upheavals of the Middle Ages' inviolable beliefs in an immovable, finite universe took many years - the pillars of religion and government were taken down by the tremors. Galileo ended his life under house arrest, for sacrilege. Erasmus relocated frequently, seeking freedom to study and write his principled analysis and criticism of church doctrines - Roman Catholic and Protestant. Eventually, those changes took root and grew on their own in ways both foreseen and unexpected. Parts of the European Renaissance involved rediscovery - of the philosophy, knowledge and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. The riches of the Renaissance, not hidden from us, but perhaps a little tarnished, may start looking brighter again in the oncoming rush of anticipation and renewed curiosity about humankind and our relationship to time and the universe. Symbols once more gain in importance for us - how else to try comprehending the fourth dimension, quarks, gluons, antimatter, or very large numbers? The graphical user interfaces of today's personal computing hide their binary underpinnings with imitations of desktops and trash bins, files and folders. Electronic reality now comes at our children in video games and otherworldly environments on DVD. We speak of turning away from old-fashioned reality, away from analog forms of knowledge and its storage - in books, for example - toward the evanescent, unlimited atmosphere where information lives. Not so fast - in a neat full circle, London's British Library recently employed new technologies to republish, electronically, the Eighth-Century Lindisfarne Gospels, the Golden Haggadah and a few more of Europe's oldest extant illuminated manuscripts, its proto-books. The project is called Turning the Pages. It seems visitors to the Library can turn the virtual pages of these digital facsimiles, using a touch-activated monitor screen. Cutting-edge technology is employed to provide more people with a lifelike experience - simulated page-turning - of manuscripts far too precious and rare, in their original form, to withstand the traffic. Not long ago collectors and curators of contemporary art worked on a project to fill a Renaissance palace with contemporary painting and sculpture. The interior had been damaged over time, and its contents stripped. Rather than gathering up antiques to make the palace entirely "authentic" they chose instead to fill the newly restored Renaissance interiors with art of the late Twentieth Century. It's a little reminiscent of the discoveries, around 1400, by Donatello and Brunelleschi, who wielded pickaxes to reveal statues and columns of Roman antiquity. They did not want to re-create ancient Rome as much as they wanted to integrate it with their age. Just as the Quattrocento drew on all that came before, our time benefits by drawing on the knowledge base, and heady attitude, formed in Europe seven hundred years ago or more. For our time to build on the sturdiest possible foundations, we can re-discover the Renaissance. Maybe we'll find we're at the cusp of another one. The instigators of the last one wore a number of hats: mathematician, architect, painter, sculptor, philosopher, teacher, scientist, inventor, historian, writer. Who are our instigators? Keep an eye on anyone you know with a hat-rack and some time to experiment. Resources: For more on the art and technology of manuscript illumination, see Prof. Kristin Redpath's article in this Newsletter. http://www.crs4.it/Ars/arshtml/arstitle.html is an impressive site - an entire course on The Art of Renaissance Scientists. The course of study was written by Joseph W. Dauben, Professor of History and of the History of Science at Lehman College of the City University of New York. The designer of the website - with animations and sounds and many illustrations - was Gary Welz, Lecturer in Mathematics at John Jay College, City University of New York. Careful explanations of developments in mathematics that fueled Renaissance painting and sculpture are clearly presented, with very helpful illustrations. The Duomo in Siena is illustrated and its history summarized at http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/sienacath/duomo.html Turning the Pages, an official "Millennium Project," can be found at the British Library on line at http://www.bl.uk/information/ttp.html About the Author: Anne M Carley edits this Newsletter. She has had supper in Siena. She has not yet had dinner at Disney World. |
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