The Renaissance: Was it a Thing? - Crash Course World History #22

Hi, I'm John Green, This is Crash Course: World History and today we're going to talk

about something that ought to be controversial: The Renaissance.

So you probably already know about the Renaissance thanks to the work of noted teenage mutant

ninja turtles Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael. But that isn't the whole story.

Mr. Green, Mr. Green. What about Splinter? I think he was an architect.

Ugh, me from the past, youíre such an idiot. Splinter was a painter, sculptor, AND an architect.

He was a quite a Renaissance rat.

[theme music]

Right, so the story goes that the Renaissance saw the rebirth of European culture after

the miserable Dark Ages, and that it ushered in the modern era of secularism, rationality, and individualism.

And those are all in the list of things we like here at Crash Course.

Mr. Green. I think you're forgetting Cool Ranch Doritos?

Yeah, fair enough.

Then what's so controversial? Well, the whole idea of a European Renaissance presupposes

that Europe was like an island unto itself that was briefly enlightened when the Greeks

were ascendant and then lost its way and then rediscovered its former European glory.

Furthermore, I'm going to argue that the Renaissance didn't even necessarily happen.

But first, let's assume that it did. Essentially, the Renaissance was an efflorescence of arts

(primarily visual, but also to a lesser extent literary) and ideas in Europe that coincided

with the rediscovery of Roman and Greek culture.

It's easiest to see this in terms of visual art, Renaissance art tends to feature a focus

on the human form, somewhat idealized, as Roman and especially Greek art had.

And this "classicizing" is also rather apparent in the architecture of the Renaissance which

featured all sorts of Greek columns and triangular pediments and Roman arches and domes. In fact,

looking at a Renaissance building you might even be able to fool yourself into thinking

you're looking at an actual Greek building, if you sort of squint and ignore the fact

that Greek buildings tend to be, you know, ruins.

In addition to rediscovering, that is, copying, Greek and Roman art, the Renaissance saw the rediscovery

of Greek and Roman writings and their ideas.

And that opened up a whole new world for scholars, well, not a new world, actually since the texts

were more than 1000 years old, but you know what I mean.

The scholars who examined, translated, and commented upon these writings were called

humanists, which can be a little bit of a confusing term, because it implies they were

concerned with, you know, humans rather than, say, the religious world.

Which can add to the common, but totally incorrect, assumption that Renaissance writers and artists