W: I hope you’ll all recall our lively discussion of Renaissance art from last week. We talked about such artists as Botticelli and DaVinci, who really characterized the Renaissance through their artwork. Art, however, is not created in a vacuum. Art is a reflection of the world, through the eyes of the artist. So, what was going on in the world to inspire such great art? Well, that’s the topic of today’s lecture. We’re going to talk about the intellectual and social movement that underlay the Renaissance. The movement was called humanism. So, what is humanism? Let’s go back to the word “Renaissance.” As we talked about last time, the word means “re-birth,” and that’s just what humanism was. It was a revival of antiquity. Antiquity, in this case, refers to the classic civilizations of Greece and Rome. Now, following the fall of the Roman Empire, we had about a thousand odd years in which... well...nothing of note in the art world really happened. These we call the Middle Ages. Now, the dominant school of thought during the late Middle Ages was called scholasticism. That’s “scholastic,” like school related things, plus “ism” --- scholasticism. A large part of humanism, the new idea in the Renaissance, was its rejection of scholasticism. The humanists felt that the scholastics were focusing too much on the Church. So, the humanists were rejecting the predominant, intellectual school in favor of the classics. The humanists studied the classical civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome and applied what they learned to their current society. It’s not that the scholastics didn’t know about the classics, they just tried to analyze them in such a way that the classics agreed with the Church. That was their whole purpose, to find ways to reconcile Greek and Roman philosophy with Christian theology. In the minds of the humanists, society had been going in the wrong direction since the fall of the Roman Empire. Not that they wanted to return to those times, but they felt that more could be learned from antiquity than from anything that had happened since. It was this revival of old ideas that changed the way that European people in the late Middle Ages thought. Humanist thinkers started to create new kinds of art and literature. They even changed the way societies thought about education, law, and, well, everything. Simply put, humanism was the basis of the Renaissance.