Long read: Was the Renaissance Real?

Adam Gopik is one of the best essayists in the world. Here he reviews two new books – Bernd Roeck’s “The World at First Light” and Ada Palmer’s “Inventing the Renaissance” – which question the received wisdom that the 300 years roughly between 1450-1750 AD are a turning point in the history of Western civilisation.

This long, deep essay is worth reading because it provides one very powerful insight: how we can nail down phase changes or regime shifts in history (or music, or sport, or investing for that matter) is NOT by looking at what came before and comparing it what came after BUT by looking at the speed of change. To be precise, if the speed of change accelerates – as it did in Western music in the decades after World War II or as it did in Italy in the 15^th century (as it has done in Indian investing over the past decade or in Indian cricket after the IPL) – then you know with reasonable certainty that a new era has begun.

Mr Gopnik’s illustrates this point with a brilliant analogy involving rock music:

“With minimal ingenuity, any historical period can be made to dissolve into the ones around it. Take the rock revolution—that great shift which, emerging in the mid-nineteen-fifties and established by the mid-sixties, definitively separated the Broadway-and-jazz-based tunes that had previously dominated popular music from the new sound. The break ravaged record companies and derailed careers. In the fifties, the wonderful jazz-and-standards singer Beverly Kenney performed a song she’d written called “I Hate Rock ’n’ Roll,” and then—perhaps for other reasons, but surely for that one, too—took her own life.

But listen closely and you hear continuities stronger than any rupture. The second song that the Beatles sang to the American public was a Broadway ballad from “The Music Man.” Chuck Berry, their hero, worshipped Nat King Cole, with Berry’s great rock songs of the fifties being variants on Cole’s witty hipster jazz songs from a decade before. (Berry also took most of his guitar licks from the sophisticated jazz guitarist Carl Hogan, of Louis Jordan’s band.) And the elements of Leonard Bernstein’s or Richard Rodgers’s music within the best work of a Paul Simon or a Paul McCartney are as obvious as is the intertwining of Miles Davis and Jimi Hendrix. It was in the record business’s interest to convince the teen-agers to whom it was selling music that their music was nothing like their parents’ music. But the rock revolution can easily look more artifactual than authentic.

To anyone who grew up in the period, this is a bit absurd. Of course, the rock revolution was real; of course, the rock era was an era, with signatures and styles all its own. The first song that the Beatles sang was self-composed, in itself a huge change. By 1967, when “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” were wildly popular, the musical world had become completely different from what it had been a few years earlier. Still, attempts to dissolve a period, however unpersuasive, can be instructive, because they make you think hard about what a period style is…

“It fades into this and fades into that,” Chuck Berry wisely said, when he was mapping the innovations of his music. “Most people’s impressions overlap other people’s impressions, and music is like that, too,” he added, shrugging off the charge of being either an absolute innovator or a mere conservator. Sometimes the speed of art simply accelerates. One might prefer…the simpler things, liking the Pre-Raphaelites more than Raphael, as much as we prefer vinyl to Spotify. But the painterly resources available to Raphael were vastly larger than those available to an artist a scant half century before, as the musical and lyrical resources available to a pop musician in 1970 were incommensurable with those available to a pop musician in 1960. Style is necessarily hybrid, but there are times when cultural speed really does get supercharged, in ways that draw on the past to create something new.”

Then Mr. Gopnik takes this delightful mental model and applies it to the Renaissance (whilst drawing upon the material from the two books referenced at the beginning of this piece). He first lays out the argument in favour of the Renaissance:

“Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, many educated Europeans and Americans shifted their model of a great-good-place-back-then from ancient Greece and Rome to Renaissance Italy. This re-evaluation coincided with nineteenth-century aestheticism—the idea that art could rival faith as a reason for living—and with a revived appreciation of material progress. Renaissance people didn’t just think things; they made things. And so celebrating the Renaissance became a way to pay respect to prosperity and materialism. When Walter Pater published “The Renaissance,” in 1873, he was implicitly aligning Botticelli with William Morris and the craft revival. Two decades later, when the art historian Bernard Berenson praised the “tactile values” of Italian painting, he was linking Giotto to the pragmatism of William James.”

Then he lays out the argument against treating the 300 period between 1450-1750 any differently from the time period before it and after it:

“If it was really a rebirth of a classical past, why are its greatest monuments all Catholic affirmations of faith? If it marked a break with medievalism—well, what medievalism? Dante and Petrarch’s clear vernacular preceded what we now call the Renaissance. As the art historian Erwin Panofsky long ago observed, Europe saw many “renaissances” in classical form long before the fifteenth century—the rounded arches of Romanesque architecture in the twelfth century, for instance. Perhaps the Renaissance appeals to the modern imagination because it was an invention of the modern imagination…

Ada Palmer….goes deep into the minutiae of the lives of Renaissance luminaries to show that, far from being idealists reaching for the rebirth of a better world, they were the usual human mixture of self-promotion, self-delusion, and fakery. The Renaissance cities, far from being principalities of prosperity and enlightened rule, were desperately poor, violent, and anarchic. They turned to antiquity more for consolation than for confident renewal…

The Renaissance, in Palmer’s view, was a series of idiosyncratic local arrangements. It was given a shine later by those who needed something shining…Palmer argues that, under close scrutiny, the whole idea collapses into contradictions…or Palmer, then, the Renaissance is not so much a golden age as a glittering illusion—assembled, reassembled, and ultimately undone by the longings of those who came after.”

We at Marcellus are simply lovers of Italian food & wine. We are no experts on the history of the Renaissance but what we love is the questioning of received wisdom and the creation of new mental models. The two things are often connected.

If you want to read our other published material, please visit https://marcellus.in/blog/

Note: The above material is neither investment research, nor financial advice. Marcellus does not seek payment for or business from this publication in any shape or form. The information provided is intended for educational purposes only. Marcellus Investment Managers is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and is also an FME (Non-Retail) with the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) as a provider of Portfolio Management Services. Additionally, Marcellus is also registered with US Securities and Exchange Commission (“US SEC”) as an Investment Advisor.