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 The powerful influence of the Italian Renaissance on art, architecture, literature, philosophy, music, and government is beyond dispute. But many questions are still debated. When did the Renaissance start and when did it end? How did women and the poor experience the Renaissance? Moreover, the Renaissance contains many striking contradictions. The Italian city-states were intense competitors, and this competition, according to some historians, was important for the cultural fertility of the Renaissance. Yet these cities also fought each other so bitterly that they created a power vacuum enabling the often destructive intervention of foreign kingdoms. The wealth of late medieval Italian cities is widely believed to have created a strong structure of sponsorship enabling artists to produce. Yet the period of the Renaissance also witnessed the catastrophic Great Plague, and trade lanes at the end of the 15th century shifted decisively to the Atlantic seaboard, leading to a long economic decline of Italy and the Mediterranean region. The Renaissance prefigures the secularism and rationalism of the enlightenment, yet the period also spurred religious fanaticism and infighting.
Regardless of how we answer these questions, the Renaissance remains a fascinating and multi-dimensional period. It is a nodal point for the transmission of antique ideas and art forms into modern Europe and the world, and at the same time it is a foundation for many modern developments. Crucial concepts of modern science come from the Renaissance. Political theory received decisive impulses, and the origins of modern diplomacy are often traced back to the microcosm of the Italian city-states in this period, where embassies fulfilled functions from spying to conflict limitation. The violin was perfected as an instrument in this period. As alums return to their alma mater, we should also consider how the liberal arts ideal represented by Colby can be traced back to the Renaissance and how the Renaissance in this sense has shaped all of our lives.
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Raffael Scheck
Raffael Scheck is professor of history and teaches modern European and German history. He has published on German right-wing politics and French colonial soldiers as prisoners of war in the Second World War. The German translation of his book Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940 was selected as number four of the 10 best non-fiction books in Germany in 2009. Raffael is now writing a book on all French colonial soldiers as German prisoners of war in World War II. After discovering an unknown captivity report of Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first president of Senegal (1960-80) and renowned poet and philosopher, Raffael is also finalizing an article on Senghor’s experience as a German POW.
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Véronique Plesch
In a popular art historical textbook the chapter on the 14th century is titled “The Dawn of Individualism.” Here lies the origin of the term "humanism," a new interest in the individual, who is no longer a "viator mundi," an earthly pilgrim bound for heaven, but has become a "faber mundi," a creator and master of the world. This presentation will focus on major monuments created in Italy during the following century, the Quattrocento, real apex of Renaissance art, and through them allows us to observe the individual in different realms: in the church, in the town, at court, and simply at home.
Véronique Plesch is professor of art and teaches courses in late medieval, Renaissance, and baroque art. She also team-teaches the Survey of Western Art. The author of three books and editor of four volumes, she has published some forty articles in Europe and the United States in French, Italian, and English on subjects ranging from late medieval and Renaissance iconography to Alpine art, and from Passion plays to early modern graffiti, with forays into contemporary art. She is president of the International Association of Word and Image Studies and vice president of the New England Medieval Conference.
Todd Borgerding
Musicians struggled with the Renaissance. Where artists, poets, and philosophers could take inspiration from the visual and written legacy of antiquity, musicians, when they turned to the same sources, were met with silence. They read in Plato and Aristotle about the affective powers of music and the place of that music in society, but they were left to guess at what that music sounded like. The process of discovering a music equal to the changing world was a long one, but it was worth the wait: the result in the 16th century was a new musical language whose basic principles still remain in effect today.
Todd Borgerding is associate professor of music. He teaches music history and directs the early music ensembles, and he has performed with the Boston Schola Cantorum and the Madison Viol Consort. He has published on topics ranging from gender and sexuality in the Renaissance to music and liturgy in the Counter Reformation.
AFTERNOON: Discussion with professors Plesch and Borgerding
EVENING: Concert
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Larissa Taylor
Commonly called the "father of Italian humanism," Francesco Petrarch (1304-74) spent much of his life as an exile in Provence. Enjoying the patronage of the papal court at Avignon, he composed important works reflecting on life, love, and a longing for a return of the papacy to Rome. While denouncing the greed of the curia by calling it the Babylon of the West, he benefited enormously from the largesse of cardinals and popes, which made possible many of his writings. Yet when he first went to Rome in 1337, he was disillusioned, asking "Where are the numerous constructions erected by Agrippa, of which only the Pantheon remains? Where are the splendorous palaces of the emperors?” One of the most complex figures of the Renaissance, Petrarch was also caught between love of God and love of the world, solitude and civic duty, the classical world and the age in which he lived. His self-reflections, commentaries, and poems speak to the critical questions of the early Renaissance.
Larissa Juliet Taylor is professor of history. She is president of the American Catholic Historical Association and is the author of numerous books, most recently The Virgin Warrior: The Life and Death of Joan of Arc.
Allison Cooper
Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) symbolizes many of the contradictions of the period in which he lived. Excluded from aristocratic society by the circumstances of his birth, his satirical writings mocked the very Renaissance courts upon which he and other authors depended for recognition and patronage. A vocal proponent of the autonomy of the artistic work, he was also one of the first men of letters to possess a mercantile spirit—to conceive, that is, of his work as a commodity. Aretino's conflicted relationship with the court and his understanding of the economic value of artistic production were often represented in his writings as a conflict between two Renaissance cities: papal Rome and the Republic of Venice. For Aretino, the former constituted a kind of hell on earth, characterized by the vagaries of fortune, deception, and intrigue, whereas the latter constituted an aesthetic and economic paradise, characterized by physical beauty, harmony, health, wealth, and economic stability. Through examples drawn from Aretino's life and work, this presentation will explore the relationship in the Italian Renaissance between the author and the court, the changing status of the work of art, and the social, cultural, and political differences between two of the Renaissance's preeminent cities.
Allison Cooper is the Paul D. and Marilyn Paganucci Assistant Professor of Italian. She teaches a variety of courses on Italian language, culture, and cinema, from Sicily, the Mafia, and Contemporary Italian Society to A Cinema of Social Conscience. She has published articles on Italian modernism and cinema and is currently at work on a cultural history of Rome's conflicting identities as capital of Christendom and capital of the Italian state titled Modern Rome Between the Sacred and the Profane.
AFTERNOON: Discussion with professors Taylor and Cooper
EVENING:
President William D. Adams
Film after talk
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Joseph Reisert
Niccolò Machiavelli faithfully served the republican government of Florence as a statesman, diplomat, and soldier, but his career was abruptly terminated in 1512 when the Medici regained supreme authority in the city. In retirement Machiavelli reflected on his own political experience in Renaissance Italy and studied carefully the political histories of classical antiquity. Desiring, as he put it, "to write something useful to whoever understands it," Machiavelli rejected the traditional practice of describing "imagined republics" and instead revealed the "effectual truth" of political life in his masterpiece, The Prince. This session will offer an introduction to Machiavelli’s political advice to the new prince and will ask whether that advice is as immoral as the epithet “Machiavellian” suggests.
Joseph Reisert is the Harriet S. and George C. Wiswell Jr. Associate Professor of American Constitutional Law. He has taught American constitutional law and the history of political thought in the Government Department since 1996, and he is currently serving as department chair. The author of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Friend of Virtue, he has published scholarly articles on the political thought of Rousseau, Kant, and Xenophon as well as on topics in constitutional law and jurisprudence. For the last five years, he also has been a regular political columnist for Waterville's Morning Sentinel and the Kennebec Journal.
David M. Freidenreich
A fierce debate broke out in early fifteenth-century Padua between a law professor and a Franciscan monk. The issue? How to define the meat of an animal owned by a Christian but slaughtered by a Jew. What seems at first glance to be the butcher-shop equivalent of a tempest in a teapot in fact sheds valuable light on the ways Renaissance intellectuals thought about Jews, about Christian traditions, and about the respective roles of Church and city-state in regulating local economic affairs.
David M. Freidenreich is the Pulver Family Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies. His forthcoming book, Foreigners and Their Food, explores how Jews, Christians, and Muslims conceptualize "us" and "them" through rules about the preparation of food by adherents of other religions and the act of eating with such outsiders.
AFTERNOON: Discussion with professors Reisert and Freidenreich
EVENING: Film
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