AHR Forum
The Revival of Antiquity: A Fan's Notes on Recent Work
ANTHONY GRAFTON
THE RENAISSANCE IS BACK-IF IT EVER WENT AWAY. Kenneth Gouwens and Paula
Findlen give powerful evidence, in their lucid and lively essays, that the intellectual
history of Renaissance Europe continues to attract powerful scholarly minds and to
stimulate major projects in historical research. From the study of classical texts to
the holding of classicizing picnics, both writers show, historians are applying new
methods, excavating new sources, and using both to create new pictures of
Renaissance society-pictures as varied, colorful, and full of life as the term
"Renaissance" would lead one to expect.
Not all the pigments and methods these scholars have applied are as new as the
uses to which they have put them, and that is all to the good. In the history of the
Renaissance as elsewhere, Findlen and Gouwens agree, scholarly traditions now of
considerable age, as well as the revisionist intellectual histories written in the 1980s
and after, continue to offer vital information and stimulus. The classic studies of
Paul Oskar Kristeller, the greatest of all students of the field, still provide the most
powerful general definition we have of Renaissance humanism. Gouwens's effort to
supply a new one begins from a spirited tussle with Kristeller, me, and others who
have gone before-and draws on, as well as challenges, the older work. Findlen,
similarly, deploys materials from a rich tradition of scholarship on collections and
antiquarianism, one that long antedates the rise of her own approach to cultural
history. In their willingness to treat earlier scholarship as a living tradition, as in
their novel ideas, Gouwens and Findlen make clear why revisionism in the
Renaissance-unlike some other fields-does not simply rise up into the air and
dissipate. These revisionists are good philologists. Archive rats as dedicated to the
pleasure of the hunt for documents as to the devising of new theses, they are also
discriminating and well-informed readers of the older secondary literature. It is a
pleasure to engage in discussion with them.
For all the differences between them, moreover, Gouwens and Findlen converge
in a fascinating and attractive way. For both seek, above all, to move from the study
of texts and terms to that of individuals living in three-dimensional, human
contexts. Gouwens insists, with absolute justice, that Renaissance intellectuals did
not only meet the classical world when having their noses ground into the
Catilinarians at school. Humanists in High Renaissance Rome, he points out,
pursued jobs and love affairs amid classical ruins, which they explored as eagerly as
the bodies of their lovers. They posted poems in classical meters on the speaking
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statues of Pasquino and Marforio. They sat up late at dinner parties, worrying about
the exact length of the Roman foot. When they read classical texts, they not only
parsed hard sentences and identified allusions but also shuddered with pleasure or
writhed with horror. Ancient books deeply affected preeminently modern intellectuals, like Machiavelli and Guicciardini. Only by recovering this three-dimensional,
richly lived experience, in all its philological and emotional shadings, can the
historian do full justice to the humanists' contact with the classics.
Findlen draws on the wealth of her own earlier studies and on recent work by
Richard Goldthwaite, Lisa Jardine, Patricia Fortini Brown, and others. She argues
that scholars should seek the origins of the concept of the Renaissance itself in
another set of three-dimensional human experiences: that of the Renaissance
collectors who made their palaces and villas into artfully designed collections of
ancient and modern objects. Collectors pioneered in developing the sharp sense of
historical distance often seen as characteristic of the Renaissance. The Florentine
scholar Niccolo Niccoli, for example, became an expert evaluator of ancient gems,
filled his house with fragments of ancient art, and ate, like an ancient Roman, from
dishes of crystal. His biographer, the stationer Vespasiano da Bisticci, remarked
that it was a "gentilezza" (elegant experience) to watch Niccoli consume a meal. In
this environment, life and collecting became a form of art. It also became second
nature to organize works of art in historically meaningful ways. Eventually, the
paintings and sculptures of the Renaissance became subject to the same kinds of
study and evaluation as antiques. The belief in the artistic supremacy of the
Renaissance grew up, in short, not-or not only-in writers' studies but in the hot
pursuit of "objects of consumption." This insight, Findlen deftly argues, helps to
explain exactly why the study of objects still plays so central a role in any effort to
make the Renaissance accessible, in teaching or in public education.
Both authors share many virtues. Both work on periods and places, individuals
and forms of evidence, that earlier American historians of the Renaissance have
tended to ignore. My own teacher, the late Eric Cochrane, would have been
delighted to read two programmatic essays that show so clearly that Italian cultural
history did not end when the French invaded Italy. Both draw on the work of
scholars outside the straight and narrow discipline of history-from the literary
critics and Neo-Latinists whose work Gouwens uses to the art historians so
important to Findlen. Both Gouwens and Findlen, finally, write with clarity, force,
and wit-qualities always in too small supply.
I find myself in general agreement with their theses-not surprising, since I have
argued in a very similar vein in recent years, both in work produced in collaboration
with Lisa Jardine and others and in essays of my own on the history of reading, the
origins of archaeology, and other humanistic activities. Contact with the ancients
took public as well as private, ritual as well as textual, archaeological as well as
hermeneutical forms. Objects and their arrangement reveal an enormous amount
about the beliefs and desires of those who spent so much money and effort on
acquiring them. I have no polemical fireworks to launch. But I do have a tiny
caution to utter, less about the substance of these fine essays than about some
aspects of the rhetoric in which they are cast. It emerges, as will be clear, from
personal experience.
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Anthony Grafton
More than twenty years ago, Lisa Jardine and I began work on what became, in
1986, From Humanism to the Humanities. In those distant days, when leisure suits
were worn without irony and disco was the object not of nostalgia but of passion,
the culture wars had not yet begun. A single issue fascinated both of us-one more
or less the reverse of the issue that most engages Findlen and Gouwens, and one
quite unconnected with the problems of the age of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan. In histories of humanist education, we read what amounted to vivid,
three-dimensional evocations of the humanist school-re-creations of it as a theater
of pleasure and passion, a place of direct contact between students of high
sensibility and the ancients with whom they hoped to speak. In the primary
documents, by contrast, we encountered the remains of something quite different-a system apparently based on, and often confined to, drill and indoctrination.
We found the contradiction exciting-not because we thought the various forms of
evidence we uncovered could tell "the whole story" of humanist education but
because we thought that they must be used by anyone who wanted to create an
account of the humanist school that did some justice to the lived experience of its
pupils. We never claimed that classroom notes-or any other single sourceoffered a complete record of the transactions among teacher, text, and pupil. In
fact, we cited a wide range of evidence, from the notes of students to the rituals of
teachers, and even attended to the ways in which some teachers tried to make their
students speak and act as Romans, in classical settings. We wanted to argue that a
three-dimensional re-creation of humanist education had to include, and in part to
rest on, these materials-as opposed to the educational manifestoes, the equivalent
of modern college catalogues and web sites, in which teachers described what they
offered. In advancing this argument, as we said, we followed the lead offered by
historians of classical education in antiquity-above all, H.-I. Marrou. But we also
had in mind our own experiences as teachers, which had led us to believe that any
full account of modern university life must pay attention to the messages students
actually receive-as opposed to those that teachers transmit. A recording of a
lecture tells one less about the students' experience than the teacher's erudition and
eloquence, unless one can read against it the notes that students actually took and
the exams on which they tried to use what they learned.
Using a language that, read in retrospect, resounds quaintly with the struggles of
the 1960s, we set out to argue that the school, for most of its inhabitants, did not
resemble Machiavelli's study or Colocci's dinner parties. We also tried to suggest
some of the reasons why a system of education that did not sparkle when examined
closely still won the loyalty of so many patrons and parents. But by the time our
book finally appeared, ignorant-and learned-armies were clashing by night over
the canon. Both our conservative and our radical readers often interpreted our
book in ways hardly consonant with our intentions-and connected it with
intellectual movements that had not existed when we began work. Even though we
succeeded in stimulating debate over what had previously been a staid realm of
Renaissance studies, much of it hardly followed the paths we had expected, and not
all of it was productive. This personal note, moreover, suggests a second point of
wider methodological interest. In describing the humanist school as we did, Lisa
Jardine and I meant to suggest that Renaissance experiences of antiquity differed
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radically. The differences depended in part on whether the one doing the
experiencing was male or female, child or adult, patrician or plebeian; in part on
where, and in what circumstances, the reader went to work. Some intellectuals met
the ancients as adults, colliding with them head on, asking personal questions and
receiving detailed answers (our "charismatic teachers" certainly had such experiences )-especially in the long years they lived after school was out. But others met
the ancients as texts, on paper; they never saw Cicero, in their minds' eyes, standing
at his podium to denounce the enemies of Rome, but they memorized many lists of
adjectives and figures of speech, which they later obediently reproduced in endless
passages of patchwork Latin prose. The Renaissance could be, and sometimes was,
a passionately lived revival of the antique. But it could also be, and often was, a long
subjection to a discipline, the ultimate purpose of which remained unclear.
Only close attention to the details of texts-from textbooks and class notes to
humanist poems and orations to inventories of museums and histories of art-can
enable the historian to determine how any given humanist read ancient books or
ancient buildings. The three-dimensional re-creation of the Renaissance of antiquity cannot be confined to text-based intellectual history. But it must rest on that or
risk returning to the sorts of unhistorical assumption that once dominated
Renaissance intellectual history. The characters and qualities of experiences of the
past varied as enormously as every other form of experience, from one generation
to the next and from one of Italy's many cultural microclimates to another. Scholars
who do not bear such points in mind run the considerable risk of blowing back into
kinetic life not only the bones of those who once danced-but also those who never
did. Some schoolboys are Tom Brown's Flashman, some consumers are Our Mutual
Friend's Veneerings. Precision and discrimination in reading the sources will enable
scholars to tell them from the Petrarchs and Sadoletos, the Giovios and Medicis,
whose passions and sensibilities Gouwens and Findlen have reconstructed with so
much flair and erudition.
Anthony Grafton teaches Renaissance and Reformation history at Princeton
University. His books include Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical
Schorlarship (1983-93), Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western
Scholarship (1990), and Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and
Renaissance Readers (1997).
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