Ep. 119: Art Reborn

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2022

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the 13th century, the world held its breath as it waited for a new kind of art to be born. Then came Cimabue—or was it Duccio? In this episode of Young Heretics, Spencer Klavan walks through the fascinating and complicated history of early Florentine Renaissance art, asking along the way what it might mean for us to seek rebirth out of a dark age.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, we are finally ready to ask the big question, where the heck did the Renaissance come from?
0:11.3	I asked the question in this way because if you've been following along,
0:16.0	then you know that we've kind of been investigating this question from the long view,
0:21.5	as part of our story with Georgi Ovasareas, our guide of how Italian art specifically,
0:28.9	and particularly in Tuscany, particularly in Florence, took on the shape that it took during
0:35.3	the, what's called the Dugento, or the 13th century, and thereafter. And I have been suggesting
0:41.5	that even though Vissari, you know, you can find fault with him in places, even though you could
0:45.4	criticize his sort of grand theory of the universe, nevertheless, he's fundamentally right. That's
0:51.2	basically been my suggestion that there is such a thing as decline in art, and there is such a thing as
0:55.6	success and what he calls perfection in art, and that fundamentally the idea has to do with
1:02.2	how convicted you are of the idea that the world is created with a divine order.
1:10.8	And I've been detailing the ways in which that idea kind of came into the world and passed out of it,
1:16.4	and we basically now got all of the elements in place, because you know, Vissari says,
1:21.6	rather interestingly, that the Christian church actually sweeps away a lot of the old pagan art
1:27.6	out of its zeal for establishing the true faith, right, for saying this is what actually
1:32.3	is true about metaphysics, which is true, important for the salvation of souls, and therefore,
1:36.3	unfortunately, we have to bid farewell to all these gods and goddesses and heroes and so forth.
1:41.1	And so we got to kind of like shrug that off and move in, you know, and the Christian church,
1:47.6	he says, Vissari, in that zeal kind of throws the baby out with the bathwater. And a lot of other
1:53.7	things have been going on at the same time. There's been decline already in the what becomes the
1:59.0	eastern and western Roman Empire, and then finally, just the western Roman Empire and the Byzantine
2:04.6	Empire, and that the decline is not solely down to the Christian church. It's also down to the
	...

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