Renaissance: The Age of Genius brings to life about 500 works by artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Sandro Botticelli, Titian and Caravaggio. Photo / Supplied
Renaissance: The Age of Genius brings to life about 500 works by artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Sandro Botticelli, Titian and Caravaggio. Photo / Supplied
Opinion by Christopher Longhurst
OPINION
The exhibition Renaissance: The Age of Genius on at Auckland’s Aotea Centre is not really about some of the world’s most beautiful art.
It is more about us, the human person as the crown of creation, and our capacity for greatness.
I think historians ended up callingthe Renaissance an age of genius not because of its accidental preponderance of amazing artists, but because of the extraordinary vision behind the art that advanced one of the most ideological programmes the world has ever seen.
In fact, Renaissance artists never even considered themselves primarily as artists. They were scientists and philosophers who studied knowledge, mathematics, physiognomy, geometry, architecture, logic and so much more. They dissected animals, including humans, and analysed plants and experimented in all things with a clear goal in mind: to make better art to boost confidence in humankind.
Renaissance artists were also celebrities. They acquired a broad favourable public image because they created an integral concept of the world focused on its inner unity and the role of the human person at the centre of that unity. They put art at the service of philosophy to make the great humanistic ideas of rationality, human rights, free speech, and happiness for all humanity palpable, effective, and life-changing.
They even filled traditional religious subjects with earthly content, focusing away from the divine and on human beings as images of the divine instead.
Up until the Renaissance, philosophers were rather aloof, contemplating religious ideas only.
What changed was Europe’s aristocratic leaders, such as the Medici, commissioning their most talented artists like Botticelli, Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo to promote what they believed mattered the most in life.
They did this by giving the artists a specific mission, to convey a simple philosophical message: life is short, live it fully, and be the best person you can be. They made those philosophical ideas part of the life of glamorous individuals and even sensuous deities whom ordinary people aspired to be like.
That is why we see in Renaissance art things like a very old man with a skull contemplating death in a field behind sexy lovers and cute baby angels.
Just like the subliminal adverts of today that trick us into buying a chocolate bar or perfume or the latest iPhone, Renaissance art was designed to take us subliminally into what the Medici were advertising.
To do so, artists like Titian and Raphael used what was already attractive to ordinary people – sexiness, nudity, love, and cute chubby angelic babies.
Through the beauty of a painting and the seductiveness of its content, the viewer naturally started to contemplate the deeper ideas of life and death.
In other words, the Renaissance was an age of genius because of an intensely sharp vision of what art should be used for – promoting human greatness.
The exhibition Renaissance: The Age of Genius may therefore be one of the sexiest philosophical shows Aotearoa New Zealand has ever seen.
For example, never has the Goddess of Love appeared more human than in Titian’s Venus of Urbino.
Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Photo / Supplied
An exercise in female eroticism, the youthful female, stark nude, stares directly at us lying on a day bed. Titian has used human beauty and sexiness to promote fidelity and modesty through the symbolism of a dog at her feet and the mother instructing her younger daughter to find Venus’s clothes.
Even more seductively, Raphael’s La Fornarina shows a young female looking directly at us with her warm, soft breasts exposed and a suggestive smile in a flirtatious invitation. We may have to return to the ideals of classical writings to understand the virtues of what she was advertising.
Raphael's La Fornarina. Photo / Supplied
However, unlike today, the Renaissance’s patrons were not using sexy people to sell luxury handbags or an SUV from the latest range. Their focus was not on advertising consumer goods.
They were giving away philosophical ideas about human existence, life and death, goodness and virtue.
They used beautiful art to promote the qualities of life that would make us happy. The energy and vision we still see today behind Renaissance art arose from a coherent ideology of using art to advance what the human person could be. Pictorial art has an enormous advantage over philosophy. We can see it and it impacts our emotions.
This was all underpinned by a philosophy worked out by Marsilio Ficino, a great Italian thinker who ran Plato’s Academy at Florence and taught Lorenzo de’ Medici and Michelangelo. Ficino contended that humans are creatures that love, and love is attracted first to beauty which is initially encountered through sexiness which leads us to love.
This theory impacted ordinary people through art. By making great art with real people, idealised and sexy, Renaissance artists drove a remarkable revival of individual and social human potential.
Christopher Longhurst. Photo / Supplied via RNZ
Further, they combined their sexiness with classical Greek and Roman values to inspire civic beauty. As a result, the public space became beautiful, refined, and appealing through ideas such as harmony, simplicity, balance, order, etc.
Rich people in society were no longer tempted to stay home and concentrate exclusively on lavishing more riches upon their private estates.
This may be the main reason why an exhibition such as Renaissance: The Age of Genius is so important for us today. It is no longer only about a philosophy that subliminally subsists in art.
As the people of the Renaissance looked back to the wisdom of the past for inspiration for their future, we too are invited to look back to the Renaissance to inspire us today.
In the end, Renaissance: The Age of Genius is not about seeing their world through our eyes, but rather about using their eyes to see our world today.
