The Renaissance: A Short History

I checked out this book from the local library and I'm ready to purchase a copy for myself. Informative, delightful and easy to read, I was eager to turn each page and learn fresh and fascinating facts about each artist presented. My only reason for giving this text a 4 star is for the absence of images. Each instance an artwork was described or compared to another, I longed for a visual. I had to either refer to other books or seek the internet. I often find it difficult to read about art, without seeing it. Overall, this book was very enjoyable though!

This is the first book I read of Paul Johnson's that is not a kilopage tome. In less than 200 pages, Johnson gave the Renaissance a most delightful treatment. This book will disappoint those who try to look for exhaustive treatment of any area of literature and art of that fabulous era, or of any of the fabled masters. But it delights the reader with a short tour of the Renaissance Italy (and to a lesser degree, Europe) by vivid illustrations of some of the most outstanding literary, architecture and artistic accomplishments and the personalities behind them.A most valuable part of this small volume is its casting of the Renaissance in a historical and geographical context. What brought about this marvelous revival of high arts? How was it related to the Gothic tradition? How some "imported" technologies, such as the movable type printing press from Germany and the oil paint from the Low Countries, were enthusiastically adopted by the Italians in propagating ideas and revolutionizing art forms. How the guild system produced successive generations of artists and also contemporaneous competition. Roles played by local politics and art patrons, and, of course, the church. And how eventually the French and German invasions from the north undermined the power foundation of this spectacular flowering of the arts, while ushering in the era of Reformation and the Baroque.As a short history book - rather than a subject matter book - I find it informative, illuminating and well worth a couple of evening's reading time.

The beauty of this book is its size and simplicity. Perhaps the best thing the compilers of the Modern Library Chronicles Series did was use historians who have the literary style and writing ability to clearly explain the complexities of THE RENAISSANCE and possess the skill to do so in under 200 pages. I can't imagine a situation like this - but if ever an occassion arose where you would need immediate access to some fact on Renaissance architecture, literature, paintings or sculpture - you could just pop out this little pocket-sized volume. It's that small. The book begins and ends with a discussion of the economic, technological, and cultural factors that both brought about the Renaissance, and contributed to its decline. Printing by movable type was "the central technological event of the Renaissance" and was a prime mover in the spread of the culture of this golden age. Johnson in fact says it was "the most important cultural event by far of the entire period." Johnson shows how the Reformation with its demands for popular and vernacular forms of religion had a concomitant influence on cultural forms such as music and painting. The polyphonic complexity and richness in music, and Gothic influences in art, were replaced with emphasis on simplicity and austerity. The Renaissance he says became "a spent force" and "by the 1560's and 1570's it was dead." This may be true of the Renaissance as a movement but it had now "become part of the basic repertoire of European arts, subsumed in the Baroque and in Rococo, ready to spring to life again in the neoclassicism of the late eighteenth century."In between his explanations on Renaissance's rise and fall are discussions on the main topics of interest in this period. In the development of architecture Johnson makes a distinction between Gothic form and style and a Gothic spirit. The former captivated all, but in southern Italy (particularly Florence) where Renaissance architectural styles first emerged, there was a longing for something else. From within the local culture an emphasis on classical themes rather than Gothic clutter emerged. A theory and practice of architecture was developed that looked at "a balance between the elements so that there is no dominant feature but a pervading style that brings the whole together." Florentine innovations were also significant in painting techniques. Johnson mentions that fresco painting methods were amended to incorporate a greater emphasis on drawings and draftmanship. These preparatory sketches are of course now works of art in their own right but then they were simply tools to allow artists to explore other subjects such as the human form. Johnson says that "the glories of the High Renaissance, and its celebration - one might almost say sanctification - of the human body, would have been impossible without this meticulous tradition of draftmanship." There are some equally interesting insights into Renaissance sculpture and literature, and it's all writ

Paul Johnson's _The Renaissance: A Short History_ (Modern Library) is indeed short. It gives capsule biographies of the main artists of the time, and the interrelations between different facets of the arts and the economic and religious trends. It is unillustrated, but pithy, and as a small book on a huge subject, it is excellent. Repeatedly, Johnson shows just how the Renaissance artists drew on ancient models. Roman type was developed by studying the classic engraved letters, artists began to use themes from pagan myths instead of only depicting scenes from the Bible, scholars resumed the task (abandoned throughout the middle ages) of critically examining scriptural texts, and the rules of perspective were rediscovered.Johnson also has insights on particular artistic processes. For instance, his description of the advantages and disadvantages of tempera use on wet plaster is excellent; the rules of perspective gave enormous freedom to the artists to depict real scenes, but artists were constrained by the fresco technique which demanded that final decisions be made about a large work before any coloring of the plaster was begun, since corrections could only be made by starting all over again. When painting in oil was introduced, artists could make a living painting not on walls but on canvas. With canvas came the easel, and artists could not only paint scenes from life, but could work in their studios where models (and clients) were readily accessible. This involved less church work, ending the religious monopoly on art, and giving another impetus towards humanism.The most important lesson from the Renaissance, however, is not its deposing the centrality of the church. Those who created the Renaissance masterpieces had drawn from the excellences of the ancients, and having done so, produced works that were equivalent and even surpassing. Leonardo himself said, "He is a wretched pupil who does not surpass his master." After centuries of stagnation, the Renaissance had instilled its most vivid legacy into western thought, that of progress.

This book is one of the few books on The Renaissance period that in, quite literally, a nutshell manages to explain with remarkable clarity what made this period in our history so unique. Paul Johnson is an incredibly concise author. I recommend this book to anyone! If anything, it's an amazing starting of point on further research into this incredible period of history. If you read this book, I guarantee you won't be disappointed!