As we saw in the past lesson, the interest for the past, in the Western World, was kept alive during the Middle Ages of Europe, only out of curiosity for what appeared mysterious and inexplicable. And such a curiosity for the evidences from the past was accomplished through forms of occasional and extravagant collecting, which did not make a distinction between what belonged to the sphere of nature and what belonged to the sphere of culture. However, the political collapse of the Roman Empire in the 5th century BC, and the crisis of urban society, together with a quite relevant demographic decline, led to a widespread, though certainly not complete, abandonment of the great urban centers of Late Antiquity. Yet, this phenomenon did not imply that the meaningful, and often imposing remains of the architectural structure of those centers were wiped out. In fact, buildings with social importance were at the time practically out of use, because it was no longer possible to upkeep them, cult buildings fell into decay, for three explicit wills of the ecclesiastical authorities who had officially prevailed, ancient buildings were pillaged in order to seize marbles, columns, decoration of any kind, in order to build the new cult places of Christianity. And yet, the monumental evidences of the Empire of Rome did not completely disappear. A number of urban centers, particularly in Italy and France, were largely in ruins, and abandoned, but the unadorned and spectral skeletons of buildings once richly adorned, like temples, basilicas, theaters, arches, amphitheaters, whose function and meaning were often misunderstood, were still visible, as happened also with the remains of statues, in large numbers in the main urban centers. These misunderstandings, often magnified by popular legends, led in some instances to save important works which would have been destroyed as evidences of the loathed pagan world, had their real identity been known. Certainly the famed bronze equestrian statue of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, which for a long time was kept in the bishop's palace of the Lateran in Rome, and that was afterward moved to the Capitol, the main high mount of Rome, would have been melted down in order to recuperate the metal, had it not been considered to be an image of Constantine the Great, the first emperor who explicitly decreed to be a Christian, and was a great protector of the new faith, the Christianity. And just to mention some of the most important impressive examples, these remains were frequently incorporated in medieval structures, as happened for the Etruscan gates in the city of Perugia or the Roman gates of Turin, or they were kept only partially in interred, like the amphitheaters of the city of Verona in North Italy and Arles in France, or the triumphal arches of Benevento and Rimini, also in Italy. In Rome, where crumbling and falling monumental remains were quite numerous and were still as suitable for reemploy, noble families set today their residencies in eminent public monuments, and buildings of the imperial city of Rome, as happened, for example, with the Marcello's Theatre, or an imperial mausoleum, built by emperor Hadrian, was turned into a functional and effective papal fortress, namely, Sant'Angelo's castle. On the other hand, always in Rome, cult buildings in good conditions, like the Pantheon of Augustus’ age, became cult places for the new religion, and the circuit, in large part still intact, and visible, of the massive city walls, built by Emperor Aurelian at the end of the 3rd century AD, kept its defensive function, albeit strongly weakened by the lack of adequate garrisons. So, the fate of the evidences from the past was different in the course of history, according to the regions where those ancient ruins stood. And these remains, the great pre-classical civilizations of the Mediterranean, from Mesopotamia to Anatolia, from Syria to Iran, with a few exceptions like the ruins of the great ceremonial staircase and center of Persepolis in Iran, disappeared under the soil of the crumbled mudbricks, and under the desert sands. In Egypt, in fact, rarely visited by western travelers south of Cairo, and therefore of the Giza pyramids, great almost intact stone cult complexes were partially covered by sand, particularly at Thebes, (Luxor, and Karnak) and at Abu Simbel, of the apex of the Pharaonic civilization, and at Denderah and Edfu, for what concerns later periods of the Egyptian history. The remains of the Greek world in Greece properly, and in southern Italy, and Sicily, albeit dilapidated in a number of cases, were in ruins, but visible, due to the evidence of a glorious yet lost age, which in the imagination of western people more and more became the silent evidence, at the same time, of an ancient, nearly prodigious greatness and of a life deeply imbued of the sins of heathenism, and therefore inexorably condemned by the Christian doctrine. The burning and continually renewed memory of the persecutions of the Roman Empire, from Nero to Diocletian, and the worshipped evidences of the martyrs of Christianity, led to the sack, and pillage of the often quite showy ruins of Roman buildings in Italy, in Gallia, France and Spain in particular, but also in the eastern provinces of the empire, from the regions of Rhine in Germany to the Danube and Asia Minor and in Syria, as they were conceived and considered cursed symbols of a heathen culture against which they inflamed in fascinating homilies of the great men of the Western and Eastern Churches raged. So in the 6th century Gregory the Great preached says and I quote, “Do not destroy the heathen temples, but only the idols they contain. Sprinkle with holy water the monuments, build altars inside of them, and keep relics inside them” end quote. Notwithstanding this deeply negative attitude towards the remains of the heathen past, the habit in the high Middle Ages to leave, everywhere in the Western World, with Roman imperial ruins, in urban and rural milieus, led Alain Schnapp, the French archaeologist, to say, and I quote: “There is no difference between the German chiefs who settle in the palace of a Roman governor, the peasants who occupy an abandoned sector of a country residence, the princes who take away marbles from the richest villas in order to decorate their own residences, the bishops who take statues, columns, and sarcophagi, in order to decorate their churches, and burials, and again the clerics, who in the precarious peace of their libraries are stubbornly chasing for quotations of ancient authors.” End of the quote. This prolonged albeit problematic habit of western Europe to live with the remains of the Roman past, set the conditions for a series of renaissance of the ancient world. The first one took place in the Carolingian Age, in the years around 800, when the studying of the classical authors was strongly intensified. Some of them, in fact, were preserved precisely for the impressive amounts of works copied in those years, for the spur given by the great Charlemagne, and by the scholars of his court. At the same time, as regard art, the inspiration drawn from ancient statues was used to contrast the orientalizing trends of Byzantine art, and the anti-naturalistic, and geometric linearism of the Celtic-Germanic world of the British Isles. A good evidence in this sense, is the Palatine Chapel at Aachen, because of the feeling of the Carolingian age, St. Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, of the Justinian’s time in the 6th century, like St Peter's in Rome, built by Constantine at the beginning of the 4th century, were no less classical than the Pantheon built by Augustus in Jesus time and refurbished in Hadrian's age. A second renaissance in the European Middle Ages took place between 970 and the year 1020, and it was usually called the “Othonian Renaissance”, from the name of the German emperor who promoted it. It was quite different, because it drew its inspirations from paleo-Christian, Carolingian and Byzantine sources, and thus it was really a peculiar not direct renaissance, but rather an indirect renaissance of the forms of the ancient world, which had already been acquired, and in the previous centuries of the Middle Ages, in order to celebrate the Christian faith. A third very important renaissance is often defined as a “Proto-Renaissance of the 12th century”, and it took place in the age of the mature Romanesque of all of Europe, and of the beginning of the Gothic in Northern France. It was a typical Mediterranean phenomenon, born in Southern France, Italy, and Spain, namely in the regions where the classical element was a native element of the civilization, where the spoken language was still quite close to ancient Latin, and, most of all, where the monuments of ancient art were not only quite numerous, but often very important. Unlike the “Othonian Renaissance”, now inspiration was mostly direct and came from the same Roman monuments of architecture. Among the most important consequences of this trend was the question of monumentality: the Romanesque wall painting was freed from the influence of miniature, and the Romanesque miniature more and more looks like small wall paintings. On the other hand, wall painting was sided by two basically new artistic genres, which had an extraordinary fortune: figurative and narrative painting on glass and, most of all, the great stone sculpture, an art which was totally lost until the second half of the 12th century. The result was that God's house, the church, became a splendid, lavishly decorated public monument. And these trends to recover, directly or indirectly, the images, ways, forms of art of Antiquity, which flourished in the centuries of the Middle Ages, somewhere, somehow were a sequence of the misunderstandings pursued in the wrong belief of a basic continuity with Antiquity, which had the paradoxical consequence that by the end of the 14th century Italian art had been radically alienated from Antiquity, much like the art of northern Europe. In such a situation, as Erwin Panofsky, the great scholar of the characteristic features of this renaissance wrote, the Renaissance of the 15th century in Italy and Netherlands was not a change for evolution, but rather a change for transformation that is sudden and permanent. The artists of the 15th century were capable to look with new eyes at the works of Antiquity present mainly in Rome, and they took, in the consideration of visual arts, the same attitude Petrarca, the Italian poet, had in considering the literary style and the political ideas of classical Antiquity. In conclusion, the 15th century persons in Italy and Netherlands felt that the works of ancient art had an unattainable superiority, and they expressed these feelings several times, in evidences echoing the literary styles typical of that same ancient world: in Antiquity, they maintained, nature had not been limited, but rather surpassed by those great artists' genius. The inspiration drawn from such an extraordinary accomplishments, observe with new eyes, which felt the distance between the ancient and the contemporary worlds, was a stimulus for a very deep renewal in arts which invested the whole Western World, leading to the creation of some of the most important masterpieces of all times.
