Section 2.2 - Renaissance in the western world, and the Renaissance - (min. 13:38)

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En provenance du cours de Sapienza University of Rome

Recovering the Humankind's Past and Saving the Universal Heritage

120 notes

Sapienza University of Rome

Recovering the Humankind's Past and Saving the Universal Heritage

120 notes

Archaeology is, among human sciences, the discipline with the strongest importance for the rediscovery, but also for the preservation and protection of cultural heritage, as Humankind’s universal patrimony. You will be introduced to the way we ourselves reflect on and are engaged with the study of human past: from the practical and material recovery of ancient traces in the field to the study and interpretation. On the other hand, the discovery of human past implies the correct conservation and presentation for both experts and general public: the study and protection of the past we share every day prevent from any possible destruction, misuse, abuse and thus cancellation of human memory. “Recovering the Humankind's Past and Saving the Universal Heritage” presents to a large public Archaeology as a historical discipline: through an inter-disciplinary perspective you will follow the evolution and change of archaeology to the moment when natural sciences contributed to make the historical reconstructions scientifically sound; the aid of informatics and of virtual reconstructions gives new fascination to the already strong suggestion of Archaeology, as the discipline of discovery par excellence. Within this frame, Ebla, which is the glory of the Sapienza school of Oriental archaeology, will have an exemplary meaning in the course development as a long lasting experience on the field and an excellent example of the scientific results of combined researches and disciplines. Moreover, the course will focus on actual, innovative instruments to preserve, monitor and give value to cultural heritage through a multidisciplinary approach, based on a deep archaeological and historical knowledge but also on ICT technologies. The wide adoption of ICT technologies in our daily life is also impacting in the way in which we interact with our cultural heritage in particular in terms of preservation and dissemination of cultural objects. In this course you will learn the basic techniques to digitize cultural objects and obtain 3D digital copies of a physical objects such as statues, vases or archaeological sites. We will also discuss how to structure the raw data in order to facilitate and make effective the access to digital contents. In particular, we will present the European Data Model, a framework for collecting, connecting and enriching data on cultural objects provided by a number of museum, archives, sites and libraries in Europe.

À partir de la leçon

Week 2 - The birth of archaeology and its role in the contemporary world.

The study of the past of the planet marked the first serious reflections on humankind’s past, although archaeology was in fact considered the practice to collect objects. “New Archaeology” represents the first major revolution, promptly followed by the more structured and aggressive “Processual Archaeology". The opening towards different disciplines implied the “loss of innocence” for archaeology, bringing at the same time scientific methods into the reconstructions of the past. Homework available since

Section 2.1 - The scientific rediscovery of the past and the first forms of protection of the past - (min. 17:43)17:43

Section 2.2 - Renaissance in the western world, and the Renaissance - (min. 13:38)13:38

Section 2.3 - The birth of Archaeology as a historical discipline - (min. 17:58)17:58

Section 2.4 - The Archaeology of prehistory and the Archaeology outside the Old World: the enlargement of horizons from the Americas to India, and China. - (min. 15:44)15:44

Rencontrer les enseignants

Paolo Matthiae
Emeritus Professor of Archaeology
Dipartimento delle Scienze dell'Antichità
Davide Nadali
PhD in Near Eastern Archaeology
Andrea Vitaletti
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Computer Science
Emanuel Demetrescu
PhD candidate

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.

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