ABSTRACT
The introduction of the term ‘Early Modern’ to designate a distinctive period in European history is fairly recent; originating in the 1960s, it has come to be widely adopted. It signifies the period from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century. At its beginning it overlaps with another division of history, much older, and now firmly established: the Renaissance, a term of very wide currency but notoriously problematic, because it has long defied precise definition. Indeed, the whole idea of the Renaissance has been highly controversial, and there are still eminent medievalists who will have nothing to do with it. (See, for example, Fossier, 1986, pp.494–523, where the Renaissance is rejected in order to present the Middle Ages as continuing well into the sixteenth century.) But for historians of art everywhere, ‘Renaissance’ is indispensable terminology, expressing that astonishing development of painting, sculpture and architecture in Italy from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. And that is just what the Renaissance meant to fifteenth-century Florentines, conscious that they were living in the midst of a cultural revival in the visual arts and literature, a revival that had brought them out of the alleged darkness of the Middle Ages, ushering in a new age in which the long-lost artistic skills of the Ancients were recovered and even enhanced. It was a sixteenth-century Florentine painter, Giorgio Vasari, who coined the word rinascita (Italian for ‘rebirth’) to express this powerful upsurge of culture, which has ever since been acknowledged by the general recognition of the genius of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo. But it is the French word for ‘rebirth’, renaissance, which now has the greater currency. That is due to Jules Michelet, a French historian, who in 1855 extended the sense of rebirth from an Italian cultural development to a historical epoch applicable to the whole of Europe. For him, ‘Renaissance’ meant the discovery of ‘the world and man’, the age of Columbus, Galileo and Vesalius, an age filled with a vigorous inspiration which he could not detect in the later Middle Ages.
