ABSTRACT
With the invention of perspective the modern notion of individualism found its artistic
counterpart. Every element in a perspective representation is related to the unique point
11.1 THE INDIVIDUAL FOCUS
It used to be assumed that the Renaissance overthrew the ‘predominantly Aristotelian
medieval approach to the world’ (as Wittkower calls it2) in favour of a wholly Platonist
one. The assumption embodies two over-simplifications. In the first place, the dominant
philosophy in the West through most of the thousand years from 350 to 1350 was
Augustinian, and therefore Platonist. And in the second, while the Renaissance brought a
revived interest in Plato, it by no means rejected Aristotle. The historian of Renaissance
thought Paul Oskar Kristeller writes that
The actual facts suggest almost exactly the opposite…In other words, as far as
Italy is concerned, Aristotelian scholasticism, just like classical humanism, is
fundamentally a phenomenon of the Renaissance period whose ultimate roots
can be traced in a continuous development to the very latest phase of the Middle
A second over-simplification is the identification of the Renaissance with a modern conception
of ‘Humanism’. When Geoffrey Scott and Rudolf Wittkower entitled their respective books The
Architecture of Humanism 4 and Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism5 they reflected
this identification. It is largely the creation of nineteenth-century historians such as Jacob Bur-
ckhardt. It is expressed most famously and concisely in the chapter on ‘The development of the
individual’ in Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, where he writes that
In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness-that which was turned
within as that which was turned without-lay dreaming or half awake beneath a
common veil…In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and
consideration of the State and of all the things of this world became possible.
