ABSTRACT
Ulrich von Hutten was one of the most outstanding German Humanists. A letter of his dated 25 October 1518 to the Nuremberg patrician Willibald Pirckheimer amounts to a summing-up of the contemporary situation. In it Hutten gives expression to the Humanist feeling for life, representing a whole generation in an age whose intellectual and artistic flowering could be seen as a decisive breakthrough and a departure from the Middle Ages: ‘O Jahrhundert, o Wissenschaften! Es ist eine Lust zu Leben, wenn auch noch nicht in der Stille. Die Studien blühen, die Geister regen sich. Barbarei, nimm dir einen Strick und mache dich auf Verbannung gefasst.’ (‘O century! O sciences! It is a delight to be alive, even if not yet in tranquillity. Study is burgeoning, the mental faculties are stirring. Barbarity, take a rope and prepare yourself for banishment.’)
What Hutten could not know was that at the very moment he was singing the praises of his century Renaissance Humanism was already reaching its zenith, only a short while later to lose its resonance-in some cases rapidly, in others more gradually. The year 1527 saw the ‘Sacco di Roma’, the dreadful ravaging of Renaissance Rome by the mercenary army of the German emperor Karl V-an event that is customarily regarded as marking the end of the Renaissance.
