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Title: The Renaissance : A Short History by Paul Johnson ISBN: 0-8129-6619-8 Publisher: Modern Library Pub. Date: 06 August, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (24 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Small Book, Big Topic
Comment: Paul Johnson's _The Renaissance: A Short History_ (Modern Library) is indeed short. It gives capsule biographies of the main artists of the time, and the interrelations between different facets of the arts and the economic and religious trends. It is unillustrated, but pithy, and as a small book on a huge subject, it is excellent. Repeatedly, Johnson shows just how the Renaissance artists drew on ancient models. Roman type was developed by studying the classic engraved letters, artists began to use themes from pagan myths instead of only depicting scenes from the Bible, scholars resumed the task (abandoned throughout the middle ages) of critically examining scriptural texts, and the rules of perspective were rediscovered.
Johnson also has insights on particular artistic processes. For instance, his description of the advantages and disadvantages of tempera use on wet plaster is excellent; the rules of perspective gave enormous freedom to the artists to depict real scenes, but artists were constrained by the fresco technique which demanded that final decisions be made about a large work before any coloring of the plaster was begun, since corrections could only be made by starting all over again. When painting in oil was introduced, artists could make a living painting not on walls but on canvas. With canvas came the easel, and artists could not only paint scenes from life, but could work in their studios where models (and clients) were readily accessible. This involved less church work, ending the religious monopoly on art, and giving another impetus towards humanism.
The most important lesson from the Renaissance, however, is not its deposing the centrality of the church. Those who created the Renaissance masterpieces had drawn from the excellences of the ancients, and having done so, produced works that were equivalent and even surpassing. Leonardo himself said, "He is a wretched pupil who does not surpass his master." After centuries of stagnation, the Renaissance had instilled its most vivid legacy into western thought, that of progress.
Rating: 5
Summary: This book deserves five stars.
Comment: This is one of the most informative books on the Renaissance I have ever read. In fewer than two hundred pages Johnson manages to examine in fair detail the major and minor figures associated with the Renaissance. Johnson's thesis is that the Renaissance was a dramatic shift from the collectivism of Medieval art, literature, and society, to an individualism that respected both the artist/writer and his subjects as unique, singular beings rather than mere archetypes. Johnson adds, however, that the Renaissance was not inevitable: without the improbable appearance of a handful of geniuses, the birth of modernity might not have taken place as it did. Among Johnson's arguments, grasped by attentive readers, is that historical events like the Renaissance cannot be confined to exact dates. Thus, Johnson usefully and justifiably discusses early writers such as Dante and Chaucer because, as careful readers will note, the innovation and spirit of their works were groundbreaking and indispensably influential on the literature that unfolded as the Renaissance progressed. Johnson is well worth your time, particularly if you are in the mood for a digestible, refreshing take on the Renaissance in a short, easily readable volume.
Rating: 4
Summary: A Nifty Little Book
Comment: First off I would just like to say that I generally don't like Paul Johnson. I don't like his conservative politics or his anglo-centrism. While I admit he wrote two great books -- MODERN TIMES and HISTORY OF THE JEWS, which I've read thrice and twice, respectively -- I don't rate his other books very highly at all, and there are quite a lot of them.
The second thing I had wanted to say is this: Pay no attention to the "Publisher's Weekly" review above because it's a pile of nonsense. The quote about Leonardo is a misquote. The actual words Johnson uses go like this: "There was not much warmth in him. He may have had homosexual inclinations." -- I mean, if you're going to quote somebody, please try to get it right. In addition, Johnson's remarks about neuroticism pertaining to Michelangelo was only part of a larger point that suggested ordinary categories of psychoanalytic thought failed to explain Michelangelo's genius, not that he wasn't neurotic. Also, Johnson does not single out Shakespeare, Chaucer, Kipling and Dickens as the only English writers of genius. He only suggests that, above all other English writers, they had inexplicable insight into the thought-processes of other human beings. Finally, the P.W. review says that "dates of birth and death abound," as if to suggest that Johnson's book is hardly more than that -- which is rubbish (if Johnson, on the other, hand omitted the dates, he would then have been guilty of the serious offenses of shoddy scholarship and confusing the hell out of the reader).
To address the book itself, Paul Johnson is a non-academic generalist in an era of academic specialists, and I don't think I have to explain the reasons why we need such people, now perhaps more than ever. His book is pithy and yet thorough. His insights are, for the most part, judicious and provocative. The material is well-organized, for in successive chapters he addresses the historic and economic background of the Renaissance, followed by Literature, Sculpture, Architecture, Painting and, finally, "The Spread and Decline of the Renaissance." For such a small book, there is really quite a lot of information. One could certainly do much worse for a general introduction to Renaissance culture.
My only significant quibble with the book is that Johnson is largely blind to the greatness of the late Renaissance phenomenon known as "Mannerism" (he even fails to mention El Greco's name!), which, knowing Johnson's ultra-conventionalism, is hardly surprising. For this reason I dread reading what he has to say about Modernism is his recently-published history of art.
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Title: A History of the American People by Paul M. Johnson ISBN: 0060930349 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 March, 1999 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: A History of Christianity by Paul Johnson ISBN: 0684815036 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: May, 1995 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Art: A New History by Paul Johnson ISBN: 0060530758 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 30 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: Intellectuals by Paul M. Johnson ISBN: 0060916575 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 11 April, 1990 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Modern Times Revised Edition : World from the Twenties to the Nineties, The by Paul M. Johnson ISBN: 0060935502 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 07 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $21.00 |
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