
A Darker View of the Renaissance - Thevet
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-darker-view-of-the-renaissance/
======
throw0101a
There's a line I ran across from the movie _The Third Man_ where the character
Harry Lime says:

> _In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror,
> murder, bloodshed—but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the
> Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy
> and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock._

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man)

~~~
goto11
The line is not supposed to be taken at face value, and certainly not as a
history lesson. In the movie Harry Lime was a criminal selling fake penicillin
on the black market thereby killing many people including children (he
acknowledges as much, as far as I can remember). The quote is just him trying
to justify this to his old friend who is horrified to discover his scheme.

This is like when people take "you cant handle the truth" or "greed is good"
or "to thine own self be true" at face value, completely ignoring the context
around the lines.

In any case it is a non sequitur. Losts of places throughout history had
murder and bloodshed _without_ producing the Italian Renaissance. (And
Switzerland did not actually have peace for 500 years anyway although they did
stay neutral during the world wars.). But Lime was not a historian, just a
cynical criminal trying to justify stealing penicillin.

It is a great line though.

~~~
danbolt
Can you do one for the "Hard times create strong men..." quote next? I feel
like that one gets tossed around a lot.

~~~
telotortium
If you've got time to read 6 posts, there's a _very_ in-depth response to that
quote starting here: [https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-
mirage-...](https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-
i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/)

------
sqrt
I found Ada Palmer's post on the Renaissance a couple months ago to be a good
read, though it's a bit long for one sitting and there are a few tangents:
[https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-
tel...](https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-telling-the-
myth-of-a-renaissance-golden-age-and-bad-middle-ages/)

A taste of what you might get out of it, from the preface:

> This post is for you if you’ve been wondering whether Black Death =>
> Renaissance means COVID => Golden Age, and you want a more robust answer
> than, “No no no no no!”

> This post is for you if you’re tired of screaming The Middle Ages weren’t
> dark and bad! and want somewhere to link people to, to show them how the
> myth began.

> This post is for you if you want to understand how an age whose relics make
> it look golden in retrospect can also be a terrible age to live in.

> And this post is for you if want to ask what history can tell us about 2020
> and come away with hope. Because comparing 2020 to the Renaissance does give
> me hope, but it’s not the hope of sitting back expecting the gears of
> history to grind on toward prosperity, and it’s not the hope for something
> like the Renaissance—it’s hope for something much, much better, but a thing
> we have to work for, all of us, and hard.

------
seiferteric
I've been kind of wondering if we will start to see an increase in anti-
enlightenment arguments given the issues we face with no clear way out. Given
climate change for example, was the industrial revolution a mistake? If it was
an inevitable consequence of the enlightenment era, then was that a mistake?
Too early to tell, but if we end up destroying ourselves I guess the answer
would have to be "yes", but it's a hard pill to swallow.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of people lived in what
we'd today call "soul-crushing poverty", and it wasn't uncommon to have bad
harvest years where a couple percent of a nation's population starved to
death. There's no way climate change is bad enough to make a world where
shirts are luxury items preferable.

~~~
barry-cotter
> Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority of people lived in
> what we'd today call "soul-crushing poverty", and it wasn't uncommon to have
> bad harvest years where a couple percent of a nation's population starved to
> death.

On a historical level what’s unusual about the Irish Great Famine of 1845-48
isn’t that a quarter of the population died, it’s that that was the last time
that happened.

~~~
CalRobert
Also that the same famine struck other places but the administration handled
it in Ireland catastrophically poorly.

------
throwaway894345
> Fletcher’s more substantive aim of exhibiting the “terror” lying behind the
> “beauty” of the Italian Renaissance is in my view less successful. First of
> all, although awestruck tourists might marvel at the beauty of Italy’s art
> and architecture without much sense of the blood and suffering that
> accompanied it (unless, of course, they watched Showtime’s series The
> Borgias, in which case they would have a sensationalized view), no scholar
> of the period would be surprised. In this regard, Fletcher is jousting with
> something of a strawman, or at least a largely mid-19th-century gossamer
> version of the Renaissance.

Straw man indeed. As a layperson, I didn’t imagine Renaissance Europe to be an
abrupt transition from medieval to 21st century living standards or political
stability. Of course there were atrocities and quality of life was
dramatically poorer and more brutish than it is today. What would be
remarkable to my lay mind is some interpretation of that brutishness as a
development or consequence of enlightenment developments (as opposed to an
extension of medieval conditions); however, I doubt such a case can credibly
be made.

~~~
api
I think that is the point even if it's overdone. Many people do think the
renaissance and enlightenment were smooth upward transitions when in reality
they were periods of profound political and social turmoil.

While I do think the enlightenment was mostly a step forward, it wasn't all
light any more than the dark ages were all dark.

This is something we should keep in mind as we enter the real information age
whose transformations and upheavals we have barely started to feel. We haven't
seen anything yet.

~~~
alentist
The “Dark Ages” does not mean what most laypeople think it means. Most
historians don’t use the term anymore, because it’s too difficult to shake off
the misleading connotations it has to the public.

~~~
pmontra
Nobody ever used that name in Italy, it's Middle Ages here (Medioevo) which
started with the fall of the Roman Empire and barbaric invasions (and the
settlement of many of the people that eventually became modern Italians.)
Anyway we had invasions as long as the 19th century, maybe the 20th as well if
you think about WW2, so it's a kind of normal business here and in most of
Europe. We also had a constant improvement of arts and technology after the
first few bad centuries. Not very dark at all.

------
seebetter
“Mona Lisa was married to a slave trader” —- wasn’t exactly what I was
thinking. How about the modern press where the elite members have ‘Au Pairs’
or underpay both legal citizens & undocumented workers to take care of their
homes? There are even true indentured servants in the US and all around the
world.

Yet let’s ‘contextualize’ the darkness of the Renaissance.

------
InfiniteRand
I think having a lot of small but wealthy states, competing for prestige is a
big factor for the art side of the Renaissance as well as for the heavy
warfare part

------
tus88
Yeah what a pity the dark ages came to and end. /s

~~~
xnyan
The term “dark ages” is a periodization popularized in the mid 19h century.
It’s not commonly used in academic discourse because it is nonspecific and
subjective in its definition.

~~~
zabana
and on top of that, that period was only dark for northern and western europe,
the rest of the world (including southern europe though its connections with
north africa and the middle east) was doing pretty good.

