03-02-2019, 07:53 AM
(03-01-2019, 08:46 PM)Hintergrund Wrote: Michelangelo also had to work for people of questionable ethics, but this didn't stop him from creating truly great art.
The High Renaissance was not an era of great moral rectitude. The Medici and Borgia families were not nice people, The Protestant Reformation, a contemporary event, had its focus on opposing the power of the Roman Catholic Church which was bleeding people outside of Italy to support the expensive art that extolled the majesty of the upper hierarchy of the RCC, so right there is a connection between the rapaciousness and selfishness of the Church hierarchy and a rebellion against that hierarchy. The so-called "Peter's Pence" was draining the peasant and the laborer in northern and western Europe.
I once heard a delightful madrigal by the composer Claudio Monteverdi -- and I looked at the lyrics and saw praise for a Renaissance prince, praise of the sort that one would expect of some fascist generalissimo or of some Party boss of a 'socialist' state. The personality cult is no novel phenomenon, and it wasn't then. A hint: the Roman emperors most despised in late antiquity as well as modern times (Nero, Caligula, and Commodus) made the most of the attributes of divinity in contrast to those that had their heads on straighter.
Moral rectitude? It took us moderns who had a taste of the Enlightenment to dispense with the idea that kings ruled by divine right, to abolish slavery and peonage, to give women the right to vote, to recognize drunken revelry as a disaster for families whose husbands drank up the wages upon which the family depended, to get children out of the factories and mines and into schools, to recognize freedom of conscience and the legal equality of people across ethnic and racial lines, and to recognize pacifism as an ideal. That is all modern.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.