250 Chapter 13
their own discoveries, but they made possible the great
philosophical achievements of the seventeenth century.
The impact of humanism on science was similar. Few
humanists were scientists in the modern sense of the
word. Many were devotees of what would now be
called superstition, though the term is unhistorical. Be-
lieving that the wisdom of the ancients was superior,
and aware that Greeks and Romans had believed in
divination, sorcery, astrology, and natural magic, some
humanists deliberately encouraged a revival of these
practices. Notions that would have been regarded as
absurd in the days of Aquinas were taken seriously.
Nevertheless, in their zeal to recover every aspect of
the ancient past, they found and edited works that
would eventually revolutionize Western thought. Galen
in medicine, Eratosthenes and Aristarchus of Samos in
cosmology, Archimedes in physics, and a host of other
writers were rediscovered, edited, and popularized.
The humanists also transmitted the idea, derived
ultimately from Pythagoras, that the universe was based
on number. This is the basic principle of numerology,
now regarded as a pseudoscience, but it inspired such
figures as Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) to explore
the mathematization of physics. Leonardo is best
known today as an artist and inventor whose ideas were
far in advance of their time. Though Leonardo failed in
his effort regarding physics, Galileo and others would
eventually learn to express physical relationships in
mathematical formulae, an important step in the devel-
opment of modern science (see chapter 16).
Few of these achievements had an immediate im-
pact on the life of ordinary Europeans. The recovery of
classical antiquity was an intellectual movement created
by and for a self-conscious elite, and many years would
pass before it touched the consciousness of the general
public. In one area, however, classical values intruded
on material life, redefining the public spaces in which
people moved and altering their visual perceptions of
the world. Renaissance art, architecture, and city plan-
ning brought the aesthetic values of Greece and Rome
down to street level. They eventually spread from the
Italian towns to the farthest reaches of Europe and
America.
Italian artists had turned to classical ruins for inspi-
ration as early as the thirteenth century. With the emer-
gence of humanism, ancient models became universal.
The architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) mea-
sured ancient ruins to determine their proportions. He
then sketched their pediments, columns, and ornamen-
tation with the intention of adapting Roman forms to
the purposes of his own day. Within a generation,
churches were being built that resembled pagan tem-
ples (see illustration 13.3). New construction, private
and public, sported columns, pilasters, and window
treatments borrowed from the porticoes of Roman
buildings. It was not mere antiquarianism because
Brunelleschi and his successors—Alberti, Bramante, and
the sixteenth-century master Palladio—knew that mod-
ern structures were different in function from those of
the past. So successful were their adaptations that Ro-
man forms and ornamentation remained a standard fea-
ture of Western architecture until the twentieth
century.
The revival of classical taste in painting and sculp-
ture was equally important. Medieval artists had illus-
trated classical themes, and some of them, such as
Nicola Pisano (c. 1220–c. 1278), had successfully imi-
tated classical forms, though only in portraying scenes
from the Bible (see illustration 13.4). In medieval prac-
tice, tales from ancient history or mythology were nor-
mally portrayed in contemporary settings because they
were intended as moral or religious allegories whoseIllustration 13.3
Leon Battista Alberti’s Tempio Malatesta.The unfinished
church of San Francesco at Rimini was built about 1450. Rimini
was a city in the papal states whose ruler, the infamous Sigis-
mundo Malatesta, was a great admirer of all things Roman. At his
request, Alberti transformed an existing church into a Roman
temple whose facade resembles a triumphal arch. Sigismundo
commissioned a statue of the Virgin Mary whose features were
modeled on those of his mistress, Isotta degli Atti.