Renaissance

Renaissance is examined as an abstract historical concept through the images people form when asked to characterize it. The contrast between a symbolic schema and an image of Michelangelo’s David reveals how thought can move from an initial, empirical grasp toward conceptual understanding—or stray into associations that interrupt that task. The example makes Renaissance less a history recounted than a test of how an idea becomes present in consciousness.

Images and the Historical Concept

Asked to define Renaissance briefly, a person might form an indeterminate image of movement, like a jet of water opening outward and falling, or imagine a flower opening. These are symbolic schemas: their spatial forms present the concept rather than offer independent subjects for attention. The flower may also carry a recognizable meaning of its own, but that added significance remains a quality assigned to it within the attempt to represent Renaissance. It does not become a separate topic that thought pursues for its own sake.

A different response is to see Michelangelo’s David upon hearing the word Renaissance. The statue is not the historical period, and the difference cannot be settled merely by looking at the image from outside. The subject’s intention determines whether the statue functions symbolically, bearing the sense of Renaissance, or is apprehended as an artwork in its own right. In the latter case, it can be considered as Michelangelo’s statue, encountered in a museum in Florence and connected with other knowledge about the artist and his works. The same visible image can therefore serve different purposes according to the act of thought that constitutes it.

The Detour Through Michelangelo’s David

When the aim is to define Renaissance, the appearance of Michelangelo’s David marks a spontaneous change of direction in thought. The shift does not happen because the image has forced itself upon an otherwise unchanged intention. Rather, the redirection at the level of knowledge is a condition of the image’s appearing in this way: thought has made a detour and lingered over the statue while trying to grasp the concept.

That detour has a double character. The statue can be a step in the same inquiry, one item among works of art produced during the Renaissance, and a point of departure for reviewing them. At the same time, it seems to hold the desired understanding within itself, as though close attention to this particular work could disclose the meaning of the whole epoch. The image thus both advances the search and tempts thought to stop at its apparent answer. Its claim to embody Renaissance remains ambiguous, closer to a mystical participation than to the direct presentation achieved by a symbolic schema.

The statue also brings with it associations beyond the assigned task. It may call up an individual journey in Italy, knowledge of Michelangelo’s other work, or an atmosphere belonging to a vanished period. These connections need not be explicit to become available as an affective sense. Because the image can carry thought away from its original question and into daydream, it is not simply a clearer or fuller version of the schema. Its independent identity gives it a power to attract attention that the schematic flower or jet of water does not have in the same way.

Illustration, Empirical Thought, and Comprehension

An illustrative image is described as an early, groping response to an abstract question. Thought has not yet settled on a clear concept; it hesitates among possible means of representing one, and its response is therefore unstable. The comparison with the answer that beauty is a beautiful woman or a beautiful horse presents this as more than a historical stage in the development of thought: it can also be a necessary preliminary in an individual person’s thinking, although reflection may shorten it. A familiar statue may similarly come to mind as an apparent answer to the question of beauty, without resolving what beauty itself means.

The image can also gather examples instead of defining the concept. Faced with the question of beauty, thought may start listing beautiful things and remain among them, unable to move beyond their competing implications. What presents itself in images is then a collection of examples, not yet a unified account of the concept. The visual form matters: in a museum containing Renaissance masterpieces, a person asked to characterize the period may glance toward one of the works before answering. Without the works in front of them, the mind may still try to make a statue present. This response treats the image as a way to consult an instance, as though experience of the example could supply what the abstract question asks for.

From that uncertain beginning, thought can take two different routes. It may lose its balance in the image, drift into daydream, and abandon the original problem. Or it may leave the illustrative example through a creative effort and apprehend Renaissance itself, at which point the symbolic schema appears. The crucial change is not a change in the image’s general role as the correlate of consciousness, but in the nature of the thought that uses it. The potential obstruction lies in thought’s own disequilibrium, not in the image by itself; the fact that an image can accompany a detour does not make every image an obstacle to understanding.

The Artwork and the Irreal

The discussion of aesthetic objects clarifies why a work associated with Renaissance cannot simply be identified with its physical support or with the historical concept it helps evoke. In the case of a portrait, the canvas, frame, and real layers of paint are distinct from the depicted figure apprehended through them. That aesthetic object appears when consciousness takes up an imaging attitude; it is not another visible layer concealed beneath the paint. The argument extends the same distinction to works of art more generally: a material support can make an object available to imagination without turning that object into a real thing located on the support.

The painting therefore does not amount to the realization of a private mental image. Its material marks provide an analogon through which a spectator can apprehend an image, while the aesthetic object remains irreal. This account gives the earlier example of Michelangelo’s David a wider significance: an artwork can be present to thought without being interchangeable with the canvas, with the spectator’s empirical knowledge of the statue, or with the historical period that the work may symbolize. Renaissance can be approached through an artwork, but the passage from an artwork to the concept still depends on how thought attends to and interprets what the image presents.