Cruise Scientific             Visual Statistics Studio

The Long Waves of Time

  Long Waves
of Time
  Chapter I
Rise of Christianity
  Chapter II
Saeculum Obscurum
  Chapter III
Carolingian Reformation
  Chapter IV
Age of Byzantium
  Chapter V
Crusades
Chapter VI
Renaissance
  Chapter VII
Reformation
  Chapter VIII
Age of Enlightenment
  Chapter IX
Resurgence of Religion
  References

 

 

 

Renaissance 

 

 

 

 


 Danse Macabre

 

The key event fomenting the transition from the age of Crusades to the Renaissance was the Black Death epidemic of plague. The Black Death was a devastating pandemic that struck Europe in the years 13471350, killing up to a third of Europe's population, an estimated 34 million people. A series of contemporaneous plague epidemics also occurred across large portions of Asia and the Middle East, indicating that the European outbreak was actually part of a Eurasian pandemic. The Christian church lost spiritual authority and prestige, as the church promised cures and treatment, but did not make good at these promises. The scope of this disaster turned explanations such as that it is Gods will into platitudes. People wanted cures, but the priests and bishops didn't have any; most of them fled as the others who could. People prayed to God, but God either did not listen or perhaps there was not any, leaving people angry and disillusioned as it dawned on many that the religion is nothing else but a gigantic fraud hoisted on the gullible and trusting.


As the Black Death passed,

Boccaccio wrote his
Decameron (1353)
where a group of seven women and three men flee from plague-ridden Florence to a villa in the countryside. To pass the time, each member of the party tells stories ...


The life returned to normal and was probably best depicted by the Limbourg brothers in their Tres Riches Heures, painted between 1412 and 1416.

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During its Golden Age, 

Francois Villon  (1431-1474) wrote about transitory temporal things:

 
 

 

 

 

 

Prince, n'enquerez de sepmaine
 Ou elles sont, ne de cest an,
 Qu'a ce reffrain ne vous remaine:
 Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?

 

Don't ask: Where are they?

Now and then, every day.

Don't refrain from refrain:

Where are the snows of yester-day?

 

 


 

Knowing only too well about poverty and social injustice, he observes that
Necessite fait gens mesprendre
Et faim saillir le loup du bois.		 Poverty people into villains turns;
Because of hunger wolves leave the woods.

When facing death by hanging he wrote

    Soon they’ll put the noose around my neck
    To make me feel the weight of my back.

You know, Francois, he used instead of 'back' the name of that part of the human body where the back loses its good name.


The general malaise of his time is reflected in his ballads, such as this one about Plump Margot.

Tres doulce face et portraicture

Foy que doy brulare bigod

Assez devote creature

Je l'aime de propre nature

Et elle moy, la doulce sade.

Qui la trouvera d'adventure

Qu'on luy lise ceste ballade.
 

Sweet face, sweet profile

By God, I adore

this devoted creature

I love her own nature

And she loves me, the sweet odalisque.

Whoever meets her when she plies her trade

Must read her this ballade.
 

Se j'ayme et sers la belle de bon hait

M'en devez vous tenir ne vil ne sot?

Elle a en soy des biens a fin souhait

Pour son amour sains bouclier et passot

Quant viennent gens je cours et happe ung pot

Au vin m'en fuis sans demener grant bruit

Je leur tens eaue, frommage, pain et fruit

S'ilz paient bien je leur dis bene stat

Retournez cy quant vous serez en ruit

En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat.
 

I love to serve this belle

Why to call me degenerate and fool?

She is beautiful and proper,

I protect her with my dagger.

When a gentleman calls, I run to fetch a pot of wine

to keep them happy, quiet, satisfied.

I get them water, cheese, bread, and fruit

To make him pay well. If he does I say

When feeling horny come again in

To this inn we both live in.
 

Mais adoncques il y a grant deshait

Quant sans argent s'ne vient couchier Margot

Veoir ne la puis, mon cuer a mort la hait

Sa robe prens, demy saint et surcot

Si luy jure qu'il tendra pour l'escot

Par les costes se prent"c'est Antecrist!"

Crie et jure par la mort Jhesucrist

Que non fera, lors j'empoingne ung esclat

Dessus son nez luy en fais ung escript

En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat.
 

Sometimes we fall on hard times

When Margot fucks a john who does not pay,

When she comes home, I hate her.

I seize her her dress, slip, jacket

To keep them as my share.

With hands on her hips, she calls me Antichrist.

She cries and swears by Jesus H. Christ.

Then I, seizing a stick
beat her through her flimsy habit

In this cat house we inhabit.
 

Vente, gresle, gelle, j'ay mon pain cuit

Ie suis paillart, la paillarde me suit

Lequel vault mieulx? Chascun bien s'entresuit

L'ung vault l'autre, c'est a mau rat mau chat

Ordure amons, ordure nous assuit

Nous deffuyons onneur, il nous deffuit

En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat.

Wind, hail, frost, my life is not sweet,

I am dissolute, she follows my suite.

One like the other, copulated,

Cursed rat, cursed cat, catenated.

I linger in a garbage can, she follows my suite.

No, our lives are not sweet

In the cat house we inhabit.

Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510)  illustrated Dante's La Divina Comedia, and painted his Madonnas.

  Birth of Venus  
  Annunciation  
   
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Birth of Venus
    
Madonna col Bambino                                                                                                   Madonna del Libro                                                        Madonna del Magnificat  
   
   
    
                                                 Primavera  
   
   
   
      Young Man, Simonetta Vespucci, Simonetta's posthumous portrait  
   
Venus and Mars  
   
  St. Sebastian  
   
 

Sandro Botticelli's name is but a nickname of a plump boy, called a 'little barrel.' In his early teens he was apprenticed to Filippo Lippi
  Madonna col Bambino by Filippo Lippi
 
In 1481, Pope Sixtus IV commissioned Botticelli (to fresco the walls) and Michelangelo (to fresco the ceiling) of the Cappella Sistina in the Vatican City. After return to Florence, intrigued by the new art of printing, Botticelli illustrated the Inferno
canticle of  Dante Alighieri's (1321) La Divina Comedia.
  

Lasciate (leave) ogne (every) speranza (hope), voi (you) ch' (that) intrate (enter)
  (Abandon all hope, you who enter here)

One of the nine levels (Cocytus, Greek κωκυτός, lamentation) of Hell,
a lake frozen by the flapping wings of Lucifer

Sample results of Dante's Inferno Test (2003)
 based on content analysis of Dante's Inferno.

 and worked for the ruler of Florence, Lorenzo the Magnificent to fresco his villa.

 

Lorenzo de Medici ruled Florence from 1469 until his death in 1492. His mistress was Simonetta Vespucci , a wife of  Marco Vespucci whom she married at the age of 15. Marco Vespucci was a cousin of Amerigo Vespucci (after whom, in 1507, Waldseemüller named the new continent "America"). Simonetta's portrait on the left (where she modeled Cleopatra) and the image below (detail from the Death of Procris) are by Piero di Cosimo . Simonetta (who died at the age of 22 from pulmonary tuberculosis) inspired several Botticelli's paintings, among them the Birth of Venus.


 

Lorenzo il Magnifico (1449 - 1492)

Simonetta Vespucci (1454 - 1476)

  
 

Girolamo Savonarola (1452 - 1498)

 

 

 

In 1494 France invaded Florence, the ruling Medici were overthrown, and Savonarola (r. 1494 -1498) emerged as the ruling sacerdot of the Christian Republic of Florence. Savonarola, a Dominican friar, was preaching about the impending Apocalypse (the millennium of 1500) presaging the Last Days of the world and maintained that the ongoing epidemic of syphilis was God's punishments for homosexuality. Aside of the the death penalty for homosexuality, Savonarola also sponsored many other draconic laws.

In 1497, Savonarola sponsored the Bonfire of the Vanities. Many books of the authors from the time of the Roman Empire, together with the objects considered to be connected with moral laxity, including paintings by Sandro Botticelli and Michelangelo Buonarroti have been thrown to the flames. Citizens of Florence became outraged by ongoing executions instigated by religious fanatics endowed with secular power and on April 8, 1498 attacked the Convent of San Marco, the seat of Savonarola government. Savonarola surrendered, was sentenced to death, hanged in chains from a cross and a fire was lit beneath him. He was executed in the same manner as many others during his reign. Niccolo Machiavelli witnessed and later wrote about Savonarola execution.

Subsequently, Medici regained control of Florence.

 

 

 

 
In 1504 Botticelli was accused of homosexuality

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Enhanced detail from the 1495 Botticelli's painting The Calumny of Apelles
 
a charge which only a few years ago was life-threatening, however the charges were dropped. Botticelli continued to paint for the rest of his life which ended on May 17, 1510. The great, unfulfilled love of Botticelli was Simonetta Vespucci and he asked to be buried next to her. They both rest in the church of Ognissanti, Florence.