Seminars

  • Founded
    1945
  • Seminar Number
    407

The Seminar in the Renaissance, founded in 1945 by Paul Oskar Kristeller and John Herman Randall, Jr., hosts presentations of about 50 minutes on various aspects of Renaissance thought (including Renaissance humanism) and its ramifications in the arts (painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature) and the sciences (physical, natural, historical, and philological), as well as history and philosophy. The Renaissance is taken to include the period from about 1350 to about 1650. We usually have met in Faculty House at 5:30 pm on the second Tuesday of each academic month (except January). Since April 2020, during the pandemic, we have been meeting earlier via Zoom, and in the future we will be meeting in a hybrid format, i.e. in person and by Zoom, at 4 pm, New York (US Eastern) Time, allowing until 6:00 for the talk and ample discussion of the talk, followed by dinner at Faculty House and further informal discussion. We have found that this allows colleagues from other parts of the globe to join the talk and discussion, to our great mutual profit.


Co-Chairs
Cynthia M. Pyle
c.m.pyle@nyu.edu

Alan Stewart
ags2105@columbia.edu

Rapporteur
Mackenzie Fox
maf2292@columbia.edu

Meeting Schedule

09/12/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
Leo Steinberg (1920-2011), Controversial Historian of Renaissance and Baroque Art
Francis Randall, Sarah Lawrence College
Abstract

Abstract

My friendship with Leo Steinberg (1920-2011) lasted 49 years. This paper discusses several of the more controversial ideas put forth in his career as an art historian, including ideas on the Renaissance/Baroque architect Borromini, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” and the significance of the sexuality of Christ. Steinberg was accused of being a Freudian theorist; I dispute this. Rather, Renaissance and Baroque artists broke with the non-sex-indicating tradition of Byzantine icons, to emphasize Christ’s and the Virgin Mary’s humanity.





10/10/2023 Zoom
4:00 PM
Pier Vettori and Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics
Christopher Rowe, Durham University
Abstract

Abstract

The Florentine Pier Vettori (1499-1585) produced editions of Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, Varro and others. He also published editions of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Poetics, and Nicomachean Ethics – no one, a contemporary said, left Aristotle’s text in better state (“more cleaned up”). My own concern is with his work on Aristotle’s other Ethics, the Eudemian. He did not publish an edition of the work, but we have his copies of the Aldine, one of them with copious marginal annotations. These record readings he found in “ancient books,” which I identify with the three Aristotelian codices containing the Eudemian Ethics that are in the Laurentian library (whose contents an eighteenth century writer claims that Vettori catalogued); they also include a significant number of emendations of his own, a majority of which are both correct and original to him. My own new critical edition of the Eudemian Ethics (OUP, September 2023) refers to him more often than to anyone else before the early modern period. In other cases (e.g. with Aeschylus, or with Plato’s Lysis), he evidently printed few of his own emendations. But the text of the Eudemian Ethics is in poor condition (as Vettori himself noted) and called for greater intervention. In this case he outplays his immediate predecessors, who include K. Laskaris, Chalkondyles, and Bessarion (although the last, in particular, in his copious excerpta from Aristotle, himself makes a number of important restorations), showing himself a true forerunner of his nineteenth-century German and British successors.





11/14/2023 Zoom
4:00 PM
Scholarship as a Philosophical Way of Life:  The Case of Leon Battista Alberti
John Sellars, Royal Holloway, University of London
Abstract

Abstract

I examine a short work by Leon Battista Alberti, his De commodis litterarum atque incommodis, which considers both the disadvantages and the benefits of a life devoted to scholarship. Alberti mocks the scholar whose life is marked by extreme hardship and poverty with little chance of attaining the rewards of fame and wealth. Yet there are also more serious benefits that come from the study of ancient literature, leading Alberti to re-assess his own motivations for wanting to embrace the life of a scholar. It is only through a philosophical clarification of values that the true worth of a scholarly life can be grasped. Along the way Alberti makes plain that the ultimate goal is the cultivation of a virtuous character. This is what makes a life devoted to scholarship a philosophical way of life.





12/12/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
Celibacy, Scholarship, and Service to the State in Quattrocento Venice: The Case of Ermolao Barbaro
Gareth Williams, Columbia University
Abstract

Abstract

This talk focuses on the extraordinary life-story of the eminent Venetian humanist, Ermolao Barbaro (1454-93). In his youthful On Celibacy (De coelibatu, 1472-3) Barbaro seeks to justify a contemplative existence that rejects the career-path expected of the Venetian patrician. The second work belongs to a much later phase in his short life: based on Barbaro’s own experience as a Venetian envoy abroad, his brief treatise On the Duty of the Ambassador (De officio legati, 1488) outlines the conduct expected of the career diplomat. But then an extraordinary turn of events: in March 1491 Barbaro was appointed Patriarch of Aquileia by Pope Innocent VIII; Barbaro was at that time the Venetian ambassador to the Papal State. Barbaro accepted the appointment to Aquileia in obedience to the Pope but without Venetian permission. He was dismissed from his Venetian ambassadorship and remained in Rome, a figure of disgrace in Venice. But how to reconcile his actions with the fact that, only two or so years before, his On the Duty of the Ambassador had preached a sermon of loyalty to the state above all else?

Viewed against each other, Barbaro’s On Celibacy and On the Duty of the Ambassador offer contrasting perspectives on the wider fifteenth-century debate about the claims of the reflective as opposed to the active life. The paper explores the life-long drama of Barbaro’s divided loyalties to the self and to the state, with stress on his recourse to many features of the ancient tension between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa.





02/13/2024 Zoom
4:00 PM
Sun Worship in Fifteenth Century Rome? Bessarion and the Worship of the Sun/Son
Scott Kennedy, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey
Abstract

Abstract

In his attacks on Platonism, the Byzantine neopagan philosopher George Gemistos (Plethon), and Plethon’s student the cardinal Bessarion in the later 1450s, George of Trebizond repeatedly mentions that he had seen hymns to the sun god written by Plethon, in which Plethon celebrated the sun as the soul of the universe and the creator of all. Modern scholars have long noted that George’s report conflicts with Plethon’s surviving Platonic hymns that assign the sun a less important role as the boundary between the material and ideal worlds. In this paper, I will suggest that the cardinal Bessarion, not Plethon, wrote Trebizond’s hymns. Fascinated by the sun in Platonic theology, Bessarion had read and annotated Julian the Apostate’s hymn to the sun god. In his In calumniatorem Platonis (Against the Slanderer of Plato), Bessarion would suggest that Plato had some knowledge of the trinity via the sun. Just as Plato treated the sun as the offspring of the good, a real-world manifestation of the Good in the Republic (508b-c), so Christ, the son of God, bridged ideal and material. As Bessarion wrote Platonizing Christian hymns such as a hymn to the archangel Michael, “a most pure form,” this suggests that he may have composed hymns syncretizing the Son with the sun as he does in the defense. As such, this paper speculates how Bessarion and his followers may have syncretized their Christianity with Platonism. More concretely, it will show that Bessarion’s syncretism is a missing link, connecting the Platonic theology of Plethon with the later sun worship of Demetrios Rhaoul Kabakes as well as more importantly Marsilio Ficino’s syncretizing project in his Liber de Sole et Luna (Book on the Sun and Moon).





03/05/2024 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
The Renaissance Question in Petrarch
H Wayne Storey, Indiana University
Abstract

Abstract

Despite declared philological scruples, the Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta [Rvf]) by Petrarch that we read today in most modern editions is at best a hybrid: Petrarch’s text from his partial holograph in Vatican Latino 3195 (rediscovered in 1886), often with silent editorial emendations, in the form of Renaissance canons of genre and book production. With the definitive demonstrations in the 1980s by Brugnolo and Storey of the intricate visual poetics instilled in Petrarch’s carefully crafted manuscript the question of a new edition became critical to the presentation of a more accurate text. By the mid-1990s Storey had begun work on a new diplomatic edition that would form the basis of a new edition that continues to be published in the Petrarchive.org Project. After examining the complex layers of editorial and textual conditions inherent in Petrarch’s Fragmenta, including how Petrarch worked with his copyists, I will demonstrate the contrasts and interpretative implications of ‘Renaissance Petrarch’ and the reconstructed texts of the Petrarchive’s new edition.





04/09/2024 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
Animals on Maps and Our Views of the World
Chet Van Duzer, University of Rochester
Abstract

Abstract

The history of human depictions of animals is as revealing about humans as it is about animals. In this talk I will examine a specific type of depictions of animals, namely those on maps made from the thirteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century, with a focus on animals of the Renaissance. The talk will begin with an introduction to the history of the illustration of animals in general, particularly the effects of the European discovery of New World animals, and the decline of emblematic interpretations of animals in favor of more observational representations. I will then examine several striking images of animals on maps, together with associated texts. Animals on maps can reveal the cartographer’s interest in geographic exotica, from supposedly kneeless elephants to squirrels that sail on pieces of bark. They can reflect the cartographer’s philosophy about the proper relationship between animals and humans. They can symbolize a region or indicate some of its most important resources, and indeed whole regions can be ascribed the shapes of animals, which demonstrates just how deeply involved animals are in our views and perceptions of the world. Moreover, the choices of animals that appear can reveal much about the mapmakers’ sources and processes—about their methods for constructing an image of the world.





05/14/2024 Faculty House, Columbia University
4:00 PM
A Time Capsule of Late Renaissance Botanical Publishing: Caspar Bauhin (1560-1624) and the De Bry Family
Karen Reeds, Princeton Research Forum

Davina Benkert, University of Basel, Switzerland
Abstract

Abstract

How did complex, illustrated books about plants make their way into print in the early seventeenth century? For this talk, we will discuss three interconnections between Basel’s prominent botanist-anatomist, Caspar Bauhin, and the de Bry publishing house that reveal rarely- seen stages in early modern publication. Two virtually unstudied sets of material relating to Bauhin in the Universitätsbibliothek Basel (UBB) archives prompted our research: a folder of botanical drawings, watercolors, and copperplate proofs (“Plant Images Related to Caspar Bauhin and his Herbarium,” UBB, K IV 3, A-D); and Bauhin’s unique cut-and-paste draft of his uncompleted Theatrum Botanicum -- a volume that interleaves a copy of Bauhin’s 1623 Pinax Theatri Botanici with pages of clipped woodcuts of plants and manuscript notes ([Caspar Bauhin and Johann Caspar Bauhin], “De Graminibus,” UBB K I 6 a&b).

First, the folder’s watercolors and engraved proofs show that Johann Theodor de Bry, capitalizing on the success of the publication of Bauhin’s illustrated Theatrum Anatomicum (Frankfurt, 1605), persuaded Bauhin to help with Florilegium novum (Oppenheim, 1612, 1614, 1618), a deluxe, oversized album of elegant engravings of flowers. Second, we conjecture that Bauhin’s dissatisfaction with the Florilegium’s lack of real botanical content and order convinced him to return to the Renaissance herbal format of side-by-side text and woodcuts -- and to leave de Bry out of the Pinax’s acknowledgments. Finally, the folder’s watercolor of the American milkweed plant raises a tantalizing question: in the course of publishing Thomas Harriot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590), had the de Bry family made this close copy of a milkweed originally painted by John White, Harriot’s companion, in “Virginia” circa 1585, and transmitted it to Bauhin?