The Pleasure of Hating the Renaissance

This essay reads Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice through the lens of Erich Auerbach and Jacques Rancière to argue that the nineteenth-century term “Renaissance” names a link, never secure, between art, history, and collectivity—which is to say, a continual rebirth of historical life. Reading Ruskin makes clear that since the nineteenth century Renaissance has never meant, despite the efforts of many from a variety of political positions to make it mean, an abstract concept of beauty manifesting itself as the informing spirit of works of art. It has never meant a majestic subject standing athwart from history and imposing his masculine will upon yielding, feminine materials. It has never meant a Eurocentric imposition of universal values upon the peripheral world. Instead, a Renaissance by definition violates epistemes by insisting upon a link between disparate times, places, and peoples. Thus the term that demarcates the cinquecento as a unique historical moment also is the term that demarcates a nineteenth-century aesthetic.