Lada Balashova
University of Essex, United Kingdom
The problems of the Renaissance in modern English culture have attracted the attention of researchers quite recently. However, Italian Renaissance was interpreted mostly as a counterpart of Elizabethan era, a source of national revival. In this essay, we would like to highlight other aspects including the reasons for emerging interest in the Renaissance in English society.
Unification of Italy in the late 1860s and the early 1870s rekindled the interest of European community regarding the culture of the great past of this part of the world. It was for the first time ever that the Renaissance was now perceived as a European phenomenon, a foundation of modern Western civilization, this approach being greatly enhanced through its cultural and historical interpretation by Jacob Burckhardt. For the first time in art history, the concept of Renaissance was seen as a comprehensive historical period, the source of three key phenomena, i.e. culture, nation and modernity — fervently debated topics in England at the time.
The new concept of the Renaissance enabled modern England to find solutions to critical contemporary problems such as the correlation of the state (authority), culture and religion, as culture again was able to influence politics through creative personalities, whilst art and an artist were endowed with spiritual and social functions. The Renaissance was also associated with physical and spiritual harmony, which appeared to be disturbed by the early 20th century. Recreating this harmony based on the archetype of cultural and statutory structure of the Renaissance became crucial for contemporary England. The most characteristic feature of modern time (since the Renaissance) has been the development of an individual implying a ruler-dictator who united Italian society as a whole. And this element correlated with another topical matter of the time, i.e. the definition of the nature of culture either as the culture of the elite, or the culture of general public. Renaissance-induced secularization of Christian notions and their replacement with human and cultural schemes resonated in Victorian England where culture became a substitute for religion.