Donatello (1386-1466): Sculptural Refinement of Man; Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464): Philosophical Refinement of the Vision
Presented on: Thursday, November 3, 1983
Presented by: Roger Weir
Italian Renaissance
Presentation 5 of 13
Donatello (1386-1466): Sculptural Refinement of Man; Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464): Philosophical Refinement of the Vision
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, November 3, 1983
Transcript:
The date is November 3rd, 1983. This is the fifth lecture in a series of lectures by Roger Weir on the Italian Renaissance. Tonight's lecture is entitled Donatello, who lived 1386-1466 sculptural refinement of man. And on Nicolas of Cusa at 1401-1464: Philosophical Refinements of the Vision.
The soul of Donatello, and it's a pleasure to speak about someone who was as gifted and delightful Donatello, always merits the smile. Lovable Donatello and his, his contribution. They speak in terms of we're trying to develop a sense of this enormous current of inspiration that suddenly enthused Northern Italy. And how just a handful of individuals, sometimes working together, oftentimes going within themselves. How they could take the complications that we know as life and the mess that we know is history and rapidly give it such an indelible stamp in shape and form. The problems then were the same problems that we have now. The lethargy of work, putting the effort in just to getting the daily living. And then trying to deal with all the memories and all the imaginings that we have in our physique. The same problems. And yet unbelievably we can sense increasingly with this lecture of Donatello and Nikolas of Cusa that a new vision had been achieved.
And after the break when we go down to the library and talk about Nicholas of Cusa we will be able to give it the name that the Italians gave it. And we need a little diagram up on the board. A simple human head. What was different before the Italian Renaissance, the inner mind of vision became capable of seeing the unity in the pattern of form. Beyond the limitations of the complications of life. It's difficult to find ways of unifying in terms of matter. In terms of the complications of life. And it was at this time that it occurred poignantly to the mind of the early Renaissance that the problem was that we were looking in the wrong place. Yet these eyes give us the cues but that the true integration comes from the inner intellectual vision. That form underneath matter is where the geometry of meeting... meaning becomes perceptible. And it becomes perceptible in an integrating sudden conception that the idea behind the shifting, changing, flux of matter is eternally present. And something in man wakens and has a resonance with that. And through this inner eye of vision, he sees suddenly all, and comprehension comes. The conversion of matter to the form of marble, to a sculpture is exactly the transformation that was affected at this time.
Yes, it had been done before. There were sculptors before. There were architects before. Painters. But we have seen how with the advent of Dante's monumental piercing to the structure of reality in its fulsome pattern how in the inner eye of the eagle in paradise man can see all. And we've seen how his contemporary Giotto began to crystallize pictorial space and finally architectural presence in accordance with that discovery. And we've had Clues all along the way of how the sequencing of the frescoed panels of Giotto, the stories of Boccaccio, the poems of Petrarca...How this produced sense that we are not presented with just a series of events in space but that they articulate themselves through an inner time element. In this temporality is the very flow and essence of consciousness. And it is the consciousness brought to form that is the purpose of art. And this forming of consciousness through a time modality was the very essence of aesthetic experience for these individuals. And thus, it was with great pleasure and comprehension at the same time that they began to raise architecture and painting and now with Donatello sculpture to the state of art that we find it in our own time.
We will see with Donatello that he leaves the art of sculpture in such an advanced state that for 500 years there was no appreciable advance over the effective technique and organizing of material right up until our own time. We find that even someone as recent as Rodin still is very close to Donatello in terms of the development of conscious form.
It was stated in the later Renaissance, the in high Renaissance, by Vasari and those individuals. Vasari was the architect of the Uffizi and he, writing about fifty years or so after Donatello had passed on, made the remark that many in his time said of Donatello that he was a pre incarnation of Michelangelo. And that in order to appreciate the great thrust of Donatello's work one had to continue the motion of that comprehension with Michelangelo. And that if one took Donatello and Michelangelo together one could see the epitome of the genius, as Vasari would say of the Italian race in Florence at that time. For having not only recapturing the antique spirit. Recapturing the antique spirit, there's almost a sympathetic magic in that phrase. That somehow man had made a cycle of expressive creations brought into manifestation.
Elements that he could arrange in such a cycle, in such a series that the antique spirit that was...had been floating for 1500 years could come back into manifestation. Come back and enthuse the forms. So that with Donatello we find a very curious to us kind of mysticism. It's a mysticism that we are hardly acquainted with anymore. It having passed into popular parlance so long ago that we don't recognize it as a mysticism. But in fact, it is.
Donatello when he was born,1386, into an impoverished family. His father never amounted to much, was in debt frequently. But the young Donatello was apprenticed very early to the crew that were hewing the big white marble blocks from Carrara into the building materials for the duomo. Which was rising on the spot. Had been rising ever since Giotto's campanile had given the key in the tone to the whole structure. And in a way the life of Donatello takes place against the background of the rising of the great Cathedral. And as the gate...great Cathedral is built Donatello achieves his mastery against the backdrop of this unfolding saga.
And in a way Donatello's life is like a slow-motion play of what happened in the life of William Blake as a young man also. I don't know if you recall that Blake from the age 16 to 21 was an apprentice engraver. And in order to gain mastery of his art he was put in Westminster Abbey. And for five years engraved every single detail of Westminster Abbey until the latticework simply was a part of his visual everyday perception in vocabulary.
For Donatello the great Cathedral in Florence and it's rising up in the manifestation was just that. It was the latticework of perceptual reality that over long decades like some grand sonorous symphony playing its themes to its completion. And it would be Donatello's best friend Filippo Brunelleschi who would dome this great cathedral. Who would solve the unsolvable problem.
And we will see with Nicholas of Cusa how he said that man's mind trying to understand the world was forever like trying to circle, make a circle out of a square. But the two seemed to be so incommensurate. How could they be brought together. And yet for Donatello, as for Cusa, as for Brunelleschi, as for Dante...all of them at this time there was a way. There was a knack. There was a mystical vision possible, but dedication was needed. something we have lost in our time. We have no longer any sense of the efficacy of dedication. We do not realize the reality of applied integrity. That the continuity of applied integrity, yes so rare in its powerful sympathetic capacities that even the gods respected. And even the gods will crown with wholeness the attempt on that basis.
This is essential in the life of Donatello. He alone of the great artists of the Quattro Centro was unmarried. He in fact, when he began to earn his living invited his aged mother to live with him. She lived until age 85 and Donatello took care of her all of his life. There have been studies on Donatello that emphasized that his great sculptures all masculine and that he doesn't attend to the feminine. But this is simply not true. Donatello attends to the feminine in the way that Dante and the Divine Comedy attended to the feminine. And we'll see in several of his major works his great capacity to envision through the inner eye the poignant Humanity of the Divine Feminine. A paradoxical statement in terms of matter a reconciliation of opposites in terms of form.
And one of Donatello's greatest sculptures towards the end of his life was his portrayal of Mary Magdalene as a wizened desert demonical religious genius whose great profundity lay in her unflinching dedication and integrity to the reality of divine incarnation and the man. It is this figure finally to the significance of Donatello. I'm sorry I again have no slides. I will get slides made. But you can see from photographs the incredible haggard power of Donatello's vision of the femme.
Later on, when the refinement comes in the next generation, where individuals become used to the high-powered integration that Donatello and Brunelleschi would form. No longer hair raised by the electrifying sense of presence in it. When it became mythologically closed so that it was more comfortable as a civilized dynamo. We will find Botticelli bringing this feminine in a gorgeous vein back to us again. But if it didn't come that way first. In fact, it came through the raw inner visionary capacities of someone like Donatello and someone like Brunelleschi.
All the time as he was a young boy Donatello was surrounded by the hard rock that seemed to yield to the hand of man. The marble from Carrara, world famous even in an own day for its purity. For its exquisiteness. I have a slide somewhere of Henry Moore sitting on huge, sawed blocks of marbles at Carrara staring off into the vast spaces on towards Pisa and the sea. And one almost gets the sense of the sculptor whose hand moves like the informed blind man not needing even to look at it to be able to begin to perceive and play with the forms. And later on, of course, when the pre incarnation comes back again in full Sun force is Michelangelo. He will seize the material as if it were some young being. And through the very force of his personality blow into it through his intellectual vision whatever shape and form he would wish to give it. But with Donatello, his great beginnings came from leaving the white marble of Carrara in Florence that was being hewn for this Cathedral rising. Coming into manifestation.
He left Florence as a teenager for a short period, about eight months nine months and he went with Brunelleschi to Rome. And the two of them often seen together there. Often described in chronicles and annuals as treasure seekers. These two teenaged geniuses went to Rome, which at that time was evacuated. The papacy had moved to Avignon. The great papal establishments and palaces were largely under caretakers and many of them quite empty. The antiquities of Rome had not been really unearthed. In fact, we think in our imagination of Piranesi's great engravings of the large antique monuments in full room and covered with vegetation. Something like that. And in among these ruins of the antique world, the old Italy, Donatello and Brunelleschi digging up and on earthing bits of marble statuary columns began to see in a way. The one towards architecture, the other toward sculpture. But in such a way that the two media played off.
And one of the most outstanding characteristics of both artists is that they were entirely conscious of the complementation of the other art. Brunelleschi in building always created an architectural space that welcomed to sculpture. And Donatello never made a sculpture that wasn't just right for the place it was made for. Unlike most sculptors, even today, whose works look somewhat interesting and decent in their studio and when you take it out and put it on the site it falls flat. With Donatello it looked so-so in the studio and when you placed it on the site it sparkled. Because it was the achievement of form as the integration of idea and space. Experience and conception together that was brought to manifestation. So that a sculpture of Donatello's literally grasped the reality of the place and your perception of it and throws it into blossom. Grows it into a perception of apt form, understandable form. It has meaning. It has significance. And a great deal of that significance and meaning comes from your comprehension. Your consciousness of knowing that you are seeing and what you are seeing.
He returned from Rome with Brunelleschi and his head full of ideas. There were great artistic competitions going on. Brunelleschi himself had lost a competition to get Ghiberti to do some large famous doors. But when they came back our Donatello was given a small assignment. He was to make two rather smallish statues, prophets they called them, to go in a certain place on the Cathedral. And these were his first public sculptures. Now it's an odd realization when one sees these. They looked like sleepy young Italian teenagers just woke up. Could they be prophets? How in the world?
There's something characteristic though about this in Donatello. He was one graced by the gods. One blessed by mother nature, who allowed Donatello to be whispered secrets of life because he was someone who would never tell. His discretion as a human being made him a secret privilege to divine insight. And characteristically of Donatello, the prophets were young boys. They were not the haggard godlike beings, but they were like those friends of yours in your adolescence whom everyone knows. Our regulars on the planet. You could play with them. You could confide with them. The humanity of the divine becomes a particular privilege of Donatello to disclose. The idea so powerful in early 14th century mysticism. The idea that God might be a friend. Might not be some tyrannical, super cosmic force but might be a friend. That mankind might be a grant... gathering of friends of God. Related by the fact that they all had a friend in common. On this most esoteric of levels. On this most penetrating intellectual vision. These are the kinds of thoughts that one must keep alive and circulating in viewing Donatello. His cheerfulness. His humanity. Has this overwhelming resonance of the spiritual mystery implicit in it everywhere.
He was singled out as having done a fairly good job on these two sculptures. And since he was about 20, 21, 22 years of age, he was being given slowly more assignments. Commissions. He was given a commission to do a David and in 1410 Donatello produced a very interesting David. His...I guess I don't have to use this here. David in 1410 stands on the head of Goliath with his toga wrapped in such a way that it's almost a cape tied nonchalantly around the throat. And he is standing with one hand on the hip in the blessing mudra. And 20 years later he would do the same David in a totally different rendition. He would bring to this same figure the characteristics of the matured Donatello. He would do the famous nude David with the hat, sword and the feet, standing in his great triumphal posture as man having come into possession of some great natural integration. The face on the 1410 David gives us the view of someone who is just waking up to the world. Is looking out with the pride of someone who is natural. But the David who is nude in 1430 looks with an eye of comprehension. He is no longer just seeing with the natural eyes, but he is seeing with the inner eye of coherent vision. And this is why he needs no further use of any conventional clothing because he has eclipsed whatever limitations there might have been upon him in terms of ethnocentrism.
The reason for this very often in anthropological perspective, the keys of meaning in an ethnocentric way gather around the great initiatory stages of the life process. Birth marriage death. And at these transformative modes they collect together almost as if magnetized by the meaningful forms scintillatingly focused underneath them. And in Donatello's first David there is a triumph in early life that's going to open up. And the second David there is a triumph that has opened up, not the possibilities of a man the world so much as man seeing through the world to the forms directing destiny underneath. And this is the maturation of Donatello from the age of about 24, 25 to the Donatello who is in his 40s. All during this time we find that Donatello increasingly is singled out by his lifelong patron Cosimo de Medici.
Now Cosimo who we will talk about next week is the most intriguing character in the whole story. He is in fact the key to the Italian Renaissance. It is Cosimo who with his peculiar personality brings the comprehension of a single mind into play across the entire spectrum of the life of the time. Cosimo who was so close to Donatello, Vasari and all the others relate that for 40 years Donatello would do almost anything that Cosimo would have for him. There was one time that he refused. There was a commission.
I have to tell an apocryphal story about Donatello every once in a while here. Cosimo had gotten him a commission. A wealthy man from Pisa who was kind of a boor. And so, Donatello had worked very hard on this torso, on this bust and had finally finished it. The man came to Florence and when he heard down Donatello's price, he just threw up his hands in a rage and offered him some penance. So, Donatello went to Cosimo and Cosimo had worked and take it up onto one of the upper balconies so that it could be seen in the proper light and space. Knowing in his mind that the sculpture was beautiful. It was a masterpiece. It was well worth everything that Donatello had asked. Twice as much. The man still refused. And so, Donatello hearing from the man that he probably could have and probably did do the sculpture in several days, grabbed an axe, pushed the sculpture over the edge and smashing it. And said now in a hundredth part of a minute I have undone my day's work. And against the pleadings of Cosimo would not redo the sculpture for the man.
But other than that event Cosimo became the great patron. As he would become the patron of half a dozen great artists at the time. when Cosimo was exiled from Florence in 1433, he left and Michelozzo the architect went with him. Donatello left with Masaccio, Big Tom and they went to Rome together. and Florence for a year was a very drab place. All of those who were making this life revolution happen withdrew themselves. And of course, the shame of and the deadliness of the atmosphere began to occur increasingly as a burden and the Florentine citizens, as we will learn next week throughout the Albizzi who had exiled through political machinations, the great Cosimo. And he came back to the city and of course the artist came back with him.
Cosimo had fixed upon Donatello as his sculptor. When he gave him the commission for the tomb of a Pope. And this tomb has the figure of the dead man in full regalia up above on a bier, raised up by columns of marble. But what's interesting about this work is that down below our three statues of Faith, Hope and Charity. And when you look at Faith, Hope and Charity there, the statues are placed in such a way that the heads of the three women presenting these virtues are placed exactly in such a way that the arched scalloping becomes almost like a halo down to the heads. So that the architectural space of the scalloped niche arch becomes the nimbus, the halo of the virtues personified in the sculpture. Donatello is presenting us with a conscious form of great significance and great power. That the place of a sculpture like this in an architecture, as was coming into being, was capable of producing an experiential journey. A sequence of temporal sequence for human beings that would enable them to mature their sense of inner vision to the point of manifest form.
In other words, Donatello like all the other thinkers and writers and artists that we have seen thus far, was creating a medium whereby the populace of the city of Florence and of these other cities that participated in this revolution in consciousness. Whereby the everyday life of the citizen was transformed from the habitual mode to one of aesthetic intuition. It became a part of the general milieu. The ambience of the city itself. And we find increasingly individuals like Brunelleschi and Donatello reading Dante as the workbook. As the basic work as we saw in the Gandhi series, how he used the Bhagavad-Gita they use the Divine Comedy. It became for them the template for their experience as artists, as men, as visionaries. And in the Divine Comedy as we saw the progression moves from the inferno and it's static hierarchies through to a transformational mountain. And its spiraling to an experience of a cosmic whole in Paradise, which is experienced as a mystery. Not portioned out bit by bit but delivered integral instantly full-blown.
So that what man experiences in terms of a time-delay realization is the significance of what was presented to him whole. And thus, it was that life became sanctified by art in the Renaissance. Because it took the space of a human life to be able to recognize and sift and experience fully the meaning of the civilization that had been produced. The meaning of the architecture, the sculpture, the paintings, the literature that had been produced for them. And as that meaning and significance sank in and matured for three or four generations in a row. There was an increasing consciousness as to the exponential possibilities of applying this. So that by the time we get to Donatello it had become self-conscious. Donatello and Brunelleschi, Cosimo, it had become self-conscious.
And we will see that the one lack that was increasingly found was that there was no philosophy at this level. That the philosophy of the early Renaissance was the weakest point in the whole length. And it will be Cosimo, as we will see next week, who will purposely set about, just as the United States did in the 1960s with their put a man on the moon program, purposely set out to find someone and train them to become the great philosopher of this civilization. And they would find that person and they would build a school for him, and they would train him. And he would in fact grow up and be that person. And the philosophy that was coming in a manifestation was largely a platonic hermetic revival, given the peculiar ethnocentricity of the northern Italians of the cuatro century. In the process of doing this they would produce what we recognize today as the Renaissance.
Donatello in his sculpture, in his work, would begin to manifest the divine in forms that at first our disconcerting. The most popular image of the Donatello frieze immediately that comes to mind, and there are so many of these that we can pick among a dozen or two dozen examples, are what the Italians call putto. Putto are the small little angels. The little winged angels that later on become the Cupid's. And later on, become in Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the nice little fairy land creatures who will help man if he keeps his integrity together. The putto, the little winged angels are a presentation of the levels of divine reality. The angelic orders of Dionysius the Areopagite, in terms of endearing human images. In terms, anthropologically of men's rebirth. In terms of what Renaissance means, a rebirth of the classic spirit. A reincarnation of that classic spirit. And how does it come back? It comes back at the beginning of its cycle of wholeness in the children. And the images of the children in the mind of Donatello as these putto. As the small angels.
In fact, when Donatello will make the naked David with all of his assertiveness, he at the same time makes a very interesting sculpture to go with it called Cupid. And just as we have the David, which I will get slides for all these eventually and put them up. We have the cupid at the very same time. And these two sculptures go together. They belong together.
And so it is in Donatello that we find, perhaps for the first time in his Madonnas, the image of the Child Jesus as a baby who does not present some immediate gaze out powerfully to the world. But as a child who turns to its mother for substance. And we find in Donatello's Madonnas who are mothering the infant or holding the head tenderly. Who are loving this baby. So that the divine archetype is no longer presented in an electrocuting powerful presentation but has begun to be mellowed and brought into manifestation to the human family. So that the humanists of Donatello's time, Brunelleschi's time, were those who were bringing into manifestation the Divine. The celestial hierarchies. But they were putting them into a human time motion, a lifetime. They were putting them into a life cycle so that there were angels that were children.
In fact, it's interesting to see and review one of Donatello's great freezes, where he shows John the Baptist, Saint John the Baptist as a child. And Saint John the Baptist as a child still has the hair...rough hair shirt of the desert ascetic. He still has the nimbus and still carrying the crossed staff for a renter of accrocture(?). But he is a child. He is a beautiful childlike one might be seeing playing in the streets. And it would have been a very easy transposition to the perceiving eye of the Florentines at this time, the northern Italians, to see such a boy as this playing in the street with other boys like that. And the inner eye seeing that could be John the Baptist. That baby could be the Christ child. That there was not this confusion so much as there was this transposition. That every human being had this possibility.
So that the phrase that Pico della Mirandola would use later on was that man had a dignity that was cosmic. Because alone this inner dignity and sense of presence allowed him to be mobile throughout the entire universe in every level of manifestation and meaning. That if there was a glue holding the universe together it was man's dignity which allowed him the mobility of transformation in motion. And thus, it was that the curse of change in the world was transformed into a virtue of inner mutability that allowed for the transformations. And in this transformation increasingly man would experience the blessings, the grace of divine love. Recognizing that this is the only medium that holds throughout all the stages of life throughout, all the perceptions.
It was Donatello who for the first time presented us with sculptures of living Florentine personages of great power and dignity. Presenting them as royal individuals. We had not seen such portrait since the days of classical Rome. Donatello having this capacity was then chosen. He was about in his mid-40s. Chosen by the city of Padua to come to Padua and to make a monument to one of the famous soldiers of fortune of the day. A man, a man named Gattamelata and the Italian word the condottieri. This man who had done so much for the city of Padua was to be given a public statue. And they wanted to statue on a horse. So, Donatello worked on this public sculpture, and it still stands there. And we have for the first time since classical antiquity the presentation of a royal dignified powerful man upon his horse in the middle of a trance. One hoof on the ball to show the mobility and the grace. This statue caused great uprising of cheer among the people of Padua. It seemed to them that Donatello was in fact one of the ancient sculptures come back into manifestation. And they besieged him to stay in Padua and work on the Cathedral of San Antonio there.
Well Donatello happy soul that he was stayed for ten years in Padua. Making a whole series of freezes and sculptures and so forth. But characteristically finally said that he could take no more adulation. He said he was getting rusty, and he had to go back home to Florence where there were nothing but critics. That he in fact returned to Florence and was given a number of great commissions there in Florence. It was at this time that Cosimo arranged for Donatello to produce series of sculptures among which is the Mary Magdalene. They dome of Brunelleschi was coming into manifestation in 1455. As the Cathedral came into being in that architectural mandala achieved its conscious form with all of the implications that we talked about in the lecture on Brunelleschi. Donatello produced a series of sculptures that were to influence sculpture right up until the 20th century. Among them was the Saint John the Baptist, this time not as a child but almost as a baroque Haggard holy man. Almost too wild, powerful for civilized life. And it was at the same time in this series that the great Mary Magdalene was produced. And as if the baroque Saint John the Baptist were not enough, he produced towards the end of this cycle a John the Baptist who is as close to a Zen master as any Western sculptor has ever come.
And these, you can see them closer up, I'm sorry I haven't slides yet, we'll have them. You can see in these works even in the photographs of these works, the coming together of the sense of crystalline form that Giotto had developed. And the great architectural unity of space commanded that Brunelleschi had developed. And the poignancy of Donatello of taking the human life from its innocent childhood through various growths to old age. When the dignity of men shagging and hoary with experience still held that inner vision that was vouchsafe to the putto before. That is to say they were participants in a divine order that so transcended this world, that on full realization of it one could happily leave this world and exit to the other. Joseph Campbell in his first excellent lecture said that one of the uses of mythology is to get us to agree to leave elegantly without digging our heels. That we have run our course of life let's not complain. Let's not seek to stay here that let us go and enjoy this transformation.
And thus, in the Renaissance in the 1450s, early 1460s the whole notion of death received a transformative envisioning. And became in fact not just the final culmination of a series of steps leading toward it inevitably but became the summation and experience of a transformation that had always been implicitly there from before birth. And that in fact then the life of Christ was a pre incarnation of every man. That the eternal was always where it was. Always in the pure form of the good. And that the permutations here had never affected it in any way whatsoever. Therefore, one could joyously be here and joyously leave for there. That this freedom from the anxiety of this ultimate split, this polarity of life/death freed Florence at this time for the next incarnation. And that would be the rising of a world class philosophy about the possibilities of the divinity in man. And in two weeks we'll see with Pacino how this only came into being. And we have lived on the glory of that for the last 500 years. We are still within a society recognizable as having descended from the Renaissance and that idea.
And I have a number of things to say about Donatello, but I'll include them when we talk about Nicolas of Cusa after the break. And we're going to go down to the library, and I'll present some more. Plus, some of the ideas of Nicolas of Cusa, which are implicit in what I've said about Donatello.
So, let's take a little break I'll be hawking my wares on the sidewalk, and I'll be back.
The best book on Donatello, this is the paperback version of it: The sculpture of Donatello, by the great Art Historian Jackson. This originally was a large two volume work with about 600 plates. And this book is about the only one really that you would need on Nicholas of Cusa. The only really insightful work is this one by Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Cassirer was associated with the Warburg Institute and towards the end of his life and the second word period with Yale.
Nicholas of Cusa lived from 1401 to 1464. So, he died in the same year that Cosimo de Medici died. And Donatello died two years later in 1466. So, the mid 1460s, somewhat of a watershed here. We'll see that Ficino by 1464 had already translated a great deal of Plato and all of The Corpus Hermeticum. That is all of the classical paramedic material had been translated in most of Plato.
It's difficult for us to think that during the period called the Middle Ages or when I was a child it was called the Dark Ages, the understanding of antiquity was completely scrambled up. It was an odd amalgam. Many errors had been made for centuries on him and compounded and the only adjective that you can describe the intellectual atmosphere with is murky. There was no real understanding of what the ancient world had been or any of its a reality.
And so, in a way, the image of the young Donatello and the young Brunelleschi as teenagers digging in the ruins of Rome to try and get some real facts in terms of a piece of marble is very poignant. They were literally pioneers trying to uncover facts. What had happened. It was a great mystery. It had been a mystery for almost 1200 years by that time. If man had been so great, if the civilization had been so monumental, what happened? It was like the proverbial aftermath of some Holocaust. And of course, with a nascent civilization coming up, with the realization these individuals were not children. Are not primitive. They knew that they were bringing back into being a very high order of human being. And they wanted to know what had happened. Were they susceptible perhaps to what had assailed the antique world. Their only real contact was through the Byzantine scholars and Manuel Chrysoloras was the most famous. Nicholas of Cusa who actually learned Greek, which is a very hard thing to do. It takes 20 years, 25 years to learn Greek. It's not like learning French or Italian or **(inaudible 2-3 words)** Reading Philosophic Cultured Hellenistic Greek is almost impossible. You almost have to grow up with it. But the contact at this time was with the late, late into the line Byzantine scholars. And the Byzantine empire was falling too. It was crumbled. It was a very Germane question. What is it in civilization that is so lethal. And are we just building another sandcastle. Is all this gonna come down.
So, these were real questions. And for the only real early philosopher Nicholas of Cusa, it seemed to him, incumbent upon him, that he understands the history of thought. And that he make some attempt, at least at a systematic unity of human thought. So, Nicholas of Cusa is the first philosopher in this whole period that attempts a systematic presentation of human thought. His first famous work De Docta Ignorantia presents the doctrine of ignorance. That is to say, it's not simply that we don't know about ultimate conditions, it's that we cannot know about ultimate conditions. But there is a complete separation that he could see in reading Plato, the great arguments in the republic. The wonderful myths in Phaedo. The stories that are told in the Phaedrus.
Again, Nicholas of Cusa was the first European to actually read the Parmenides of Plato. He came face to face with the old Paramendian polarity. What is, is. What isn't, isn't. That there's no commensurability between them whatsoever. That there are polarities that are mutually exclusive instruments. Not the ideational world, the ideal form. How no contact in a commensurate way, in a staged progressive way, with this world. Not the way in which there is an interchange is a mystery to them. It is always going to be a mystery.
The Medieval world had based itself naively on the confidence that there were gradual stages connecting man and heaven. There were orders and if one just followed these emanation orders, one could literally climb the stairs. That there were goals there. Maybe you didn't do it and maybe no one you knew, but if someone could they were there. But with the quattrocento with Donatello, Nicholas of Cusa, Brunelleschi, it became apparent that in classical antiquity it had been understood that there was a break in commensurate **(inaudible)** between heaven and earth. And that in many ways they were polarized. That what was so here was almost automatically not so there. The changing of this world was in fact permanent. So that when man tried to use colloquial paradigms from his experience here untutored, he always fell into a trap. Of what Nicholas of Cusa would single out as the flawed Aristotelian logic of the syllogism with its missing middle. That in fact one could never approach in this way any understanding of the divine. So that one had to retract and go back. And this was the curiosity kicker in work. They had to go back and read, understand, and relearn what the ancients had established for themselves. In particular, Plato in particular, the conundrum presented in The Parmenides. This meant that all the static cosmologies that had been lent on, dependent upon, had to be scrapped.
Now, this didn't occur all at once. It didn't penetrate what this was going to me all at once. It was such a monumental realization that it took a couple of generations for it to sink in. And when it began to sink in and toward the end of Michelangelo's life, even such mighty synthetic genius he would be, getting to be very disturbed. As Kenneth Clark once observed in his book Civilization, there were clear storm warnings on the horizon of civilization that if all this were so. If man was really what they had discovered him to be. In life was a very peculiar circumstances we had better change our whole way of living to adapt to it. The real efficacy of the process and to stop day dreaming. But the first warning signal in all this is Nicholas of Cusa.
He studied at Padua University, and he was there in the late 1420s. He was influenced a lot by Meister Eckhart and his mysticism. I won't go into that. We will give him a lecture. And Dionysius the Areopagite and we will also give a lecture on that subject. But it wasn't his education that effected. It was a sudden realization. He had gone on a visit to Constantinople, he had gone to see the Byzantine scholar **(inaudible)**. And when he was crossing the street, it suddenly occurred to him that this problem of the incommensurate was never going to be solved by intellectual finagling on a natural basis. And what was brought into realization for him, snapped into fact for him, was that the inner eye had to reject a graduated cosmos and had to prepare itself to accept a full-blown integrated realization. And that what was graduated was not the approach to the realization, but the explication of the realization in terms of man's life. In terms of the conscious time which it took for him to articulate to him. And so, this cone of purgatory leading up to paradise was turned upside down. So, man had to prepare himself to be conscientious because only through a long life of conscientiousness could he absorb and explicate for himself and living reality what the significance might be of such a penetration of the divine.
This would change the entire nature of consciousness. It would no longer be the question of having a super tinker toy set and building some kind of construct. It meant that you'd have to live a life of integrity and continuity to allow for the unity to play itself out. So that one could finally in one's life see the wholeness of the pattern. The difficulty was that life is very difficult to have continuity. We may have money. We may have power. We may have adventure. But the most difficult of all is to have continuity because everything impinges upon it. Everything takes us away from it. A job, ambition, dreams, work, play, everything leads us away from that inner presence. And so, we need help. We need help organizing the exterior world into nodes of integrity so that we can readjust ourselves along the way. And this is what architecture and sculpture painting can do for it, even philosophy. And so, the utility of these great constructs in the renaissance became the working material for homeless. They were not making treasurers for a museum. They were trying to get big and to help themselves to maintain the continuity of their sense of inner presence because it was the only real bonafide salvation left to them. This produced a change which from the exterior is viewed always as the pagan **(inaudible)** and it's not so wrong. They just became really religious and realized that the lax clergy, the power for enabling priests, were not going to be able to help them. Not because they were lax. Not because they were power machinations, human beings did that. But because there was no longer an efficacious way in that mode. They had to go to the man. That man had to be opened to that man could be all things. That the circle of meaning was just the circumference of his toe reaching step became the paradigm for his realization of interior integrity as the only way, the only possibility left alive to be alert.
And there were many people, as we in our culture today who just have no idea. Could care less. But if you did begin to care and if you did begin to know by the 1460s, you would come into possession of some glimpse of this. It might be in the distance **(inaudible)** So that architecture and sculpture and paint are being lights have integrity. And when had they been whole best? In Greece and Rome. And so, the recovery of classical antiquity was an exercise in literally unearthing clues for their hopes. They weren't treasure secrets. They were pioneers of the new mentality. And this has the most peculiar tone to it and conserve(?) in here. I think if I can give you this.
Nicholas of Cusa, the starting point is the opposition between the being of the absolute and the being of the empirical condition. In other words, the being of the infinite and being of the finite. But now the opposition is no longer merely dogmatically positive, rather it must be understood in its ultimate depth and conceived up through the conditions of human knowledge. This position towards the problem of knowledge makes Cusa the first modern thinker. It was the realization that our mind can only work through a certain knowledge image base and that if that knowledge image base is highly problematical. If it requires a radical transformation and reorganization. Where is man going to stand in order to make that? He's going to have to stand outside of himself - extra se - He is going to have to stand outside somehow. But he can't depend upon his feelings, his emotions. What does he have left?
From Nicholas of Cusa, the only thing he had left was the mathematical clarity of pure **(inaudible)**. So, geometrising became an exercise in salvation. The development of perspective. Arranging this world so that it coalesced to the vanishing point beyond became not an artistic exercise as much that a training of perspective. Of the codification of a methodology by which our knowledge on this physical basis can be organized and unified to a threshold which vanishes here but opens up beyond.
So that the inner eye of man in the late renaissance, In Shakespeare's time, Cervantes time. And we'll get to that and that's a peculiar problem. When they wanted to express what they call it the occult eye. Robert Flood had this great diagram of man's cranium all nicely organized in the letter in the different areas and what came out was the occult eye, the inner eyes, the seeing. But when it first came as a glimpse, as an idea of wholeness in Nicholas of Cusa in 1440, it wasn't formulated yet. It wasn't understood yet. It had to be played with and felt for. There is a career of ideas. It takes about 150 years for an idea to occur in the mind of some pioneer for that idea to mature and finally find its way down to general use in the populace. About 150 years for that.
The synthesizing ideas are very powerful. Man is ignorant. He is ignorant, not because he doesn't know, but he's ignorant as Socrates said, because he thinks he knows and really does not. So, at the beginnings of wisdom, come in recognizing the limitations of what one knows and how can we do that best by putting them into a form. Because when we can show ourselves the forms that's it. And what we don't know... where they belong. We don't know the context. We don't know the ultimate extension. And so, what becomes perceptible with conscious form is infinite space. And a work of sculpture, as anyone can experience for themselves, is not contained by the form, but also has its position in that yet make alive this space around it. One even talks aesthetically, sometimes as a work of sculptured controlling space. So that one is **(inaudible)**, but in this reflexive way also illuminates for us in a very special way to the occult eye what is not. And the invisible realm of ideational form come into apperception. They become not available as keys which could be pocketed, but as modes of possibility which can be worked with in the sense of context.
Whenever this occurs in civilization, and it's occurred many times, many times, dozens of times. And what happens is that man becomes a mariner on the seas of possibility, begins to explore. He wants to explore that world. And then so he takes the ultimate form himself and puts it in motion against the world of possibility. And in that adventure discovers the chain of sequences, the golden chain of sequences that will finally be understood later on in the mythology of that effort(?).
And so, with Donatello we find the form of man coming into an interesting juxtaposition with the form of the divine. And if you'd like one image for that, think of the Putto. Think of child angels. Happy child angels with wings and instruments. And then the high renaissance when the mythology of the epoch was becoming conscious. These putto are everywhere. In all the paintings. And when **(inaudible 2 works) began building up the apex of the visual spaces, there are world wind putto everywhere arriving to the masses. But they first came in through the hand of one man, Donatello.
And they came into comprehension through one other man, Nicholas or Cusa. He goes on and....Cusa goes on, and he gives us here "The true organ of its apprehension is the intellectual vision. The visio intellectualis where in all the opposition of logical geniuses and species are resolved. For in this vision, we see ourselves taken beyond all empirical differences of being and beyond all merely conceptual distinctions to the simple origin." In other words, to the point that lies beyond all divisions and antitheses for that point to be approachable. Yeah, as Cusura will be pointed out, and Nicholas of Cusa explicated so well, there needs to be a conjunction of opposites. One has to take the absolute greatest in the absolute least and bringing them together. Well, the absolute least, a little baby, a human baby, and the absolute greatest are the angels of ultimate vision. And so those putti of Donatello are that reconciliation of opposites brought together. And the mystery that they presented is one that is the vanishing point, the threshold of universal rebirth.
When this was first understood as an ethical event in Basel, Switzerland in the 19th century by Jacob Burckhardt, he used the only word that he could to describe it. He said this was an age of rebirth, the Renaissance and he coined the phrase. And he understood it because that his city at his time, it was also undergoing the beginning of this **(inaudible)** in civilization. In our time, we don't have the artist so much as we have the scientists, psychologists. We look for a Michelangelo in our age, we don't work for someone who made buildings. We look for someone who understood the inner secrets of self-transformation. Maybe somebody like Karl Yung is the Michelangelo of our generation.
Well, there's always a mastermind in the works. And week you'll see Cosimo de Medici, who really the phrase that the Italians used to have for him was Padre Patria(?), a father of the country. The father of the whole work. He is sort of the Godfather for the entire renaissance. He was the man to whom they all came. And he always found a way to handle the situation. Once when Donatello was angry because one of his young assistants had left for another sculptor, he was enraged and uh, in a fit of madness went off to this other city to kill this young lad. So, Cosimo sent a messenger on ahead. And the Messenger told the youngster not to run or complain, but to laugh. Because Cosimo understood things. So, when Donatello came back Cosimo asked him if he killed him. And he said No. He said the guy laughed and I started laughing and pretty soon we were drinking. So, Cosimo was that sort of a fellow. He knew what to do.
Well, we will see you next week.
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