Gaining Perspective

Masaccio's The Holy Trinity

In 1424, something remarkable happened. Masaccio, a fresco painter in Italy, delivered his commissioned work, The Holy Trinity, the first known work to feature perspective. Prior to this innovation, relative size in a painting signified relative importance. However, as Lewis Mumford
says, "in the new picture of the world, size meant not human or divine importance, but distance." This shift indicated a larger cultural shift toward emphasis on the individual that came with the humanism movement.

In embracing perspective, painters no longer pressed an interpretation on their viewers. Similarly, humanism advocated for the development of individual thought and character. Just as figure's importance in painted works was no longer defined by position, so was the common man no longer defined by his position in the world, but by what he decided to make of himself.

The concept of the individual came with the concept of an individual's responsibility for their own development. In The Courtier, Castiglione discusses traits that a good courtier should seek to develop to be truly useful to his prince. Those qualities, as discussed in this blog post, ranged from an understanding of history and philosophy to athleticism and romantic proficiency. As stated before, Castiglione implies heavily throughout the work that development of these traits ought to be the purpose of 'the courtier's' life. Responsibility belonged to the individual to become whatever he desired to be. The idealists of the time believed that it was innate in man to desire to become more.

Pico della Mirandola, a philosopher of the time, mused in his Oration on the Dignity of Man,

"Let some holy ambition invade our souls, so that, dissatisfied with mediocrity, we shall eagerly desire the highest things and shall toil with all our strength to obtain them, since we may if we wish."  (More on Pico and humanism here) 

As the Renaissance moved past its peak in Italy, humanism and the perspective it brought with it swept into the rest of Europe. The tide of that movement collided magnificently with the surge of reform that blazed both within and without the Catholic church to create Christian humanism, an ideology that existed and thrived on both sides of the Protestant rift. This evolution of the Renaissance ideology brought with it a new dimension to perspective and the notion of 'self'.

Before, it had been enough for a man to develop himself into whatever he might wish to become. The Christian aspect of Christian humanism, however, demanded not only development, but forward progress. Erasmus, widely acclaimed as the father of Christian humanism, made this point quite poignantly in his work In Praise of Folly, an essay written from the point of view of Folly herself. Erasmus, through Folly's advocation of it, condemns the notion that being stupid and happy is a better state of being that being uncomfortable and aware of the potential for growth.

Far from the lack of perspective that defined the age before, man's development of self grew to become the focus and expectation for those who had sufficient means to pursue that course. Not only that, but the responsibility for the development of self had become compounded with the responsibility for improvement of self. These developments set us soundly on the path to achieving the deep and widely resonate sense of self that permeates out global culture today.

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