Back, Forward, & Back Again

Petrarch looked back over his shoulder nearly thirteen centuries to glimpse sight of works that would make mankind wonder and marvel for centuries to come: Cicero’s letters.  This demonstration of ‘ad fontes’ triggered a new perspective of communication.  Somehow, diving back into the past allowed our forefathers to move more quickly forward. 

Letters to Cicero

Petrarch’s discovery didn’t stop there.  He continued to dig deeper into the past and introduced ideals of humanism—that man was capable of great things.  “What a piece of work is man!”  Shakespeare would later exclaim, which is the very sentiment that fueled and sustained a new awareness of communication.

The two letters Petrarch wrote to Cicero were only the beginning; humanism ideals couldn’t be contained to the written word alone.  Artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo communicated their ideas and passions through arts, and for others, it was speech.  Castiglione’s The Courtier masterfully illustrates how the Renaissance-theme of sprezzatura shifted the communication-focus to speech. 

Montaigne's Difference Between Novelty and Nature

            Michel de Montaigne was a French essayist of the Renaissance. One of his essays is titled “Of a Monstrous Child” focuses on the concept prevalent in the Renaissance that men have a greater worth and dignity that was previously not believed in the Middle Ages, when men were considered “cogs in the universe” instead of a central part of the universe such as was believed in the Renaissance.

            The essay “Of a Monstrous Child” recounts the experience of Montaigne observing the relationship of a deformed child (the deformity was the abscess of an underdeveloped conjoined twin) and his uncle, who was leading him around the town in which they lived seeking donations for the “freak show” of nature that he has marketed as. Montaigne’s moral of this essay is that though there is something that is not understood because of its oddness, anything alive is still created from God: “Those that we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of His work the infinite forms that He has comprehended therein; and it is to be believed that this figure which astonishes us has relation to some other figure of the same kind unknown to man.”

            On the concept of infinite worth of men, this essay further proves that the Renaissance mindset shifted from only the holiest religious man was worth something in God’s eyes to anything created by nature (and therefore God), no matter its strangeness, has dignity and is worth respect.

            Montaigne ends his essay with a citation from Cicero whose philosophical writings also inspired the humanism movement: “What he often sees he does not admire, though he be ignorant how it comes to pass. When a thing happens he never saw before, he thinks that it is a portent.”