Erasmus and Biography

When making an attempt to come to some conclusions about the frequent word-portraits Erasmus painted, the first impulse is to apologize for harping on a theme so hackneyed. On further consideration, however, the apologies must take a very different form. The subject involves some of the most fundamental questions about the Renaissance. The danger will be to promise more than one can perform, and formulate queries to which there can be no answer. For the subject really resolves itself into the assessment of character by the men of the Renaissance, how far they were simply renewing the classical conception of personality and how far they took up a new standpoint and ushered in the modern world. Again, whether it is true that biography as we know it was hardly practised during the Middle Ages, and if so, why; and does this distinction operate in favour of the claim made by the humanists that they were bringing back light after darkness – does it justify in fact the idea of a Renaissance? (As the reaction against Burckhardt cleared, it has been possible once more to believe in such an idea.) Again, what is the relationship of painting in words to painting tout court, painting in visual media, and have these word sketches of Erasmus anything to reveal about this much-discussed question? Did he, who wrote so appreciatively of the art of Dürer, have any conscious intention of approximating to visual art?