Staging Rome: the Renaissance, Rome, and humanism’s classical crisis

Abstract Thou stranger, which for Romein Romehere seekest, And nought of Romein Romeperceiu’st at all, These same olde walls, olde arches, which thou seest, Old Palaces, is that which Romemen call. Behold what wreake, what ruine, and what wast . . . Joachim du Bellay, Les Antiquitez de Rome(1558), translated by Edmund Spenser (1591) Despite the critical tendency to view the Renaissance in Europe as a great awakening of autonomous selfhood, Renaissance humanism was as much about conXict as self-discovery.1 Ideological tensions during the Renaissance abounded, none more signiWcant than humanism’s obsession with classical culture amid very contemporary economic, religious, and political changes. The gaze back to antiquity— its art, literature, philosophy, politics, nationalism—was, on the one hand, the primary source for a growing focus on self-identity and a secular world founded on introspection of the self; on the other 1 There have recently been various approaches to humanism that have implicitly and explicitly challenged this somewhat old-fashioned view of the Renaissance. Jonathan Dollimore in his discussion of ‘Essentialist Humanism’ with regards to attitudes toward Renaissance tragedy illustrates the politically subversive nature of humanism; see Dollimore (2004). Ernesto Grassi (1988) takes a Heideggerian view of the Renaissance, and Gian Mario Anselmi (1988) approaches the humanist programme from a fundamentally Marxist view. See also Grassi (1983) and Leonard Barkan (1991).