Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

46. Ibid. One reason Ficino found Plato so congenial, rather than Aristotle (over and above the fact that the texts were newly available), was his belief that ‘deeds sway us more than the accounts of deeds’ and that ‘exemplary lives’ (the Socratic way of life) are better teachers than the moral instruction of Aristotle.

47. Tarnas, Op. cit., page 214; Brucker, Op. cit., page 228. Haskins, Op. cit., page 295.

48. Tarnas, Op. cit., page 216. Haskins, Op. cit., page 283.

49. Barnes, Op. cit., page 556.

50. Ibid., page 558.

51. A. J. Krailsheimer, ‘Erasmus’, in A. J. Krailsheimer (editor), The Continental Renaissance, London: Penguin Books, 1971, pages 393–394.

52. McGrath, Op. cit., pages 253ff. See also: Krailsheimer (editor), Op. cit., page 478ff, for Montaigne.

53. Barnes, Op. cit., page 563.

54. Ibid.

55. Bronowski and Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition, Op. cit., page 61.

56. Kerrigan and Braden, Op. cit., page 77.

57. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 67.

58. Krailsheimer (editor), Op. cit., pages 388–389, for the background to Adages and its success.

59. Barnes, Op. cit., page 564.

60. Ibid., page 565.

61. Bronowski and Mazlish, Op. cit., page 72. See Moynahan, Op. cit., page 339, for what Erasmus wrote elsewhere about Luther.

62. Francis Ames-Lewis and Mary Rogers (editors), Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998, page 203.

63. Peter Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, 1420–1540, London: Batsford, 1972, page 189.

64. Ibid., page 191.

65. Kerrigan and Braden, Op. cit., page 17.

66. Burke, Op. cit., page 191.

67. Kerrigan and Braden, Op. cit., page 11.

68. Ibid., pages 19–20. Even the economic records of the Datini family, referred to earlier, were kept for ‘posterity’, as if they equated to some sort of literary archive in which money was the equivalent of poetry. Ibid., pages 42–43.

69. Ibid., page 62.

70. Burke, Op. cit., page 194. And see Brucker, Op. cit., page 100 for criticism of Burckhardt and the conclusions he draws.

71. Burke, Op. cit., page 195.

72. Ibid., page 197.

73. Hall, Op. cit., page 90. Brucker, Op. cit., pages 218–220, for universities and tolerance in Florence.

74. Tarnas, Op. cit., page 225.

75. Peter Burke, Introduction to Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, London: Penguin Books, 1990, page 13.

76. They even felt they could conquer death, in the sense of gaining a measure of fame that would outlive them, and cause them to be remembered. In fifteenth-century tomb sculpture, for example, the macabre is almost totally absent. Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, Op. cit., page 201.

77. Ibid., page 200. See Brucker, Op. cit., pages 223–225, for Bracciolini and Florentine attitudes to money and fame.

78. Burke, Op. cit., page 201.

CHAPTER 19: THE EXPLOSION OF IMAGINATION

1. There are many accounts. See, for example: Herbert Lucas SJ, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, London: Sands & Co., 1899, pages 40ff; and see Pierre van Paassen, A Crown of Fire: The Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola, London: Hutchinson, 1961, pages 173ff, for other tactics of Savonarola.

2. Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, Op. cit., pages 302–303. See also: Moynahan, Op. cit., pages 334–335, for another account.

3. Elizabeth Cropper, Introduction to Francis Ames-Lewis and Mary Rogers (editors), Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art, page 1.

4. Ibid., page 2, and Burckhardt, Op. cit., volume II, page 351.

5. Aerial perspective deals with the tendency for all observable objects, as they recede from the spectator, to become more muted in tone and to become bluer in proportion to their distance, owing to the density of the atmosphere. (This is why mountains in the background always appear blueish.) Peter and Linda Murray, Dictionary of Art and Artists (seventh edition), London: Penguin Books, 1997, pages 337–338.

6. It was a bishop, the Bishop of Meaux, who argued in his mammoth poem, Ovide Moralisé, that Christian instruction could be found in many of the myths of Ovid. Burke, Op. cit. And see Moynahan, Op. cit., page 335, for the way Botticelli changed under the influence of Savonarola.