"New Renaissance" is not a slogan. What meanings should be attributed to this expression?

“After this desert, a New Renaissance for culture awaits us,” hoped Minister Dario Franceschini a few days ago, seizing on the collective urgent need to return to listening to concerts and going to the theater. Indeed, even among friends who never went to the theater in the Avanti Covid era, this desire emerges with increasing intensity during our increasingly thinning calls. Unfortunately, it will not be on March 27, as we had hoped, due to the worsening pandemic picture. All that remains is for us to try to take advantage of this further suspension to relaunch a discussion on the forms this New Renaissance may take when we finally get going again. New Renaissance is undoubtedly a much-used expression, with different meanings, so much so that it risks becoming a slogan emptied of meaning and sensuality. Yet, precisely because of its great evocative capacity, I believe it is important to try to understand what families of meaning should be attributed to it, around which communities, not only cultural ones, should be rebuilt. For this purpose it is useful, first of all, to start with a roundup of quotes in which it has been invoked.

"In Arabia the New Renaissance" (Matteo Renzi, senator).

How not to start with this recent quote, according to which the senator believes the Saudi kingdom is the most likely candidate to trace the glories of the historical period in question. Although the king is making mighty infrastructural investments, he is also repurposing practices more in keeping with the Renaissance itself than a contemporary reinterpretation of it, continuing the witch-hunt that the West has abolished for centuries and is apparently still deeply fashionable in Saudi Arabia, starting with the killing of journalist Jamal Kashoggi.

"For our country, bringing in economic operators, both public and private [in business refreshments] that operate in the cultural sector, would be particularly significant and could be the first piece of a new economic, social and cultural renaissance for Italy" (Tiziano Onesti, IlSole24Ore)

Onesti, in this April 2020 article, was deservedly concerned about the survival of cinemas, theaters, and museums thanks to the refreshments that were supposed to help them until the end of the pandemic, but it is not clear how this state intervention on cultural infrastructure, while necessary, could trigger any kind of New Renaissance. The Renaissance is not and has not been palaces and paintings, infrastructural assets and opulence, but is, inescapably, the enhancement of the human skills that in infrastructure act, which those who talk about culture often forget about, focusing on the preservation and restyling of ancient splendors.

"This country must come out of the Middle Ages and know a New Renaissance" (Luca Zaia, President of the Veneto Region).

The expression New Renaissance has come particularly back into fashion with the arrival of new Prime Minister Mario Draghi, evidently considered by many politicians to be the new Lorenzo the Magnificent. It seems that people often confuse Renaissance with Resurgence or resurrection. People talk about Renaissance as something that will descend from above, thanks to a new politician, a new scientific discovery, a new massive economic handout. Why would any of these variables retrieve, like a deus ex machina, the still living heritage of a centuries-old history, if we do not try to understand what about that history made that period so special?

“With Mario Draghi a New Renaissance” (Federico Marchetti, founder of Yoox Net-a-porter).

Some entrepreneurs also use the expression New Renaissance, in this case connected to meritocracy and hard work. These are two indispensable characteristics for progress, but they are equally indispensable for hyperliberal development or any form of rebirth after a pandemic. In this case, as in the one cited by the President of the Veneto Region, the quotation probably refers to a generic and indispensable rebirth, but it should be declined with values that go beyond efficiencyism. It is not enough to produce, it is not enough to consume, we need to figure out how to do it in a socially and economically sustainable way.

Ottavio Vannini, Michelangelo shows Lorenzo the Magnificent the head of the Faun (1638-1642; fresco; Florence, Palazzo Pitti, Sala di San Giovanni)

"How will the music change after the Coronavirus? I hope, indeed I am sure, that we will be facing a new Renaissance, a real revolution. We today, accustomed to “amusical” forms, to an almost absence of sound. Because beyond passing fads, what survives is melody and harmony. It is not enough to speak on a monochord. I hope that we can also re-educate the new generations by teaching classical music in high schools" (Sergio Cammariere, singer)

Artists, too, sometimes talk about the New Renaissance. Not always, however, to remind us that Leonardo da Vinci, while painting the Mona Lisa, was designing the Navigli of Milan, working with the most disparate masters of the workshops; sometimes, as in this case, the New Renaissance is even cited as a hoped-for revolution that would finally drive out the trap to make the melodies we all know come back, that would reassure our tried souls with constant confirmations with respect to the already known.

"Starting from the assumption that the majority of Italians are ignorant of their cultural origins, Rinascimento [its political movement, Editor’s note] tends to uplift society, making them aware that they are children of genius minds such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and all those Masters who lived in the historical period that most of all exalted and promoted the concept of Beauty, the Renaissance precisely" (Vittorio Sgarbi, art critic)

Speaking of the New Renaissance, one could not fail to mention one of the most prolific and prescient art critics, who has even made it a political movement. In his words one can feel the weight of a history that does not serve to understand the present, but rather to make us feel ignorant. People talk about beauty as if it were an innate property of matter, not a negotiated, shared perception, transformed over the centuries. We pretend that beauty has universally and timelessly recognized canons, without considering that, if Renaissance works of art have so greatly influenced successive generations across the globe, it did not happen because the Four Ninja Turtles (named after the American comic book creators, fascinated by their vacation in Florence) managed to find the magic formula of an ’objective aesthetic, as much as because they were part of a social system that did not give art the role of a frill, but ascribed to it the ability to open windows to other worlds, to easily tell complex stories, to experiment with new materials, so much so that each of those who came into contact with the protagonists of that revolution wished to be part of that community.

"We are called to a new Renaissance. Things must not go back to the way they were: things must be better. A civilized country must protect everyone, especially the most fragile people: the elderly and the disabled" (Flavio Insinna, TV Host)

Let’s close this first roundup of quotes with this one, expressed on Domenica In, which confirms without a shadow of a doubt how Nuovo Rinascimento is an archetype of our imagination, of the Italian DNA, with such disruptive power that it is even quoted in a national-popular broadcast.

But are those we have just listed the meanings of New Renaissance that we need for a beautiful, sustainable and inclusive restart?

Probably not, because they have little to do with what we believe to have been the engine of innovation that distinguished the Renaissance and which we find in the words of Ursula Von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, who chooses another slogan and another cultural movement, probably closer to her background, to argue her case: the Bauhaus.

"The New European Bauhaus wants to be a bridge , a bridge between, on the one hand, the world of science and technology and, on the other hand, the world of arts and culture, it is a new aesthetic of the European green deal that combines good design with sustainability .The EuropeanBauhausaims to bring the European green deal closer to people’s minds and homes to the point of making the comfort and attractiveness of sustainable living tangible. The European Bauhaus will show that the necessary can also be beautiful."

This quote, unlike the others, needs no comment because it is a clear and radical argument about the meaning to be given to the new deal he envisions. Just as with the Renaissance, the reference to the New Bauhaus has sparked some controversy, such as that, for example, that it was a misogynist school. References to the past, of course, are always insidious (we are reminded of this by the comparisons activists often make with celebratory statues, sometimes resignifying them with artistic gestures, sometimes denying them with their destruction) but they cannot be erased, because they are our common heritage, the one thanks to which we are who we are, in which there is much that needs to be recognized and valued. We can certainly bring to light all the contradictions that have existed in any movement to see what we can do better. It cannot be denied, on the other hand, that a collective imagination is never built from scratch, but is elaborated in dialectic with the past.

Even the Renaissance can give rise to revisionist criticism. For example, in the strong paradigm shift that put man at the center, after years in which divine law had had the upper hand over every choice, the foundations were also laid for a culture that certifies the clear split between man and nature and that needs to be radically revised: for centuries, we deluded ourselves that man could stamp his hand on the rest of creation as Homo Faber, a setting for which we still pay the consequences today. There are, however, many other fruitful references we can refer to in order to fill this slogan with meaning, such as the valorization of collaborative processes, the depowering of the hierarchical rhetoric between scientific and humanistic knowledge, the perception of art as an instrument of economic and social progress, the focus on the role of the individual as a transformative agent, or the spirit of enterprise, to name but a few.

And indeed, beyond rhetoric, many have attempted to redefine the New Renaissance in more complex ways. For example:

"While we have kept the cultural system divided between the humanistic and the scientific, this divide no longer exists in fact. We must seize this extraordinary opportunity of the pandemic that has made us realize that science and humanism are one. A new Renaissance? Yes, where, however, science converges strongly with the humanistic side" (Paolo Verri, director of Matera 2019)

"It will be to redesign this “middle space” as necessarily flexible, adaptive, non-rigid, following people in their movements without renouncing sociality, a new form of dialogue between things, houses, people and actions, a conversation [...] And this understanding, this unveiling is an action proper to art, which has always removed the veil from reality: thus creativity will be the anti-fragility, the reaction that will trigger a new Renaissance. And in this the Italians have always been a model; they know how to elegantly design change, to trigger the process that is culture. (Daniela Cavallo, professor of Territorial Marketing at the University of Verona)

"A new Renaissance of the Country that is based on a great action of redevelopment and cultural regeneration of the places where we live and work, where we educate ourselves or make culture, favoring and incentivizing all the actions and works that can ensure, in certain times and according to a multi-year program, the establishment of a collective vision aimed at continuously increasing safety, healthiness, living space, green, mobility: a new way of living and thinking, in short." (Fabrizio Cola, Head of Institutional Relations UMAN-ANIMA Confindustria)

It is not enough to invoke a New Renaissance hoping that it can materialize in our workplaces and homes, but it is important to start filling this slogan with shared meanings so that it becomes a clear reference on which to set the policies of Italy’s Next Generation Eu, making it trespass from the enclosure of culture with a lowercase c to allow it to inform in a transversal way every reasoning about the country’s future.

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