While scrolling through Instagram yesterday, I happened to stumble upon a comment by a netizen claiming that they wished to go back to the period of the renaissance to experience the infamous art and cultural revolution in real time. Being the history geek that I am, that took me to a spiral of wondering what it would really be like to be able to live in the middle ages? Would I be a part of all those enthralling innovations? Would my name be etched in the history books, people admiring me for my art? Would I get to see the real woman behind the celebrated Mona Lisa painting in real life?! While the answers to my questions may forever remain a mystery, the least I could do to satisfy my inner curiosity was to research and reconstruct a scenario of one’s daily life back in the renaissance.
If I’m being honest, I expected the middle ages to be a bit more interesting or at least the historians to be a bit more candid about the true nature of the Renaissance. Living in the Renaissance has been glorified but underneath all that glamour, lies painful exploitation, death and whatnot. Living in those times would never give me access to explore the artistic revolution nor to participate in it. Why, you may ask? Just by the virtue of being a woman, I would be denied access to any right available to a man. Even if I were to produce art, it would probably get buried underneath and be forgotten. Being destined to the fate of being a mere commodity, I would eventually become a miserable replica of the Woman Lying on a Couch, perhaps the only way I would ever be connected to a form of art.
Not only will my life be damned with the horror of being confined within four walls, I would also bear witness to arguably one of the worst pandemics to ever hit humanity-The Black Death. The infamous bubonic plague didn’t just cause the death of several but also brought Europe to its knees with the economic strain. With the depression on the high, the industrialists started exploiting the laborers by paying them less than what they deserved. Men of the renaissance began pinning their hopes in the hands of the church. This, in turn led to a rise of religious extremism which was in direct conflict with the notions of humanism and rejection of Catholicism emerging during that era. Wars raged on while the common people got caught in the middle, and eventually had to suffer through immense psychological trauma.
Seeing how the Bubonic Plague left its last traces in the year 1352, one would assume that the post-plague period would certainly be better. However, that wasn’t the case. If one were to live in the post-plague period in Italy, only then would they realize the capitalist horrors that gripped the society. Though celebrated at the time, looking back on it, one can find eerie similarities between the conspicuous amounts of consumption of art and the trend of fast fashion in today’s world. Arguments like the Lopez Thesis have developed to explain this phenomenon. As per his theory, due to the economic downfall of the country, men got heavily discouraged from investing and instead spent their surplus wealth on consuming materials instead. To live in that time was to submit to these ideas and to indirectly promote the exploitation of poor workers who were barely making ends meet.
The era of the Renaissance has been romanticized to an unbearable extent. Granted, the paintings and the fashion of that time are unparalleled, but even then, one should be mindful of what was hidden from the eyes of a common man. The exploitation, discrimination, oppression of women and the casualties of wars of the era are nothing to be glorified. It seems as if the idea of living in those ages is far better than the reality of it. Merely reading about it is a painful reminder of the world we live in and how we continue to practice the commodification of art knowing the damage it does to our society.
I stepped into the world of renaissance, thinking of it as philanthropic heaven, a world engulfed by varied beauty and wisdom. I wished to witness the glamour of Italy while it was adorned with artistic and scientific innovations. However, the realization that all that glitters is not gold came to me shortly. It was not a world of roses but instead of thorns disguised underneath the stem. The middle ages gave us icons like Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo but it also brought about a shift from moralistic ideals to material ones.