the Renaissance

We have talked about the distinction between a polymath and a Renaissance man (woman), but I thought that I would give a little background on the word Renaissance. After all, when people talk about the meaning of a Renaissance person, they should know a little about where the word Renaissance came from.

Although scholars had been writing about the era of the Renaissance since the Renaissance, they had not been not calling it that, at least not in English. The word was first used, in Italian, in 1550, when the Italian historian and writer Giorgio Vasari referred to the rinascita in his celebrated book of art history, Lives of the Artists.

However, the word was not used in English until 1840, when British writer Thomas Trollope (the lesser known older brother of noted novelist Anthony Trollope) used it in a travelogue called A Summer in Brittany, but he used it as an architectural term only. Trollope specifically noted that it was a French word that he was using, writing, “It [a church] is built in that heaviest and least graceful of all possible styles, the ‘renaissance’ as the French choose to term it.”

Although the Oxford English Dictionary honors Trollope with the first use of Renaissance in the English language, it doesn’t seem like Trollope actually intended to use it as an English word. It certainly appears as though he thought that he was inserting a foreign term in an otherwise English sentence.

The setting off of renaissance continued for some time, although the word was clearly spreading. For example, in 1842, the early travel writer Sir Francis Palgrave referred often to the renaissance style of architecture in his Hand-Book for Travellers in Northern Italy. And young Queen Victoria wrote in her journal that same year that they had seen “the fine greenhouse the Duke has built, all in stone, in the Renaissance style.”

Then, in 1845, another travel writer, Richard Ford, in A Hand-book for Travellers in Spain, wrote: “Charles V. and Philip II., both real patrons of art, were the leading sovereigns of Europe at the bright period of the Renaissance, when fine art was an every-day necessity, and pervaded every relation of life.” Ford was the first writer to use the word to refer to an era, rather than simply to an architectural style, but he italicized it, which presumably meant that he was still unsure as to whether it was a real English word.

Finally, in 1851, English art critic John Ruskin referred simply to the Renaissance in his book The Stones of Venice. And with that usage, it could be said that the word had officially entered the English language.