The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance
Joscelyn Godwin
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| 'His sheer humanity leaves one gasping with wonderment, with pleasure, with humour' | | – Anthony Rooley |
| ‘Dazzlingly wide-ranging … unusual and refreshing … a fascinating range of beetle-browed and potentially illuminating interpretations – cabbalistic, alchemical, Neoplatonic, zodiacal – for some of the most stunning creations of the Renaissance’ | – Andrew Graham-Dixon,
The Daily Telegraph |
'Professor Godwin takes one on a spiritually very coherent journey, with subtle interconnecting links ...
An immense amount of material is covered, always very clearly and comprehensively ...
a joy to read’ | | – The Art Book |
This remarkable, highly illustrated work is the first to introduce the general reader to the revival of the pagan imagination in Renaissance art and culture –
a hidden stream of spirituality that is so well reflected in art and literature but, until now, has been so poorly understood.
One of the strangest paradoxes of Western culture is the way in which the Christian courts of the Renaissance adopted classical mythology as a sort of alternative religion. Even popes and cardinals seem often to be taking Jupiter and Venus as seriously as Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Of course, nobody believed in them – or did they?
Joscelyn Godwin demonstrates how pagan forces existed side-by-side – sometimes uneasily – with the official doctrines of the Church, and explores how pagan themes were used to enhance both public and private life. He has chapters on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a pagan fantasy by a Dominican friar (which Godwin recently translated to wide critical acclaim); a Christian church filled with pagan allusions; the 'cabinets of curiosities' where rulers retired into their own private pagan worlds; 'garden magic' and the origins of opera.
With its vast repertoire of imagery, from the Nine Muses to the Signs of the Zodiac, from the Golden Age to the epic of Troy, paganism offered a nostalgia for a classical world untroubled by sin and in no need of redemption. It faded with the Reformation. But the dream still exists as a possibility for all those who are in harmony with it.
Also of interest:
Athanasius Kircher A Renaissance Man and the Quest for Lost Knowledge
The Archaeology of Nostalgia |
|  |  | | | | ISBN 0500251193 | | ISBN-13 978-0500251195 | | | | 24.0 x 19.0 cm | | Hardback | | 304pp | | 250 illustrations | | First published 2003 | | | | £26.00 | | | |  | | | | 
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