Open Access

Robert Brennan

• The Italian Renaissance has long been studied as a point of origin for "modern" ideas about art. This approach, which can be traced back to figures like Giorgio Vasari and Jacob Burckhardt, remains central in scholarship on Renaissance art to this day. For example, on the first page of a recent textbook on Italian Renaissance art, Stephen Campbell and Michael Cole begin by laying out two contrary views of the period. To Renaissance writers like Lorenzo Ghiberti, they explain, the Renaissance meant the rebirth of classical antiquity; "to others, however, it has seemed that the importance of Italian art after about 1400 lay not in its return to origins but in the emergence of something entirely new and characteristically modern - the idea of art itself." [...] While this outlook has certainly made a lasting contribution to Renaissance art history, it has also given rise to certain blind spots and misconceptions in the field. For example, it is often assumed that the word "art" underwent a radical change of meaning in the Renaissance, anticipating the later, post-Enlightenment notion of the "fine arts" as an autonomous field of creative activity. However, close readings of period texts often suggest the opposite.