The broken lines of the Albertian storia

Abstract

The disenchantment discussed in the previous session inevitably takes the form of Machiavellian disenchantment in late ^15th-century Italy. The hypothesis here is that Machiavelli, writing in The Prince of his Strange Defeat, drew up an assessment of the bankruptcy of the Albertian world. The latter claimed to explain the wickedness of the world through the orderly arrangement of storia, whose beauty is apt to disarm the jealous and the violent. Machiavelli's biting irony undermines a historical experience that could be described as " renaissante " insofar as it claims to configure a relationship to time through visual culture. This is why any defense and illustration of the Renaissance not as a concept but as a chrononym or as " epoch name " is a misnomer. If we can say, with Hans Blumenberg, that " modern times exist at the moment they declare themselves to be such ", we need to ask ourselves how this self-consciousness exists. For while humanism sometimes situates this Renaissance in the here and now, it is most often projected onto the horizon. In other words, the Renaissance is not the time when Roman letters return, but the time to come when they will.

Contents

• "For history is, in essence, the science of change" (Marc Bloch, L'Étrange défaite, 1940)
• Self-examination, testimony and experience: how history "can attempt to penetrate the future"
• Undoing, with Machiavelli, that little pile of tricks and beauties we call a culture
• Machiavelli and Marc Bloch, two strange defeats
• A hypothesis: Machiavelli notes the bankruptcy of the Albertian world
• Leon Battista Alberti, the man who "always takes the color found in the thing about which he writes" (Cristoforo Landino)
• Parlo come pictore : la finestra, the "ministers of seeing", the friendship of colors and storia in Alberti's De pictura (1436)
• What building means: architectural lexicon and political regimes in De re aedifactoria (1452)
• A consoling and gentle idea: "But beauty will obtain, even from bitter enemies, that they moderate their wrath and consent to leave it inviolate"
• The central belief of humanism: a rhetoric common to all mankind, which prevails in a single narrative
• Petrarch, the Roman way versus Greco-Arab complication
• "Awaiting the coming of a new dawn": the melancholy ofAfrica 's last days and an address to the world's youth
• The counter-intuitive defence and illustration of the Renaissance as an epochal name
• The Renaissance is not the time when Roman letters return, but the time when they will
• Petrarch, Contre celui qui maudit l'Italie (1373): "What is history, then, if not the praise of Rome?"
• And for Marc Bloch, in L'Étrangedéfaite (TheStrangeDefeat), "on his research sheets, the lines, whose course the past facts tell him, are never straight lines"
• Broken lines and broken threads: Otto of Freising confronts the communal world in 1154
• The question of the blind spot: what doesn't he see that makes him so good at seeing what's coming?
• Pisa, Roma altera : other ways of continuing ancient history
• Aldo Schiavone'sL'Histoire brisée ( 2003): back to political economy
• For Otto of Freising, busy, undisciplined Italians, busy with the world (Sylvain Piron, L'occupation du monde, 2019)
• From the Stendhalian happy few to the Petrarchan aristocracy of the secretum
• The critique of the occupati in La Vie solitaire : "those whom the affairs of others monopolize, whom the will of others directs, and who learn from the face of others what they have to do"
• From hatred of the city to hatred of the people: Petrarch points to the place of experience