Help with Renaissance Quote, please!
I remember hearing a history professor once paraphrasing Baldassere Castiglione with the line "We must collect shards against the ruin of our civilisation." However, my google-fu is failing me as I try to find the actual quote. I think it was supposedly from "The Book of the Courtier". Though it might be that the quote was from somewhere else and he just used it to sum up the intent of the book.
The meaning was that, as the renaissance was waning with 'barbarian' armies looting throughout Italy and autocratic, sometimes mentally unstable tyrants supplanting republican governments, all that one could do to uphold humanism and high culture for posterity was to keep practising courtly behaviour and learning on a personal level. To keep a candle burning in the growing darkness, if you will.
Does that sound familiar to anyone?
Solved! He probably was referencing T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". Thanks!
The meaning was that, as the renaissance was waning with 'barbarian' armies looting throughout Italy and autocratic, sometimes mentally unstable tyrants supplanting republican governments, all that one could do to uphold humanism and high culture for posterity was to keep practising courtly behaviour and learning on a personal level. To keep a candle burning in the growing darkness, if you will.
Does that sound familiar to anyone?
Solved! He probably was referencing T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". Thanks!