The Renaissance: Florence Leads the Way - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 97

Figure 7.1. Florence
Perhaps the oldest metaphor for human existence is that life is a journey that ends in
an afterlife. [84] In the Middle Ages, life was seen as a journey to the grave and beyond the
grave, either to Paradise or to Satan's realm. The good life was defined as a life of Christian
devotion, prayer, and obedience to tradition and to nature's laws. In the Renaissance, life's
journey assumed a new meaning and a new set of goals: to make use of human reason and
to use that reason to advance knowledge, to explore the world, to delight in natural won-
ders, to admire human beauty and the human body, to take pleasure in the infinite variety of
human behavior, and to live the good life in accordance with a well-defined code of ethics
and morality built on the precepts of Greek and Roman cultures.
Wrapped in and around these goals were new and distinctive achievements in painting
and the visual arts, science and medicine, architecture, politics, and exploration and discov-
ery. In the Middle Ages, artistic creativity was less admired than fidelity to past forms and
techniques. Painters were regarded as craftsmen; their modesty (to the point of anonymity)
was expected. But the goal of the Renaissance painter was to be recognized for his personal
creativity and to be regarded, and celebrated, as an artist. In this, as in so many aspects of
the Renaissance, Florence led the way.
As distinguished historian Daniel Boorstin says, Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337) was
a legend in his own time. He transformed Christian paintings from stylized, “schematic re-