Summary
Title: The Mirror of the Gods: How Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods
Author: Malcolm Bull
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195219236
Pro:
• Comprehensive and detailed examination of the origins of the Renaissance
• Demonstrates how ancient religious beliefs can be modified to suit current needs
Con:
• More an academic work for academic audiences - probably not for the average reader
Description:
• Analysis of how Renaissance artists appropriated ancient religious imagery & stores
• Explores the impact ancient religion had on early-modern Europe
• 200 black & white images, 16 color pages
Book Review
By the end of the Middle Ages, Christianity had so permeated European culture that the ancient religions had become completely foreign — foreign gods, foreign stories, and foreign concepts — despite the fact that the remains of ancient religion were literally lying all around at people’s feet. There existed, then, a curious contradiction in that Europeans were close physically but distant psychologically from the religious beliefs of ancient Rome and Greece.
Malcolm Bull’s The Mirror of the Gods: How Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods is an exploration of how Renaissance artists, writers, and philosophers worked to close that distance and bring ancient religious beliefs back into contemporary consciousness. Bull takes us on a god-by-god tour of how the Renaissance didn’t simply rediscover, but also reinvented the ancient world that lay all around them.
Interest in ancient mythology began with minor decorations — things like painted wedding chests and, later, statues in people’s gardens. At least all of this must have appeared minor, but it represented a fundamental shift in culture. The Christianity which pervaded European culture was meant to be taken seriously and literally. Christianity was true and there was really no room for fiction. Ancient mythology, however, was fiction and people weren’t accustomed to that.
There was certainly no intent to undermine Christianity, and it’s not as though people started to tear down Christian altars and replace them with statues of Zeus; but the long-term and cumulative effect was corrosive. By the time of the Enlightenment, philosophers were using the example of ancient mythology to argue that religious beliefs could be widespread while also false.
The Mirror of the Gods: How Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods
During the Renaissance, mythological figures took on political significance. The use of mythology was transformed from “minor” decorations to symbols of the power of political office — Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, for example, was identified with Jupiter, king of the gods. The pagan gods became popular because they were useful and evoked powerful imagery.
Malcolm Bull’s book is an impressive work of scholarship that adds greatly to our understanding of the Renaissance and the modern appropriation of the ancient world, but it is also a primarily academic work that is aimed at an academic audience. The prose is clear, but deep. A knowledge of Renaissance history, literature, and art would be helpful here and I wish I had known more before starting. Less background knowledge about the ancient gods is necessary because the focus is, after all, on how the Renaissance appropriated those gods and reinvented them for new purposes.
