Abstract
Bredekamp’s text proposes that the Renaissance should not be regarded as a single unity in all its manifestations, but rather a complex coexistence of divergent world views. Renaissance society, he argues, was not rationally ordered in its every dimension and nor are any deviations away from this order to be explained away simply as anachronistic hangovers from the Middle Ages. This, he argues, was the standard art-historical approach at the time of writing, with the emergence of art freed from religiosity seen as a manifestation of the emancipation of man from superstition and religious asceticism. This liberation of aesthetic sensibility, Bredekamp insists, served economic and political interests and was fundamentally class-specific.