The Social Cartography of Genius.
How the Florentine Renassance demonstrates the social alchemy required to unleash genius.
The Social Cartography of Genius
How the Florentine Renassance demonstrates the social alchemy required to unleash genius
The efflorescence that was the Florentine Renaissance, which vaulted Europe out of a thousand year period of arguable stagnation, seems to have been catalyzed by a very small number of people, several hundred more or less, over something like 80 years.
Of those known many were humanists– scholars, artists, architects, et cetera–receiving common inputs and in dialogue with one another either directly or through encountering one another’s work. As a student of contexts, I am wondering what particular contextual alchemy is required to create the conditions for the social cartography of genius?
Genius, I am told, comes from Nature. There is talent in it, but something else, some grace in it. Yet what happened in Florence defies expectation unless there is some other element at play. That other element is, I would propose, context. Not that there were not talented Florentines, but rather what I am saying is that there was elaborated, intentionally or not, a social context that evoked genius. It was the context, not something in the particular people. And this has been under-attended to in the literature, and in our imaginal realms, because we are fixated on the notion of individual greatness.
A unique combination of factors, undeniably including patronage (of the Medici, of the Papal state), as well as this sort of trans-disciplinary ferment was happening as people (they were men at the time) from various trades, disciplines, classes, backgrounds, and social standings came together around books, around ideas, and debated, in call-and-response, in gatherings both formal and informal, a broad range of ideas. These dialogues were across disciplinary boundaries, and across social classes. This ferment was characterized in particular by its diversity.
This had happened before, perhaps most famously in the Academy that developed around Socrates in ancient Athens. Plato and Aristotle were Socrates’ most famous students and couldn’t agree it seems on anything. Here was a previous context that birthed genius. Not a single person, not one genius, but a birthplace of ideas with historical import…
It has happened fairly recently, at Black Mountain College, for example. The following is from Wikipedia:
Black Mountain College was a private liberal arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and several others. The college was ideologically organized around John Dewey's educational philosophy, which emphasized holistic learning and the study of art as central to a liberal arts education.[2]
Many of the college's faculty and students were or would go on to become highly influential in the arts, including Josef and Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, Robert Creeley, Merce Cunningham, Max Dehn, Elaine de Kooning, Willem de Kooning, Buckminster Fuller, Walter Gropius, Ray Johnson, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Charles Olson, Robert Rauschenberg, Mary Caroline Richards, Dorothea Rockburne, Michael Rumaker, Aaron Siskind and Cy Twombly.
Although it was quite notable during its lifetime, the school closed in 1957 after 24 years due to funding issue...The history and legacy of Black Mountain College are preserved and extended by the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, located in downtown Asheville, North Carolina.[3]
The college existed a mere 24 years, and look at the list of luminary graduates. A veritable who’s who of 20th century artistic influence. From a tiny school. Yet something magical happened there, something that was about creating the proper context to evoke collective genius.
How did that happen? How could we cause it to happen again?
In summer 2025 from May through July I’ll be in residence in Tuscany, doing research for this project. We expect the book in 2026. I’m looking forward to getting lost in Florence, being in an older European city again, being around buildings made of materials more permanent than most of what we construct with in the United States. I’m looking forward to wandering into a family chapel frescoed hundreds of years ago and encountering this image of Adam and Eve, though I suspicion they look alot like two young Florentines of the artist’s acquaintance…
Masolino and Massachio’s paintings adorn the same chapel, the Brancacci Chapel, and though their technique and depiction of human form bears some of the same novel technical hallmarks- look at how much respect there is for the actual living anatomy- their visions could not be more different. Behold the serenity of this Adam and Eve, and then by contrast, the agony of the one below.
Oh shit. Explusion. Yet look at the quality of the painting, particularly notice the shadows on Adam’s back and right leg. The lighting here is particularly interesting because I would think that this image of exile would have the light behind them–they are being kicked out of the Garden, but no, his back - from whence they have come - is in shadow, and the light is on his downcast and shamed face. The agony of exile is so palpable here. Notice also that these two figures are illuminated differently. That each stands in their own lighting– an impossibility really, since they are next to eachother.
Look at the brushstrokes of the legs, the feet. This is a painting with contemporary sensibilities, a painting from the year 1427 that has vaulted forward representationally from what had been the norm of painting for several hundred years prior. Genius.
Yet the common genius of the Renaissance: a context that gave birth to it…
If you are interested in these themes, I’ll be teaching a retreat in Tuscany in late May or early June 2025. You can learn more about it here, and fill out an expression of interest here.
