What was the Renaissance? What does it mean to be a renaissance person? How can we embody the Renaissance Approach? What benefits could it yield for our life success and fulfillment?
The Renaissance is a period of history and a European cultural movement covering the 15th and 16th centuries. It was a time of great intellectual transformation. A new movement that embraced ideas about art, science, politics, philosophy, religion, exploration and architecture. This eruption of thought fostered the growth of some of the greatest artists: Raphael, Giorgione, Titian, Michelangelo and of course, Leonardo da Vinci.
There was a new concept of artistic perfection that began in Florence, Italy during the Renaissance. The concept was of disegno - drawing and design.
Within disegno there were to other concepts - concept of disegno esterno, the external physical manifestation of art (the artwork), and disegno interno, or the internal, intellectual idea behind the art (the artist’s meaning and content). During the High Renaissance, perfection was considered to be achieved when both disegno interno and esterno were in balance.
Living with a ‘Renaissance Approach’ means having an insatiable curiosity for everything; it means complete engagement with the present. Constantly thinking about the external as much as the internal. It means surrounding yourself with people who challenge and support you. It means trying new things, keeping an open mind, and embracing your senses.
It means learning everything you can about every thing that interests you and being willing to explore the ones you are unsure about.
Our ideal goal as creatives is to embrace the ‘Renaissance Approach’: Becoming one who is capable of integrating all things, internal and external, and translating interior thoughts authentically into actionable decisions. The challenge here is to always be on the search for a better way of doing things - being more mindful about actions relative to their consequences, having empathy and not fearing the unknown, pushing yourself to find the courage to think differently, and having the desire to execute with honesty towards your intentions and the results you want. It's a long journey of self education, knowledge seeking, idea exchanges, and most importantly, dedication. This approach helps us excel in our fields of work and in our private lives. By making conscious decisions with reference to learned experiences, it helps improve the overall outcome quality of our decision making.
As artists, our every decision, our every impulse has an effect on the works that we create. Imagine everything you know. All the techniques of how to mix colors or that special way of cutting paper that you use, maybe even the way you set up your canvas before you start a painting. These little techniques improve the ability of your self expression by making the physical less of an obstacle for you to work around. Now imagine all the other little techniques out there that could benefit you in ways that you never even thought of. In comparing what we know to the unknown, we see that there is so much to learn. Using the Renaissance Approach, the learning never ends and as time goes by we are able to benefit from each and every experience that we've had to aid us in our journey of creating meaningful and high quality works.
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