Table Of ContentTHE RENAISSANCE CONSIDERED AS
A CREATIVE PHENOMENON
By using the fresh investigative language of cognitive history, a symbiosis of the
methods of cognitive science and historical inquiry, this book departs from almost
all previous approaches to Renaissance studies.
The Renaissance has attracted the attention of distinguished scholars from many
different vantage points – political, social, economic, intellectual, and cultural. In this
volume, Subrata Dasgupta sheds an alternative light on the Renaissance by consid-
ering it as a creative phenomenon. To be creative is to make history by producing
material and/or abstract artifacts that are both new and consequential; to be creative
also entails drawing on history and on the culture of the time. Most significantly, the
creative process occurs in individual minds: it is a cognitive process of a very special
kind. Beginning with a ‘prehistory’ set in classical Greece and medieval Islam, this
book explores a variety of inventions and discoveries through the 14th–16th centu-
ries, mainly in Italy, in humanities, painting, architecture, craft technology, anatomy,
natural science, and engineering.
This book will be of interest not only to Renaissance scholars but also to stu-
dents interested in Renaissance history and the nature of the creative tradition.
Subrata Dasgupta is Professor Emeritus in the School of Computing &
Informatics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA, where from 1993
to 2018 he held the Computer Science Trust Fund Eminent Scholar Chair and
from 1999 to 2013 served as director of the Institute of Cognitive Science. He has
authored numerous works on the cognitive, historical, and computational aspects of
creative phenomena, especially in science, technology, intellectual movements, and
art including, most recently, A Cognitive Historical Approach to Creativity (Routledge,
2019).
THE RENAISSANCE
CONSIDERED
AS A CREATIVE
PHENOMENON
Explorations in Cognitive History
Subrata Dasgupta
Cover image: Wall fresco above Piccolomini Library entrance, Siena Duomo
© Sérgio Nogueira / Alamy Stock Photo
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 Subrata Dasgupta
The right of Subrata Dasgupta to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dasgupta, Subrata, author.
Title: The Renaissance considered as a creative phenomenon : explorations
in cognitive history / Subrata Dasgupta.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical
references and index. | Contents: Prologue -- The language of cognitive
history -- Renaissance creativity - a cognitive prehistory -- The
cognitive style of a renaissance humanist -- A shared memory revolution
-- Art-of-painting as an artifact -- Utilitarianism of an unforgiving
kind -- Refute-and-replace as a creative phenomenon -- ‘Galileo modern’
as a cognitive style -- Epilogue -- Glossary of terms -- Bibliography --
Index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021033156 | ISBN 9781032146829 (hardback) | ISBN
9781032146843 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003240518 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Renaissance--Italy. | Renaissance. | Creative ability. |
Cognitive psychology. | Renaissance--Psychological aspects. |
Renaissance--Italy--Historiography. | Renaissance--Historiography.
Classification: LCC DG445 .D37 2022 | DDC 945/.05--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021033156
ISBN: 978-1-032-14682-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-14684-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-24051-8 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003240518
Typeset in Bembo
by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)
To
SUNDAR CHATERJI
… and a friendship spanning 6 decades …
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments viii
Prologue ix
1 The language of cognitive history 1
2 Renaissance creativity: a cognitive prehistory 22
3 The cognitive style of an early humanist 55
4 A shared memory revolution 87
5 Art-of-painting as a Renaissance artifact 119
6 Utilitarianism of an unforgiving kind 171
7 Refute-and-replace: rejecting antiquity 217
8 ‘Galileo modern’ as a cognitive style 256
Epilogue 283
Glossary of terms 298
Bibliography 307
Index 320
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The Renaissance as a creative phenomenon was a multidisciplinary affair. My debt
to scholars whose domains stretched across an astonishingly wide spectrum of disci-
plines will be evident from the citations and the bibliography in this book. I thanks
them for all that I have learnt from them.
In my own fields of creativity studies and cognitive history I have been stimu-
lated enormously, over the years, by the writings of, and/or conversations and cor-
respondences with numerous people, most notably (in no particular order) Dean
Keith Simonton, Thomas Nickles, Herbert A. Simon, Jonathan Feinstein, Norman
Holland, Mark Runco, Ryan Tweney, Wenceslao Gonzalez, Paul Rosenbloom,
Amiya Bagchi, Robert Weber and Deepanwita Dasgupta. I thank them all.
In the course of working on this book, remembrance of innumerable con-
versations with my late father-in-law Rabindra Kumar Dasgupta about the two
Renaissances — the Italian and the Bengal — that were so close to his heart, and
on which his erudition was unmatched, would invariably intrude on my thoughts.
I thank three anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions
on the original proposal for this book on behalf of the publisher.
My thanks to Laura Pilsworth, my editor at Routledge for warmly embracing
my initial proposal. It has been a pleasure working with her.
I thank YassarArafat Abdulnasser and his production team for seeing this project
through to completion.
Last but not least my thanks to Mithu, Shome, Deep and Heidi for always being
there.
PROLOGUE
I. The renaissance as a confederacy of creative phenomena
‘Renaissance’ is a controversial concept. For many people, the word refers to a par-
ticular period and place in European history, located mainly in central and north-
ern Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries – a time and a place characterized by the
efflorescence of a remarkable culture that reflected in different ways the rebirth of
the intellectual, literary, aesthetic, and civic achievements of classical Greece and
Rome. For them, the word was a shorthand for ‘Italian Renaissance’. Thus when
art historian E. H. Gombrich subtitled a collection of his essays “Studies in the Art
of the Renaissance”, it was the art of this period in Italian history he was referring
to.1 Likewise, when the Italian scholar Paolo Galluzzi titled his book Renaissance
Engineers, he was referring to engineers who worked and practiced their trade in
the time of the Italian Renaissance.2 This identification of ‘Renaissance’ with ‘Italian
Renaissance’ was surely influenced by the writings of such 19th-century scholars as
the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt and the English ‘man of letters’ Walter Pater.3
But there are those who think otherwise. Some assert that there was no sharp
delineation between the Renaissance in 15th- and 16th-century Italy and the
Middle Ages that preceded it. In the evocative words of art historian Erwin Panofsky,
according to this view, the Italian Renaissance was “linked to the Middle Ages by a
thousand ties”.4 For others, the word ‘renaissance’ (with a lower case ‘r’) signifies a
generic kind of revitalization or awakening that is quite independent of any specific
historical period, place, or society. In writing of ‘renaissance’, the British historian
Arnold Toynbee summoned up the word ‘revenant’ – a return from the dead; for
Toynbee, ‘renaissance’ was a general term that signified the impact of the ‘ghost’ of a
dead civilization on a living one.5 Historians have thus written of the ‘Carolingian
Renaissance’ of the 8th and 9th centuries, the European ‘12th-century Renaissance’,
the 19th-century ‘Bengal Renaissance’ in British India, the 20th-century ‘Harlem
