I finally found what I was looking for in Culture and Society in Venice 1470-1790: the connection between the Postmodern and the Post-Renaissance (may be my own coinage). The Counter-Reformation was a conservative backlash against the Humanists and the Protestants in which the Church machine sought to regain control of the people through art, music and intellectual life. It could be that we are entering a similar phase now after the cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s through the 1990s. A bloody time of religious strife (100 Years War, anyone?), a time of ornate insignificance (palazzos:altarpieces; McMansions:myspace pages).

Within this context, read this passage regarding the educational schism in the Post-Renaissance. I feel it strongly correlates to today’s academic environment and art world.

The Counter-Reformation influence did perhaps have the effect of pushing classical studies in the direction of compendious accumulation of knowledge devoid of ultimate philosophical or ethical purpose. Precisely because of this, however, it may hae stimulated the direction of scholarly energies into other fields of enquiry such as antiquarian studies, historiography and even science. At the same time, the climate of intellectual caution which it engendered probably tended to canalise these energies into the patient accumulation of facts; while enquiry was restricted, erudition burgeoned.

It has become common to refer to an “erudite” movement in seventeenth-century scholarship, the roots of which can be seen in Renaissance humanism… Those men of the eighteenth century, especially in France, who rejoiced in the title of philosophes and who believed that their own age was one of “enlightenment,” were to counterpose their own “philosophical history,” which had a strong polemical and didactic purpose, to the “erudite” historiography and antiquarianism of the preceding age, which was essentially concerned with the accumulation of facts…

The ethos of “erudition” can be characterized a belief that facts were in themselves things of value, worthy of being collected, and this did in fact contain certain creative possibilities… Vera historia–”true history”–had a certain literary form, usually based on classical models, it was selective, it dealt essentially with “great events,” which basically meant political and military one, it examined the causes of events… It was distinguished from “annals,” the unadorned record, and again from “antiquities,” the study of “fragments,” whether archaeological remains or isolated documents. The essence of the study of “antiquities” was that it dealt with the fragmentary…

By this time, the intellectual interests of Venetians were, it seems, becoming increasingly encyclopaedic… For instance, there was a tradition of vernacular historiography, basically independent of classical models, which followed annal form or synthesised it with that of vera historia… [B]y the end of the century [1500’s], the passion for accumulating antique sculptures, coins and medals was becoming a veritable mania…

[I]t was the Venetians who…took the lead in raising the claims of the volgare [vernacular] as a literary language… With regard to the visual arts, it was perhaps through interest in antique literature no less than in antique art that the influence of classical scholarship made itself felt in painting in the first instance. By the mid-sixteenth century, the effects of antiquarianism were to be seen with particular clarity in architecture and sculpture…

I think what the Venetians were inspired by is close to the perpetuation of retro imagery in art, design and fashion and the nerding-out about everything old school from comic books to knitting. The acceptance of casual, informal, deeplly first person-based language in everyday use such as email, text messages, and general etiquette as well as in literature does not necessarily stem from the Internet. Rather, the Internet is the vehicle of this language that is educated so it can merely regurgitate, driven away from the philosophical basis of the act of learning as a path to find meaning in life.

But as with any cultural movement, the backlash has already begun from Day 1. Something is bubbling under the surface, we are having the conversations already. I don’t know if I’ll be around to see it, but perhaps a new Enlightenment is coming that will break away from all this.