Renaissance Art and Thought: Renaissance Florence

The Black Artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it. His role is to report and reflect so precisely the nature of the society, and of himself, in that society, that other men will be moved by the exactness of his rendering, and if they are black men, grow strong through this moving, having seen their own strength, and weakness, and if they are white men, tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched with the filth of their evil.

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!

The men of the Renaissance were in a peculiar situation... What they saw behind them... were the peaks of classical antiquity... the summit of human reason... since lost. ...[T]hey were governed by... this ancient outlook which at one level represented a static view... and at another level... involved a theory of decadence... under a system that might be described as cyclic. This antique-modern view... found explicit statement... in the writings of Machiavelli. ...Within any city or state or civilization... the natural operation of time was to produce internal corruption... a process of decandence. [I]n a parallel manner... bodies would decompose and the finest fabrics in nature would suffer putrefaction. ...[T]he current science chimed in... for in both realms... compound bodies had a natural tendency to disintegrate. ...[A]t the Renaissance it was almost less possible to believe in what we call progress than it had been in the middle ages.