Английский Ренессанс: Культура и Искусство XVI-XVII веков

Cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the mid 16th century to the early 17th century

The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England during the late 15th, 16th and early 17th centuries. It is associated with the pan European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late 14th century. As in most of the rest of Northern Europe, England saw little of these developments until more than a century later within the Northern Renaissance. Renaissance style and ideas were slow to penetrate England, and the Elizabethan era in the second half of the 16th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance. Many scholars see its beginnings in the early 16th century during the reign of Henry VIII. Others argue the Renaissance was already present in England in the late 15th century. The English Renaissance is different from the Italian Renaissance in several ways. The dominant art forms of the English Renaissance were literature and music. Visual arts in the English Renaissance were much less significant than in the Italian Renaissance. The English period began far later than the Italian, which was moving into Mannerism and the Baroque by the 1550s or earlier.

The English Renaissance saw significant scientific progress. The astronomers Thomas Digges and Thomas Harriot made important contributions; William Gilbert published his seminal study of magnetism, De Magnete, in 1600. He was the first to discover that the Earth was itself a dipole magnet as well as the first to correctly explain why a nautical compass worked as it did. Substantial advancements were made in the fields of cartography and surveying. John Dee was the court astronomer for Elizabeth I and an influential mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, teacher, occultist, and alchemist. Sir Francis Bacon was the pioneer of modern scientific thought, and is commonly regarded as one of the founders of the Scientific Revolution. His works were influential in the development of the scientific method that party invented modern science. Historian William Hepworth Dixon stated: "Bacon's influence in the modern world is so great that every man who rides in a train, sends a telegram, follows a steam plough, sits in an easy chair, crosses the channel or the Atlantic, eats a good dinner, enjoys a beautiful garden, or undergoes a painless surgical operation, owes him something''. English thought advanced towards modern science with the Baconian method. English achievements in exploration were also noteworthy. Sir Francis Drake successfully circumnavigated the globe between 1577 and 1581. This was the first English circumnavigation, and third circumnavigation overall in history. Martin Frobisher explored the Arctic. The first attempt at English settlement of the eastern seaboard of North America occurred in this era. In 1583, Humphrey Gilbert sailed to Newfoundland, taking possession of the harbour of St. John's together with all land within two hundred leagues to the north and south of it. In 1584, the queen granted Sir Walter Raleigh a charter for the colonisation of Virginia; it was named in her honour. Raleigh and Elizabeth sought both immediate riches and a base for privateers to raid the Spanish treasure fleets. In 1600, the queen chartered the East India Company in an attempt to break the Spanish and Portuguese monopoly of far Eastern trade. It established trading posts, which in later centuries evolved into British India, on the coasts of what is now India and Bangladesh. Larger scale colonisation to North America began shortly after Elizabeth's death. Originally chartered as the "Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies", the East India Company rose to account for half of the world's trade during the mid 1700s and early 1800s, particularly in basic commodities including cotton, silk, indigo dye, sugar, salt, spices, saltpetre, tea, and opium.

England was slow to produce visual arts in Renaissance styles like the rest of Northern European, and the artists of the Tudor court were mainly imported foreigners until after the end of the Renaissance; Hans Holbein was the outstanding figure. The English Reformation produced a huge programme of iconoclasm that destroyed almost all medieval religious art, and all but ended the skill of painting in England. However, England under the Tudor dynasty was a thriving home for arts. An international community of artists and merchants, many of them religious refugees, navigated to England for royal patrons. English art was to be dominated by portrait painting and landscape art, for centuries to come. A significant English invention was the portrait miniature, which essentially took the techniques of the dying art of the illuminated manuscript and transferred them to small portraits worn in lockets. Though the form was developed in England by foreign artists, mostly Flemish like Lucas Horenbout, the somewhat undistinguished founder of the tradition, by the late 16th century, natives such as Nicolas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver produced the finest work. The portrait miniature had spread all over Europe by the 18th century. The portraiture of Elizabeth I was carefully controlled and developed into an elaborate and wholly un realist iconic style, that has succeeded in creating enduring images. The many portraits drove the evolution of English royal portraits in the Early Modern period. Even the earliest portraits of Elizabeth I contain symbolic objects such as roses and prayer books that would have carried meaning to viewers of her day. Later portraits of Elizabeth layer the iconography of empire—globes, crowns, swords and columns—and representations of virginity and purity—such as moons and pearls—with classical allusions to present a complex "story" that conveyed to Elizabethan era viewers the majesty and significance of their Virgin Queen. The Armada Portrait is an allegorical panel painting depicting the queen surrounded by symbols of empire against a backdrop representing the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The Jacobean era produced figures like Robert Peake the Elder, William Larkin, and Sir Nathaniel Bacon.

English Renaissance music kept in touch with continental developments. Elizabethan music experienced a shift in popularity from sacred to secular music and the rise of instrumental music. Professional musicians were employed by the Church of England, the nobility, and the rising middle class. Elizabeth I was fond of music and played the lute and virginal, sang, and even claimed to have composed dance music. She felt that dancing was a great form of physical exercise and employed musicians to play for her while she danced. The interests of the queen were expected to be adopted by her subjects. All noblemen were expected to be proficient in playing the lute and "any young woman unable to take her proper place in a vocal or instrumental ensemble became the laughing stock of society". Music printing led to a market of amateur musicians purchasing works published by those who received special permission from the queen. The Elizabethan madrigal was distinct from, but related to, the Italian tradition. The most famous composers for the Anglican Church were Thomas Tallis and his student William Byrd. Considered among the greatest composers of the Renaissance, he had a profound influence on composers both from his native country and in Europe. Both composers were Catholics and produced vocal works in both Latin and English. Secular vocal works became extremely popular with the importation of Italian musicians and compositions. The music of the late Italian madrigal composers inspired native composers who are now labelled as the English Madrigal School. These composers adapted the text painting and polyphonic writing of the Italians into a uniquely English genre of madrigal. Thomas Morley published collections of madrigals which included his own compositions as well as those of his contemporaries. The most famous of these collections was The Triumphs of Oriana, which was made in honour of Queen Elizabeth and featured the compositions of Morley, Thomas Weelkes, and John Wilbye among other representatives of the English madrigalists. Instrumental music was also very popular. The most popular solo instruments of the time were the virginal and the lute. The virginal was a popular variant of the harpsichord among the English and one of Elizabeth's favourite instruments to play. Numerous works were produced for the instrument including several collections by William Byrd, namely the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book and Parthenia. The lute strung with sheepgut was the most popular instrument of the age. Lutes could be played as solo instruments or as accompaniment for singers. Compositions of the latter variety were known as lute song. The most popular Elizabethan composer for the lute and of lute songs was John Dowland. Several families of instruments were popular among the English people and were employed for the group music making. If all of the instruments in an ensemble were of the same family they were considered to be in "consort". Mixed ensembles were said to be in "broken consort". Both forms of ensembles were equally popular. The key composers from the early Renaissance era also wrote in a late Medieval style, and as such, they are transitional figures. Leonel Power was an English composer of the late medieval and early Renaissance music eras. Along with John Dunstaple and Walter Frye, he was one of the major figures in English music in the early 15th century. Power is the composer best represented in the Old Hall Manuscript. He was one of the first composers to set separate movements of the ordinary of the mass which were thematically unified and intended for contiguous performance. The Old Hall Manuscript contains his mass based on the Marian antiphon, Alma Redemptoris Mater, in which the antiphon is stated literally in the tenor voice in each movement, without melodic ornaments. This is the only cyclic setting of the mass ordinary which can be attributed to him. He wrote mass cycles, fragments, and single movements and a variety of other sacred works. John Dunstaple (or Dunstable) was an English composer of polyphonic music of the late medieval era and early Renaissance periods. He was one of the most famous composers active in the early 15th century, a near contemporary of Power, and was widely influential, not only in England but on the continent, especially in the developing style of the Burgundian School. Dunstaple's influence on the continent's musical vocabulary was enormous, particularly considering the relative paucity of his (attributable) works. He was recognized for possessing something never heard before in music of the Burgundian School: la contenance angloise ("the English countenance"), a term used by the poet Martin le Franc in his Le Champion des Dames. Other leading composers include Robert Johnson, John Taverner, Thomas Morley, Orlando Gibbons, and John Blitheman. The colossal polychoral productions of the Venetian School had been anticipated in the works of Thomas Tallis, and the Palestrina style from the Roman School had already been absorbed prior to the publication of Musica transalpina, in the music of masters such as William Byrd. The Italian and English Renaissances were similar in sharing a specific musical aesthetic. In the late 16th century Italy was the musical center of Europe, and one of the principal forms which emerged from that singular explosion of musical creativity was the madrigal. In 1588, Nicholas Yonge published in England the Musica transalpina—a collection of Italian madrigals that had been Anglicized—an event which began a vogue of madrigal in England which was almost unmatched in the Renaissance in being an instantaneous adoption of an idea, from another country, adapted to local aesthetics. English poetry was exactly at the right stage of development for this transplantation to occur, since forms such as the sonnet were uniquely adapted to setting as madrigals. Composers such as Thomas Morley, the only contemporary composer to set Shakespeare, and whose work survives, published collections of their own, roughly in the Italian manner but yet with a unique Englishness; interest in the compositions of the English Madrigal School has enjoyed a considerable revival in recent decades in Europe.

Despite some buildings in a partly Renaissance style from the reign of Henry VIII, notably Hampton Court Palace The vanished Nonsuch Palace, Sutton Place and Layer Marney Tower, and the building of Soulton Hall under Queen Mary I, it was not until dawning of Elizabethan architecture that a true Renaissance style became widespread. The wool trade, which had carried the economy of England in the late medieval period, was no longer as prosperous as it had been and there was less disposable wealth for architectural projects. Under Elizabeth I, farming was encouraged resulting in a recovery that put a vast amount of wealth into the hands of a large number of people. Elizabeth built no new palaces, instead encouraging her courtiers to build extravagantly and house her on her summer progresses. A large number of small houses were built, and at the same time many country mansions were constructed. Many of the earlier medieval or Tudor manors were remodelled and modernised during Elizabeth's reign. Civic and institutional buildings also became increasingly common. The most famous buildings, of a type called the prodigy house, are large show houses constructed for courtiers, and characterised by lavish use of glass, as at "Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall", Wollaton Hall, Montacute House, Hatfield House and Burghley House, the style continuing into the early 17th century before developing into Jacobean architecture. Lesser, but still large, houses like Little Moreton Hall continued to be constructed and expanded in essentially medieval half timbered styles until the late 16th century. Church architecture essentially continued in the late medieval Perpendicular Gothic style until the Reformation, and then stopped almost completely, although church monuments, screens and other fittings often had classical styles from about the mid century. The few new church buildings post Reformation were usually still Gothic in style, as in Langley Chapel of 1601. It was also at this time that the long gallery became popular in English manor houses, often displaying painting collections and decorated ceilings. This was apparently mainly used for walking in, and a growing range of parlours and withdrawing rooms supplemented the main living room for the family, the great chamber. The great hall was now mostly used by the servants, and as an impressive point of entry to the house. Familiar materials, such as wood and silver, were worked more deeply in intricate and intensely three dimensional designs. Miracle plays were local re enactments of stories from the Bible. They derived from the old custom of mystery plays, in which stories and fables were enacted to teach lessons or educate about life in general. Music was greatly enjoyed throughout this era, as seen through quite a few family evenings including musical performances. English children were taught to sing and dance at a very early age and became used to performing in public during such evenings. Keyboard instruments such as harpsichords, clavichords, dulcimers and virginals were played. Woodwind instruments like crumhorns, and flutes and stringed instruments such as lutes and rebecs were also widely used. Royal court dances included the pavane and galliard, the almain and the volta. There was an expansion of education and apprenticships in 14th 16th century England. Boys were allowed to go to school and began at the age of 4, they then moved to grammar school when they were 7 years old. Apprenticships were the main route for youths to enter skilled trades and crafts. In 1562 the Statute of Artificers and Apprentices was passed to regulate and protect the apprenticeship system, forbidding anyone from practising a trade or craft without first serving a 7 year period as an apprentice to a master. Guilds controlled many trades and used apprenticeships to control entry. Many towns and villages had a parish school where the local vicar taught boys to read and write. Brothers could teach their sisters these skills. At school, pupils were taught English, Latin, Greek, catechism and arithmetic.

The notion of calling this period a ''renaissance" is a modern invention, having been popularized by the historian Jacob Burckhardt in the 19th century. England had already experienced a flourishing of literature over 200 years before the time of Shakespeare. Geoffrey Chaucer's popularizing of English as a medium of literary composition rather than Latin occurred only 50 years after Dante had started using Italian for serious poetry, and Chaucer translated works by both Boccaccio and Petrarch into Middle English. At the same time William Langland, author of Piers Plowman, and John Gower were also writing in English. In the fifteenth century, Thomas Malory (author of Le Morte D'Arthur), John Lydgate, and Thomas Hoccleve were notable figures. Other cultural historians have countered that, regardless of whether the name "renaissance" is apt, there was undeniably an artistic flowering in England under the Tudor monarchs.