June 1970: Fiorenza discovers that she bears the ancient name of Florence, the “flourishing”.
She discovers it by spending a week there preparing the final exam at Art School. Intense days spent with Maria, her study friend, from early morning to evening, when they return to the Youth Hostel in via Santa Monaca, with their feet destroyed by too much walking. After the Uffizi, the Boboli, Santa Maria del Fiore and the Baptistery, the Cathedral and the Pazzi Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Beato Angelico, Botticelli, Masaccio, San Lorenzo, the Medici Chapel, Michelangelo …, tiredness, yes, but with enchanted eyes full of Beauty.
An indelible memory, in those formative years, which adds to the wonder the awareness of one’s own ignorance, the desire to learn by discovering what they will not teach us at school; the law of cycles that culminates in the highest expressions of human genius, and then decays to the point lower than any civilization.
When was the Renaissance born?
We were taught that it is based on the humanistic thought which already begins in the fourteenth century, but not that it incorporates Egyptian and Greek / Roman culture, rediscovering Hermeticism and Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy. The homo universalis of Nicolò Cusano and Pico della Mirandola evokes God as the supreme Architect and perfect Craftsman, becoming a receptacle of his Grace, acting on the world and the forces of nature, using knowledge in harmony with the celestial forces.
We were taught that, after almost 1000 years of the Middle Ages – the obscurantist middle age, the dark time after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in which the “loss” of the great civilization that mapped Europe by roads, city, deforestation, reclamation, creating a powerful political and organizational system, regulating it with codes and laws whose structure still remains – suddenly Humanism was born in Florence, which soon, through the expression of the Arts, became what was called ‘the Renaissance’ time.
According to many, the Middle Ages ended after the massive spread of the black plague in Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. At that time Dante (who died exactly 800 years ago) had already written the Divine Comedy in which he celebrates Florence, and the journey of human consciousness from trials to reunion with the Soul-Beatrice.
But on closer inspection the seeds of the new were sown, again in Italy, another 800 years earlier, when Benedict of Norcia, the initiator of modern spiritual communities, was born on the slopes of the Sibillini Mountains, in Umbria. He gave us and his disciples in hundreds of monasteries, two simple rules “Ora et Labora” (Pray and Work), that reunite material life with spiritual life. Furthermore, his cooperation with his twin sister St. Scholastica, reopened the path to the inspirational importance of the feminine principle. St. Francis of Assisi and St.Clare will follow 5 centuries later.
And only a little later the Master builders of cathedrals travel through Europe, raising with their occult science, the most daring temples ever erected in Europe, marking its chakras.
And while it seems that human civilization – as we had known it – disappears, nature regains possession and Europe is once again covered with great druidics forests.
Finally, in 1425, heralded by over a century of ferment of new ideas, a ray appears, a manifestation of Light and Intelligence, and marks the return of the third ray to the planet: a new Thought.
In the 100 years before and after the appearance of this Light, the Renaissance is born, through a new conception of Man that connects to the Universe and therefore to the great laws of nature, to his task as creator of Harmony and Synthesis between Art, Science and Religion.
Before 1425, Cosimo de Medici, the founder of the Medici dynasty, and the two great architects who shaped the new Light in harmonious mathematical esoteric proportions, Brunelleschi and Alberti, were born. And Nicolò Cusano, the great philosopher of “Learned Ignorance“, who gives life to the “coincidentia oppositorum” (coincidence of opposites), a revelation received in 1437.
Florence becomes an irresistible center of attraction for the new vision, not only calling the “creatives” to the workshops, but magnetizing the embodiment and expression of new ideas, thoughts and experimental artistic forms, supported by great patrons.
The philosophers Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola give life to the new thought that connects to ancient wisdom while Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo, supported by Lorenzo the Magnificent, express it in new forms.
Light and Harmony give life to expressions of eternal value, masterworks of stone, of sacred proportions, of color, of sound that continue to vibrate in the human heart to this day.
On 4 March 1436 Brunelleschi’s dome in Santa Maria del Fiore, the first bold and innovative dome after the Pantheon – still the largest non-reinforced concrete dome in the world – was inaugurated with the Nuper Rosarum Flores motet specifically composed by Guillame Dufey. The composer created it with the dimensional proportions of the dome, the ratios 6: 4: 2: 3, recurrent in the cathedral. Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, 3 of the 4 Liberal Arts of the Greek Quadrivium, manifest themselves in Architecture, which embodies them in space.
Harmony is listened to with the heart.
At the beginning of the 1500s, the Light grows and expands, illuminating and including the revolutionary heliocentric visions of Copernicus, who at that time, refined his formation in Italy.
While the artistic currents of the Italian Renaissance are exhausting their genius in the incipit of “mannerism”, a prince who will be known as Akbar the Great, future Great Moghal of Hindustan, planned and built the new city of Fathepur Sikri close to Agra, the capital of a new culture that includes all religions, philosophies and the arts.
The Italian Renaissance expands like a wave, this time from West to East, and slowly, from there, it withdraws, sowing the seeds of a Planetary Renaissance, which – we believe – is about to begin, and which after the third ray, will bring in manifestation the fourth, that of Harmony through Conflict, which cyclical history tells us, will begin shortly, in 2025.
by Fiorenza Bortolotti
Read more about the “Towards a Planetary Renaissance” Online Event here