Issues of Translation: ’Renaissance’, ’Antique’, and ’Classical’ revisited

Maria Fabricius Hansen juxtaposes in this essay the conventional definitions of the Renaissance, through its endeavours to revive or renew Roman Antiquity, with observations of paintings and buildings of the fifteenth century in order to reconsider the characteristics of Italian visual culture of the time. Erwin Panofsky's assertions in 'Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art' (1960) that a new historical consciousness and a quest for an ‘all'antica' idiom was manifest in the art and architecture of the period are routinely reiterated in art historical narratives. By formally analysing fifteenth-century visual culture, however, questions can be raised about what the artists and architects of the period actually used as their models and how they understood and studied the past.