In the spring of 2019, a hillside near Lake Elsinore, California, turned orange. Rain had come at the right time, and the poppies opened all at once. Someone posted a photo, and then the influencers came. Then everyone else came—some 50,000 people—until the crowds trampled the flowers they’d driven out to photograph. This led the town to close the canyon and call the weekend Flowergeddon.

People didn’t come to simply see the flowers. Many had come, selfie-style, to be seen seeing them. And by taking that approach, they destroyed the thing itself. The flowers were trampled underfoot.

opens his book Superbloom with this scene in California, and its subtitle explains why: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. We’ve always assumed that more communication would bring more understanding. But Carr argues that something very different happened. The faster and easier communication became, the more it could also breed confusion, mental distraction, and strife.

In short, too much communication, which comes too fast, can undermine real connection. Screen-based “connection” can produce loneliness.

The Epidemic of Loneliness

The numbers show why we should take this problem seriously.

In 2023, Gallup surveyed people in 142 countries about loneliness. The highest rates were among adults between nineteen and twenty-nine, at 27 percent. The lowest were among people sixty-five and older, at 17 percent.

A seemingly related fact is that as social media use has soared, the time people spend with their friends in real life has moved in the opposite direction. This “epidemic of loneliness” is extremely dangerous to our health, and it was proclaimed so by then–Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in a 2023 advisory, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.

The Gallup survey doesn’t prove that smartphones or social media caused the increase in loneliness, although there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest it’s a major contributing cause. But it does challenge one of the great beliefs of the digital age: that making connection easier would make us all feel more connected. That belief now looks doubtful.

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Connection Is a Byproduct: The Renaissance Approach

To take a deeper look at how connection and friendships arise, let’s now visit a historical garden in Florence.

On the western edge of Florence, the Rucellai family kept a walled garden. It was called the Orti Oricellari, and parts of it still survive.

Around 1516, a group of friends began to meet in this garden. They had no formal organization, but they did have something in common: They liked to read Roman history and argue about it. Their debates focused on topics like liberty and good governance.

One of the men who came to these meetings was a former government official who had been fired, tortured, and exiled to a farm outside the city. His name was Niccolò Machiavelli. He wrote a book at the group’s urging, inspired by their conversations and arguments, and he dedicated it to two of the men who had sat in the garden with him.

Today we call the book Discourses on Livy, and it’s one of the founding works of modern political thought.

But nobody went to that garden simply to “connect.” They went to argue about Livy. Yet friendship and intellectual community grew around the thing they were doing together.

This pattern appears frequently in Renaissance life, and we can still draw upon it today.

The lay brotherhoods that held Florence together at the neighborhood level gathered around religious observances, charitable work, and mutual assistance. Workshops and professional guilds gathered around commissions: creating a set of bronze doors, a dome, or covering a wall with a fresco. The Silk Guild of Florence even created an orphanage for abandoned babies, which cared for thousands of abandoned children over the centuries.

Meanwhile, scholars scattered across Europe were held together by letters. Many of these handwritten messages were about books, ideas, and the recovery of lost Latin texts. In Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici built a library at San Marco, which pulled people together in real life. He opened it to anyone who could read.

These people valued friendship, fellowship, and civic bonds. But they didn’t try to manufacture “connection” in the abstract.

The Third Thing: The Interests That Pull Us Together

Instead, the Renaissance built forms of life around shared interests and practices. Then connection grew through them.

Maybe we could put it this way: Connection cannot thrive on connection alone. It needs a third thing.

Once we see that, the failure of our online platforms becomes less mysterious.

Facebook was built around the promise of connection. So were many of the technologies that followed it. Yet simply placing people in contact with one another does not create meaningful social bonds.

The problem is not that the internet lacks third things. It’s full of them: books, music, politics, gardening, photography, travel, art. The poppies at Lake Elsinore were a third thing too.

But something happened to these things. Instead of remaining objects of attention, they became backdrops for self-presentation.

“Look at the flowers” became something else: “Look at me looking at the flowers!” The attention that might have been directed outward curved back toward the self.

That may be one of the central problems of contemporary connection. We have more opportunities than ever to see one another, but fewer settings ask us to look together at something beyond ourselves.

Creating Spaces for Connection Today

If you want to create connection, here’s a practical formula anyone can try. Just ask yourself, “What is the third thing that could bring people together?”

This is not you or the other person. The third thing is something that you both want to experience. It could be a book, a craft, or a meal you’re cooking together. It could be a problem that needs solving or a piece of music you both want to hear.

The strongest gatherings tend to have some object beyond the gathering itself. But the focus for attention is only part of the equation. The Renaissance examples suggest that several other things matter, too.

A group must be bounded. To be ongoing, it has to meet at least several times. People participate rather than just observe. In this setting, shared attention becomes a shared experience. This is how a roomful of acquaintances slowly becomes a community.

This also raises a question, which is whether this can happen online.

I think it can, based on the underlying intention of the group. But a third thing needs to be present that draws people together. It’s also important that people can have a chance to know each other. This is more difficult with online meetings—and often, it just doesn’t happen.

That said, twelve people meeting on a video call every Wednesday to read one difficult book together can develop a deeper sense of community than the fifty thousand sightseers who gathered at the Flowergeddon superbloom in California.

What matters is that the group is bounded. These groups need to recur, people need to participate, and their attention needs to be focused on something they genuinely value.

In-person gatherings possess an advantage that online meetings have difficulty reproducing. Physical presence is three-dimensional and embodied. It creates a more lifelike web of attention. Being in the same room helps participants to interact with others in a more tangible way. In physical settings, people arrive together, occupy the same space, and have time to chat. They notice who is missing, and they experience all the unplanned moments surrounding the thing they arrived to do.

But the deeper principle is not physical proximity alone. It is shared attention, sustained over time.

Ironically, we tend to talk about the epidemic of loneliness as if it fell on us from the sky. But it didn’t. We let it happen—at least unconsciously—spurred on by addictive technology. We wrongly assumed that friendship and connection would be magically delivered by Big Tech.

By contrast, people in the Renaissance understood that human connection and community could be nurtured in specific settings. They built the settings and organizations that encouraged it, one garden, one workshop, one fraternity, and one library at a time.

The good news is that the Renaissance approach didn’t need to be expensive. Aristotle pointed out that small things can be magnificent, too, and the humanists took him seriously. A quiet room, a table for meeting and conversation, and a set time once a week are all that are needed. We don’t need a Medici budget to create a space where people can focus their attention on something together.

To try this approach, pick the third thing first, and make it worthy of attention. It could be a difficult book, a skill, or a part of your town that needs tending. Then invite at least two or three people, set a time, and show up.

The point isn’t to force a friendship, but to create a setting where connection can grow.

I think the cure for loneliness requires more than just having contact with others. It means restoring the shared attention that social media takes away.

For the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, attention meant turning away from our individual self to see the presence of something, or someone, more fully. As she famously wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

When we attend to something together, we come to see more clearly. It can help us to see others more deeply too.

Friendship has always had a way of growing around the things we care about together, and there’s no reason to believe our current time is any different.

About the Author

David Fideler explores the role of philosophy and the humanities in modern life. He’s the founder of the Renaissance Program in Florence, Italy, and edits The Living Ideas Journal. His book on the Stoic philosopher Seneca has been published in over fifteen languages. Originally from the United States, he now lives in Europe.

Read Living Ideas Journal

The Living Ideas Journal explores how Renaissance humanism, and the humanities more broadly, can deepen our experience of being alive. You’ll find free essays on beauty, human dignity, and the art of becoming more deeply human.

Subscribe to the free monthly Living Ideas Journal newsletter for new articles, online courses, and our in-person programs in Florence and beyond.

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The Richest Man in the World Trims His Grape Vines

In the warm June mornings of the 1440s, in the hills just outside of Florence, the richest man in the world began his day by trimming his grape vines. Once the vines were finished, Cosimo de’ Medici went inside and read a passage from Saint Gregory’s writings on ethics. Only then did he turn his attention to the world of business.

But this morning ritual was not idleness. Cosimo ran the largest, most powerful bank in the world. He served as the de facto ruler of Florence, and he was in the middle of building what would become the first public library in Renaissance Europe. He also understood something many seem to have forgotten today: wisdom requires space. A mind that never stops solving problems eventually loses the ability to ask whether those problems are worth solving in the first place.

Six hundred years later, the largest IPO in history priced just last week. Elon Musk, whose SpaceX has announced plans to launch up to one million AI data centers into orbit, is now a trillionaire and worth more than anyone who has ever lived. He doesn’t trim his grape vines in the morning but is famous, and in fact celebrated, for sleeping under his desk at work.

This comparison of powerful CEOs, centuries apart, is not meant to condemn Elon Musk. But it’s meant to highlight something about the world we are building, and what it really costs.

Building the Renaissance Library

Like so much in the Renaissance, this story begins with Petrarch. As he wandered through the ruins of Rome in the fourteenth century, Petrarch saw the broken remains of a civilization that had lost something essential.

Following the fall of Rome, the great libraries that had educated Cicero, Seneca, and the five good emperors of Rome, were gone. But their destruction was not just a cultural loss. It was a human one. The wisdom those books contained, Petrarch believed, could still change the world if it could be rediscovered. He spent his life trying to recover it by searching for lost manuscripts on his travels.

But as Petrarch traveled through Europe, he was in danger. Bandits controlled the roads between cities, and he had to travel under armed guard. Petrarch had friends who were robbed and killed on the road. But none of this stopped him, or those who came after him, in their search for classical wisdom. By the early 1400s, his followers — a small circle of humanist scholars — had transformed his search for lost manuscripts into an organized project, driven by the belief that recovering ancient knowledge could help bring peace to their war-torn world.

Poggio Bracciolini was the most famous of these “book hunters.” A papal secretary by day and a bold, Indiana Jones–style adventurer in spirit, Poggio traveled through the Alps and appeared unannounced at monastery libraries across northern Europe. In 1417, at an unnamed German monastery, he pulled from a dusty shelf a manuscript that had been “missing” for over a thousand years. It was Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, one of the masterworks of ancient philosophy, and Poggio’s most famous discovery. As usual, to announce the find, he wrote to his friend Niccolò Niccoli in Florence.

The eccentric and often-annoying Niccoli was the operation’s other half. He had come from a wealthy Florentine family, wore a plum-colored toga, and spent every florin of his inheritance on rare manuscripts. His home became a library, housing a collection of eight hundred volumes, some of which he’d lend out to friends. Working together, Niccoli and Poggio were in constant correspondence. Poggio would discover precious, lost works, which Niccoli would then copy, archive, and distribute to other humanists. Together, with perhaps twenty others working across Europe, they located nearly every surviving ancient Latin manuscript by around 1450.

A man obsessed, Niccoli died bankrupt, but had one final request. In his will, he asked that his collection remain freely available, in a public library, to anyone who wished to study these books. Cosimo de’ Medici, who had been funding the operation behind the scenes all along, honored that wish. He paid off all of Niccoli’s debts, purchased additional manuscripts, and installed the collection in the rebuilt monastery of San Marco, which he also paid for.

You can still visit the San Marco Monastery and the site of the first Renaissance library today, and it remains a place of radiant beauty and captivating history.

When the library opened in 1444, scholars started arriving from across Europe. As Renaissance historian Ada Palmer describes the humanist dream, Petrarch and his followers wanted to restore “the library that educated Cicero, and Seneca, and Caesar, which they hoped would educate a new and virtuous generation who would rule with competence and wisdom, and put the good of the state before all.”

Yet in this project there were no investors, shareholders, or return on capital. There was only the conviction that books could make better human beings, and that better human beings could make a better world. In other words, the library was a pure act of philanthropy.

The books were chained to the reading desks, as we can still see today in the Malatestiana Library, which followed it, in Cesena, Italy. It was a standard practice for the time, to keep the collection intact. But the doors were open to anyone who walked in off the street.

With its chained books and open doors, the San Marco Library was a lasting gift to all of humanity.

Now, six hundred years later, we are building something too. But the question remains, What?

Building the AI Data Center

On the outskirts of cities, and increasingly in remote locations chosen for their access to cheap power and cold water, the defining infrastructure of our age is taking shape. But the AI data center is not designed to be visited. Nor is it designed to be beautiful. It is not, in any meaningful sense, designed for human beings at all. A data center is a massive supercomputer, built with the most advanced technology ever devised. Running around the clock and generating intense heat, a data center cools itself by using immense amounts of water, and it uses enough electricity to power a city.

The scale is difficult to comprehend. This year alone, the largest technology companies in the world — Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon — have announced a combined $740 billion in AI-related capital expenditure, a 69 percent increase from last year. These construction projects combine chips, servers, cooling systems, and the power required to run them.

By 2027, the global infrastructure processing AI queries is projected to consume the equivalent of half the United Kingdom’s annual water usage. The electricity cost is equally staggering and growing rapidly. In Ireland, data centers consumed 22 percent of the country’s total electricity in 2024 — more than every urban household in the country combined.

The Nvidia GPU chip has become the manuscript page of our age. Made by machines at massive expense, a rack of the most advanced Nvidia processors consumes roughly 140 kilowatts of power continuously.

The humanist manuscript was created entirely by human hands, to be read by human eyes, and to be held in human memory. But AI chips are made by machines, for machines, to produce outputs that increasingly replace the human beings who once did the work.

And then there is the dream beyond the dream, in which technology will rule all. Last week, SpaceX debuted the largest IPO ever priced on Wall Street at a $2.1 trillion valuation. The company has announced plans to launch up to one million AI data centers into orbit. These solar-powered satellites, each the width of a Boeing 747, would use liquid cooling in space, connected to users below by laser. In this final vision of the AI buildout, the goal of the entire enterprise has become visible: a high-tech infrastructure that has literally left the Earth behind, along with the human beings on it.

By contrast, Cosimo de’ Medici built the Renaissance library in the heart of Florence, where anyone could walk in off the street.

The Human Cost: Humanitas vs. Dehumanization

The Renaissance had a term for what it was trying to build. Humanitas described the cultivation of what was finest in human nature. It encompassed reason and ethical development, human dignity, creative expression, the capacity for friendship and love, the search for truth, and a deep concern for the common good. But these were not qualities a person simply had. They were qualities a person developed through education, through reflection, and through engagement with great ideas that a library makes possible.

Once we understand what Renaissance thinkers meant by humanitas, its opposite becomes clear. While the humanists never used the word “dehumanization,” which is a modern term, the idea is implied in everything they wrote. Humanitas is always about fullness: the full development of what human beings might become. Its opposite, dehumanization, is always a reduction, including our modern compressions of a person into a single function, category, number, or unit of cost. And this kind of reduction is now being carried out in the language of corporate efficiency.

In May of this year, Standard Chartered Bank announced the elimination of 7,800 jobs. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been shocking if not for the language used. But its CEO, Bill Winters, took care to explain the decision in precise terms. “It’s not cost-cutting,” he told investors on the webcast. “It’s replacing low-value human capital with financial and investment capital.” The substitution of workers in favor of machines, he added, “will accelerate as we go forward into AI.”

Consider those words again: low-value human capital. This phrase would have been incomprehensible to a Renaissance humanist — not because they were naive about money or power, but because the entire edifice of humanist thought rested on the conviction that human beings possessed intrinsic dignity that nothing could reduce. The humanists built a library to cultivate that dignity. But Winters dismantled his workforce to fund the machines that are replacing his people.

Yet he is far from alone. Meta recently laid off 8,000 people — ten percent of its workforce — explicitly to “offset” its $125–145 billion AI investment. It’s literally a move to replace humans with chips and data centers. To add insult to injury, Meta had its employees train their AI replacements before being let go. And other tech companies have eliminated tens of thousands of jobs, citing their preference for AI over human employees.

More recently, we learned that Oracle let go of 21,000 employees to help pay for its AI buildout, while 99 percent of CEOs surveyed said they expect to replace some employees with AI over the next two years.

This is reduction or dehumanization in the precise sense the Renaissance understood. While humanitas called for the full development of every human being, the logic of the data center calls for the elimination of human beings wherever a machine can be substituted. The humanists asked what a person might become. But when corporations lose their soul and become machinelike, they ask when AI can replace human beings.

Cosimo de’ Medici spent a fortune building a library so that anyone could walk in, study, and cultivate their humanity. But Bill Winters is spending a fortune on AI by removing the humans from his payroll. Both men spent fortunes, but only one of them built something for human beings.

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Learning from the Renaissance Today

Now let’s return to that warm, June morning on the outskirts of Florence. Cosimo de’ Medici — the most powerful banker in the world, and a champion of human nature — is pruning his grape vines. When the vines are finished, he goes inside and reads a passage from Saint Gregory before turning to the business of the day. This reflected the pattern of a humane life. It was the deliberate creation of space in which wisdom can dwell before the demands of the world rush in.

The Romans called this otium, or private time to feed the mind and spirit. Cicero, Petrarch, and the Renaissance humanists all embraced it. They understood something we are at risk of forgetting: too much information can crowd out wisdom. Without otium or leisure, a mind that fails to refresh itself will lose its ability to know what is worthy of real attention.

Compare this with the Silicon Valley ideal of the CEO sleeping under his desk, mentally engaged with operational problems around the clock, and treating the human mind as an engine to be run at maximum output until it breaks or is replaced. Something human goes missing there. What disappears is the kind of reflection that can step back and ask the oldest and most important question: What is all of this for?

That question is what the Renaissance was built on. It’s also a question we surely need to ask today. We don’t have to follow in Cosimo’s exact footsteps by reading Saint Gregory to start the day. But we do need some space for wisdom and our inner life to deepen, before the workday begins.

The contrasts we’ve seen are not accidental: Cosimo versus Musk. Books versus chips. Human nature versus machines. Philanthropy versus greed. A library designed to create better human beings versus an infrastructure designed to replace them. All of these reflect fundamentally different answers to the question of what we should be working toward.

The Renaissance answer was clear. While not a perfect civilization, it asked the right question: What does it mean to become more deeply human, and how can we build a world that makes this possible? From that one question flowed the art, the architecture, the education, the civic life, and even the libraries. That question is with us still because it’s part of who we are as human beings.

Boldly taking on the AI question this spring, Pope Leo XIV uplifted many readers, both secular and religious, with the wisdom of his encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“magnificent humanity”). In this work, he joined a long tradition by asking that question again, and by giving voice to Renaissance wisdom. Strip away the theological framing, and his words could have been written by any Renaissance humanist studying in Cosimo’s San Marco Library:

In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human.

Six hundred years have passed since the first Renaissance library opened its doors on a Florentine street. But the question it was built to ask is even more urgent today.

About the Author

David Fideler explores the role of philosophy and the humanities in modern life. He’s the founder of the Renaissance Program in Florence, Italy, and edits The Living Ideas Journal. His book on the Stoic philosopher Seneca has been published in over 15 languages. Originally from the United States, he now lives in Europe.

Further Reading Online

• How the Renaissance Rediscovered “the Human”

• Michelangelo’s David and “the Dignity of Man”

Sources and Further Reading

Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolò Niccoli. Two Renaissance Book Hunters: The Letters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis. Translated by Phyllis Walter Goodhart Gordan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974.

Vespasiano da Bisticci. The Vespasiano Memoirs: Lives of Illustrious Men of the XV Century. Translated by William George and Emily Waters. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1926. First published 1837.

Ross King. The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2021.

William F. Meehan III. “The Importance of Cosimo de’ Medici in Library History.” Indiana Libraries 26, no. 3 (2007): 15–17.

Ada Palmer. Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2025.

Berthold L. Ullman and Philip A. Stadter. The Public Library of Renaissance Florence: Niccolò Niccoli, Cosimo de’ Medici and the Library of San Marco. Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1972.

Read Living Ideas Journal

The Living Ideas Journal explores how Renaissance humanism, and the humanities more broadly, can deepen our experience of being alive. You’ll find free essays on beauty, human dignity, and the art of becoming more deeply human.

Subscribe to the free monthly Living Ideas Journal newsletter for new articles, online courses, and our in-person programs in Florence and beyond.

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For much of human history, people have worried about injustice, cruelty, corruption, and ethical failure. In fact, we still do. But what people did not worry about was the possibility that we might slowly lose our humanity on a collective level. The idea that we could make technological progress while becoming less human is very recent.

The Industrial Revolution brought unprecedented productivity, but also a growing unease that human life was becoming mechanized: Boys working in a cotton mill in Macon, Georgia, 1909.

This concern only appeared in the last few centuries, as societies became increasingly shaped by machines and abstract systems. With the Industrial Revolution came unprecedented productivity, but also a growing unease that human life was becoming mechanized. Some claimed that life was becoming increasingly shaped around efficiency and production rather than human meaning. And over time, this concern deepened. Today, with the advent of AI, this question has become even more urgent.

But from a Renaissance perspective, the question would have sounded strange. That’s because Renaissance thinkers believed that humans were not primarily defined by what they owned or produced, but by what they cultivated. In this view, humanity was not a static condition. While all humans are born equally in terms of their potential and worth, to become more deeply human requires development. Human character, judgment, attention, and imagination are not just handed to us; they need to be cultivated.

From this perspective, the problem is not that modern life introduces new tools or technologies. Every age has done that. The deeper problem is that modern civilization has largely abandoned a clear understanding of how human beings develop—and why that still matters.

While there are many pathways that can help us to develop our humanity, there are three that have always been important, which are especially timely today: character, attention, and creativity.

Character

One of the capacities most clearly at risk today is ethical development. Renaissance humanists inherited from classical philosophy the idea that character grows over time through education, reflection, imitation, and deliberate practice. Becoming a good person was not automatic; it was a lifelong project. They even developed a new form of education to develop character. Called the studia humanitatis or “humane studies,” it’s the origin of the humanities.

But today, by contrast, character development is often treated as either innate or accidental. It’s now common for people to speak about “systems,” “incentives,” and “outcomes,” but to speak far less about the slow cultivation of judgment, conscience, and responsibility. When decisions are increasingly delegated to policies or algorithms, individuals may act efficiently but without ever becoming wiser.

Attention

A second endangered capacity is deep and sustained attention. Renaissance culture prized reading, memory, rhetoric, and conversation. These disciplines trained the mind, deepened the soul, and contributed to society. Attention was understood as an ethical and intellectual gift: the ability to dwell with complexity, to listen, to weigh competing claims, and to reflect before acting.

Attention feeds our inner life. But by contrast, modern life constantly fragments attention. Speed, digital distraction, online ads blasted into our brains, and constant stimulation leave little room for the inward silence required for understanding. And when attention collapses, so does the possibility of depth in our thoughts and our relationships.

Creativity

A third loss concerns creative participation in the world. Renaissance thinkers believed that human beings were called to complete what nature begins. Art, architecture, education, and civic life were all expressions of this responsibility. Creativity was not merely a personal expression; it was a developmental process. To create something worthy required discipline, knowledge, and inner growth. But today, creativity is often reduced to output rather than development. And when creation becomes effortless, automated, or produced at the click of a button, it risks losing its role in shaping the creator. We may gain abundance while losing the sense that our work is a reflection of human development.

These losses don’t have to announce themselves dramatically. They can accumulate over time. A society can remain prosperous, informed, and technologically sophisticated while slowly erasing the conditions that once fostered human depth. But eventually, comfort replaces character. Information displaces wisdom. And capability expands while purpose contracts.

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This is why debates about artificial intelligence feel both urgent and incomplete. AI is not the ultimate source of these problems. It’s just their most recent, noteworthy expression. It exposes how willing we are to outsource judgment, attention, and creativity without asking what happens to the human being who is left behind. Today, it’s literally possible to create an entire, multipage website with a one-sentence prompt. The danger is not that machines will become human, but that we will forget what it takes to maintain our humanity.

The Renaissance humanists remind us that civilizations thrive not just by improving their tools. They thrive by cultivating the people who use them. Human beings flourish when learning develops character. We thrive when attention is focused rather than scattered. And we grow when creativity is understood as a transformational practice, not simply a technical one.

Recovering this perspective involves remembering that humanity is something we must always cultivate, both as individuals and as a society. Any civilization that forgets this risks losing its soul, even if it achieves extraordinary power.

About the Author

David Fideler explores the role of philosophy and the humanities in modern life. He’s the founder of the Renaissance Program and edits the Living Ideas Journal. His book on the Stoic philosopher Seneca has been published in over fifteen languages. Originally from the United States, he now lives in Europe.

Read about our immersive, five-day course, The Renaissance Program in Florence. It explores the ideas that shaped the Italian Renaissance—and what we might learn from them today—including Renaissance philosophies of human nature.

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Over the course of my life, intelligent friends have sometimes said, “A new Renaissance is really needed today.” A very well-read taxi driver in Florence, Italy, even suggested this to me once during a memorable conversation.

But today, the question is being discussed publicly — and it’s attracting widespread and passionate interest.

As someone who studies how the Italian Renaissance came into being — and who teaches a course on this topic in Florence — this conversation has captured my attention. So I thought I’d weigh in and highlight what history has to say.

A Perfect Storm: Literacy and the Humanities in Decline

The reason the “new Renaissance” question has surfaced now is because we’re facing a perfect storm of cultural challenges. It involves two developments that are deeply troubling.

First, long-term literacy and reading rates have been plummeting — especially among young people — due to decreased attention spans caused by smartphones and social media. A particularly shocking article published by The Atlantic describes how students arriving at elite universities are unprepared, having never been asked to read an entire book during high school.

The second factor is the long-term decline of the humanities as taught in today’s universities. Enrollment in humanities courses has been dropping for years, often due to self-inflicted wounds.

Sometimes, programs are slashed for supposedly financial reasons. But in other cases, even successful programs with high student demand are dismantled or restructured for no clear reason, like Jennifer Frey’s honors program at the University of Tulsa.

Due to demographic changes and a shrinking student population, this cutting back is certain to accelerate in the coming years.

A Wake-Up Call: Addictive Technology and the Decline of Literacy

A major wake-up call for many came via an UnHerd podcast hosted by Freddie Sayers on YouTube (August 27), featuring journalist and public philosopher .

Entitled The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, this short but information-rich episode is well worth watching. It blends thoughtful discussion with studies documenting the collapse in sustained reading, since the advent of the smartphone. (Just one example: reading for pleasure in the U.S. has declined 40% in the past 20 years.)

Host Freddie Sayers described it as “the most depressing episode” he had ever worked on.

By the end of the conversation, Sayers asked whether there was anything to feel hopeful about.

Henderson’s answer pointed to history: after the fall of classical civilization and a period of darkness, a Renaissance — and later, the Enlightenment — emerged, bringing a recovery of knowledge and cultural flourishing. Perhaps we could witness a similar renewal again.

As of this writing, the video has attracted 130,000 views and over 1,600 comments. Most striking, however, was a large spike in views near the end. It seems many viewers found the discussion of a new Renaissance inspiring. They replayed that hopeful conclusion time and again.

Is a New Renaissance Coming?

One major reason for the humanities’ collapse is that their original purpose has been forgotten. Invented during the Renaissance, the humanities were designed to cultivate well-rounded and ethically grounded individuals who could contribute to the public good and help heal their fractured society.

Yet visit almost any humanities department today, and you’ll struggle to find a professor who can explain where the humanities came from — or what their purpose was in the first place.

One exception is , a Harvard-trained literature and poetry scholar who now hosts an independent online learning community.

Like myself, Walker emphasizes the original mission of the humanities: to nourish the human spirit. But in much of academia today, the humanities have been overtaken by ideological frameworks and “theory.” They are no longer taught as sources of insight for how to live, but as subjects of abstract analysis.

The Next Renaissance May Arise Outside Academia

In response, Walker has actively joined the “new Renaissance” conversation, contributing essays and videos on the topic. One of his podcast episodes, The Next Renaissance is Coming, draws from two of his earlier published articles.

With his online academy, Walker personally sees how people want to study the humanities not for credentials, but for meaning. He interacts with people who feel dispirited by academic trends and are seeking nourishment and inspiration. Many of these participants view today’s academic approach — often rigid, ideological, or overly theoretical — as uninviting.

Walker believes the institutional damage is so deep that any true rebirth of the humanities is likely to arise outside academia, with a few rare and welcome exceptions.

As Walker notes:

Nearly every renaissance has begun under conditions of collapse or shortly after cultural exhaustion and the lack of meaning. And, like the European Renaissance of the fifteenth century, the next one will come from outside of the academy.

This is historically true. The original Renaissance humanists created the studia humanitatis — “humane studies” or the original humanities — outside the university system, which was then dominated by medieval scholasticism.

Scholasticism emphasized commentaries, rigid logic, classification, and dry academic debates. It had little to say about personal development or civic engagement — the human element — which the humanists were interested in.

The humanities, then, were developed as a life-enhancing alternative to scholasticism. The Renaissance humanists created their own schools before their ideas were much later adopted by universities, which ultimately transformed education for centuries.

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Speaking of renewal, Walker has observed that “the very signs we take as symptoms of decline — such as technological disruption, institutional distrust, and cultural anxiety — may also be the early signs of a rebirth.”

This idea follows established patterns. As historian Michael Bonner as shown, renaissances typically arise after periods of cultural decline. This happened not just in Europe, but also in China, Persia, and other ancient cultures. In times of crisis, people often seek out the time-tested wisdom that once gave their societies strength.

The Seeds of a New Renaissance — and Our New Petrarch Moment

That’s also how the Italian Renaissance began, with Petrarch, in the 1300s.

Looking around at a broken, plague-ravaged world, Petrarch saw clear signs of decline. The grandeur of ancient Rome had collapsed. The Eternal City had dwindled from one million people to around 30,000, reduced to rubble and ruled by feuding warlords. Most classical buildings had been ruined and looted for construction materials. Cows grazed in the Roman Forum. Even the papacy had abandoned the city for Avignon in southern France.

Petrarch also believed that Latin — a great cultural language — had decayed. Medieval Latin, he argued, had become corrupt and barbaric, and was far removed from the eloquence of Cicero. The humanists sought to restore that eloquence as part of their broader cultural recovery, since persuasive communication is a foundation of civil society.

Beyond style, the Latin language itself had largely vanished from everyday life. In ancient Rome, nearly everyone spoke some form of Latin. But by Petrarch’s time, it survived only in clerical and scholarly use. In this way, just like the broken monuments of ancient Rome, the language itself had fallen into ruin — eerily resonating with our modern concerns about declining literacy.

Early in his life, Petrarch began a personal quest to recover lost wisdom. Whenever he’d visit a new city, Petrarch would stop by local monasteries in search of lost manuscripts. Petrarch’s manuscript searches would later inspire the book hunters and humanists of the early 1400s, who helped build the Renaissance.

Petrarch himself was a sensitive, poetic soul. In the 1300s, he was like a one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind: he noticed things that others didn’t see.

But once he identified the signs of cultural collapse — and made the case for renewal — his vision became compelling. His followers, the Renaissance humanists, carried it forward. The result was a cultural rebirth.

Today, we’ve entered a new Petrarch moment. People are increasingly concerned about the dehumanizing forces of our time — such as artificial intelligence, automation, and a social system increasingly controlled by a technocratic elite.

In Petrarch’s time, it fell upon just one person to raise the alarm. Today, that unease is widely shared — and that, in itself, is a cause for hope.

About the Author

David Fideler is a philosopher and cultural historian. He created The Renaissance Program in Florence, devoted to the ideas that shaped the Renaissance and what we might learn from them today. The 2026 program sold out months in advance. He also edits Living Ideas Journal.

The Renaissance Program in Florence explores the profound ideas that shaped the Italian Renaissance. It also asks what those ideas — and the thinkers behind them — might still offer us today.

As of this writing, the March 2026 program in Florence is fully subscribed, though spaces could open up. To learn more, click on the image below. You can also join the mailing list to receive updates about our online offerings and future in-person programs.

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Renaissance thinkers, inspired by Marsilio Ficino and the Hermetic writings, envisioned a new view of human nature — one that called them to love the world and perfect nature through art and beauty.

What does it mean to be human in the first place? And what is the so-called “dignity of man,” or dignity of human beings, which was so important to Renaissance thinkers?

For Renaissance thinkers, the answer to these questions often came from ancient philosophers or from Christianity. But some of the most striking ideas came from the Hermetic writings, translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino (1433–99).

These writings offered Ficino a new vision of human nature. While earlier thinkers like Aristotle defined human beings as being rational (“a rational animal”), the Hermetic writings stressed the divine nature of human beings. One writing emphasized human nature as the bond between spirit and matter, and it highlighted the human inclination to love and care for the things of the Earth.

Human Nature in the Hermetic Writings

The Hermetic writings are mystical and philosophical texts that originated in Egypt, shaped by both Greek philosophy and native Egyptian thought. They were presented as revealed knowledge from an ancient Egyptian sage known as “Thrice-Great Hermes” — or Hermes Trismegistus. Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation made these works influential during the later part of Renaissance. (This image of Hermes Trismegistus below appears in the marble pavement of the Cathedral of Siena, Italy.)

The Hermetic writings emphasize the importance of rationality, like Greek philosophers; but they see rationality as something deeper, even mystical. They offer a profoundly spiritual vision of human nature, distinct from Christianity.

In the Asclepius, a Hermetic dialogue known in the Renaissance, we are told many remarkable things about human beings:

• Human beings are “a great miracle, a being to be adored and honored.” (This line appears at the very beginning of Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man — and it was also often quoted by Ficino.)

• Human beings are divine, like God and the cosmos.

• Human beings have a dual nature: they are both spiritual and material, serving as the bond that links the two realms.

• Human beings “contemplate heaven” and the order of nature, while also “taking care of the things on earth.” (This is somewhat different from the Book of Genesis, where human beings are stewards, which essentially means “property managers.”)

• Love is essential: human beings are loved by higher cosmic powers, and they in turn love and care for the things of the earth. (Again, this emphasis on love is not found in Genesis.)

• And finally: although limited physically by their bodies, human beings have minds that are limitless — capable of understanding the cosmos and all of creation. In other words, some part of the human mind is infinite.

Needless to say, this is a profoundly optimistic view of human dignity, and it had a deep influence on Renaissance thought.

The Hermetic Writings and Marsilio Ficino’s “Philosophy of Man”

Ficino translated the Hermetic writings in 1463, and they deeply shaped his thinking, which blended three main traditions: Christianity, Neoplatonism, and Hermetic philosophy.

The Hermetic writings were so important to Ficino that he sometimes copied entire passages into his own writings by closely paraphrasing them.

Following the Asclepius, Ficino repeatedly describes the human soul as the “bond of the world,” tying all things together. He also makes love a universal force that unites and animates the cosmic hierarchy. As we look upward toward the divine, we simultaneously love that which is below. This image comes straight from the Asclepius, and its portrait of the ideal human:

He raises his sight to heaven while he takes care of the earth. Thus he is in the fortunate middle position: he loves the things that are below him and is beloved by the beings above.

Further, in the Asclepius, humans are “bound in a knot of love” to all other creatures.

In this Hermetic vision, human beings are meant to love and care for the Earth — an emotional bond that’s largely missing from the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the Hebrew Bible, human beings are depicted as stewards of creation. The Hebrew word translated as “steward” means “administrator,” and in Greek, it becomes “household manager.” These are managerial roles: humans are not asked to love nature, only to care for it on God’s behalf.

By contrast, the Hermetic texts describe a much more organic connection between the divine and the human. The Asclepius sacralizes the human “middle position”: loving what is below, contemplating what is above, and being bound “in a knot of love” to the whole.

This vision also spells out a Renaissance ethos: Inspired by love, humans are moved by their very nature to adorn and beautify the world. And this love easily sparks the creative process.

The Hermetic idea of a human-centered cosmos also aligns with the ideals of Renaissance humanism, which emphasized self-understanding, human potential, and the development of our powers. And that’s why it is called humanism — a movement centered on human development.

The Dance of “Art” and “Nature” in the Renaissance

This Hermetic call to love the world pairs beautifully with another ancient idea, one from Aristotle, that “art completes nature.” In other words, art or technē completes what nature starts but does not finish on its own.

This ancient theme — the relationship between art and nature — took on new significance during the Renaissance. When we combine these two ideas — “love and care for the world” with “art completing nature” — we arrive at a defining Renaissance insight: moved by love and inspiration, human beings can create a more beautiful world.

We see this spirit clearly in Renaissance painting, architecture, and garden design.

In formal garden design, “art” and “nature” are intimately joined. And in her book The Italian Renaissance Garden, Claudia Lazzaro explores this interplay between art and nature. As she writes, “Nature was . . . conceived as ordered, a reflection of cosmic order; and in imitation of nature, art must imitate not only nature’s outward appearance, but also its underlying order.”

This intersection of art and nature also appears in the work of Giannozzo Manetti, another Renaissance humanist who read the Asclepius. Manetti argued that while God created the world beautifully, human beings have the power to make it even more beautiful.

Returning to the garden theme, Lazzaro writes that:

In recreating nature, the garden also revealed the laws of nature behind its material appearance, and thus reflected the belief in the correspondence between things visible and invisible which was central to Renaissance thought. The divine harmony of the universe was echoed in the harmony created through human art in buildings, pictures, households, governments — and gardens. . . .

She continues:

In the arts, this relation between microcosm and macrocosm was expressed through mathematical perspective, proportional relationship of parts, symmetry, and geometric forms. The order in the garden, achieved through similar means, likewise reflects and reproduces a cosmic order.

The Medici Villa in Fiesole — and a Surprising Coincidence

The first formal Renaissance garden attached to a villa was built by the Medici family in Fiesole, overlooking Florence, in the mid-1400s. With a sweeping view of the city below, the upper garden was laid out geometrically to mirror the proportions and dimensions of the villa itself.

This was not a working garden for food production. Rather, it was designed to inspire contemplation — a conscious effort to recreate a garden of philosophical reflection, inspired by ancient Roman examples. It soon became a meeting place for Renaissance thinkers, including Lorenzo de’ Medici, Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola.

The Renaissance scholar Ross King describes the villa as the result of a desire to create “an enclave of beauty and order through the harmonious interplay of plants and flowers with geometry and architecture.” In the end, he notes, “It became a kind of fifteenth-century Florentine equivalent of Plato’s Academy or Aristotle’s Lyceum — a place where the carefully crafted beauty of nature could elevate both the mind and the spirit.”

It’s fitting that Marsilio Ficino — who believed beauty could elevate the soul and that we should love and care for the Earth — spent time here with friends, in a setting consecrated to beauty. Here, the life of the mind and the beauty of nature came together. Here, both human nature and the beauty of nature were cultivated.

I’ve now been fortunate to visit this special place several times. And when I first saw it, while planning the first Renaissance Program in Florence, I thought: “We really should do something here.” It would be unforgettable, I thought, to bring people there to walk in the footsteps of Ficino and Pico — to see the same views, to experience the same harmony and beauty, born of nature and art together.

Over a year later, during our first five-day course, the Renaissance Program in Florence became a reality. To conclude the event, we visited Villa Medici. We explored its interior (normally closed to the public), took in the view, and walked in the footsteps of Ficino, Pico, and Renaissance humanists.

A new Renaissance Program is scheduled for the final week of March 2026 — and we’ll be returning to this remarkable villa and Renaissance gathering place. If you’d like to walk in Ficino’s footsteps too, and experience this unforgettable setting, you’re warmly invited to join us. You can find full details on our website.

Love and Knowledge

Marsilio Ficino’s recovery of the Hermetic tradition of love intersects with a broader Renaissance ethos — that human care and creativity can transform the world. In many ways, the great achievements of the Renaissance resonate with this vision.

In the Platonic and Hermetic traditions, human beings are indeed rational creatures, and our rationality is a gift that should be cultivated. But we are far more than that. We also possess deeper forms of knowing — including the kind of understanding that comes through love. As Dante noted, love awakens the soul to act. Love of beauty can elevate the soul, but it can also move us to care for the world, to heal it, and even to transform it.

As Ficino wrote: “There is nothing to be found in this whole living world so deformed that Soul does not attend it, that a gift of Soul is not in it.” Even what appears damaged or misshapen is worthy of care and enlivened by the presence of soul.

One takeaway from the Renaissance mindset is that we can often create admirable things with reason alone. But to create what is truly great — lasting, meaningful, and deep — something more is required: a spark of love or devotion. We can certainly see this love reflected in the extraordinary care behind the greatest works of Renaissance art.

“To create what is truly great — lasting, meaningful, and deep — something more is required: a spark of love or devotion.”

For Ficino, as illustrated in Botticelli’s Primavera, the lush garden of the world is animated by love, which flows through it. Read as a Neoplatonic allegory, the Primavera tells a story: the soul enters the world in a naive state, is transformed through the power of love, and — after this transformation — it is led to contemplate divine beauty and the source of creation.

For Ficino, love plays a central philosophical role because love, like reason, is also a way of knowing.

Influenced by both the Hermetic writings and Neoplatonism, Ficino taught that love is the bond of the universe. Likewise, he believed that love is another name for humanity itself — for the more we love others, the more fully we express our human nature. In Latin, humanitas implies not just civility or learning, but also a love for all that is human.

To truly know, and to be deeply human, is to love — and to let that love shape the world.

David Fideler explores the role of philosophy and the humanities in modern life. He’s the founder of the Renaissance Program in Florence, Italy, and edits the Living Ideas Journal. His book on the Stoic philosopher Seneca has been published in over 15 languages. Originally from the United States, he now lives in Europe.

If you’d like to walk in the footsteps of Marsilio Ficino and experience the beauty of Renaissance thought where it was born, we warmly invite you to join us in Florence in March 2026. The Renaissance Program includes lectures, guided visits, and conversations in places where history still speaks — including the Medici Villa in Fiesole, overlooking the city Ficino called home.

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• Download the original, illustrated paper, which includes notes and references.

At first glance, the phrase “secular humanism” might sound like something the Renaissance would have celebrated. After all, Renaissance humanism placed the human being at the center of education, ethics, and cultural life. It emphasized human potential and encouraged individuals to develop their minds, cultivate character, and contribute to the common good.

But as we will see, the Renaissance approach to humanism was quite different from what emerged in the modern age, particularly through the work of Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who gave secular humanism a very different foundation.

Let’s start with the Renaissance . . .

Renaissance humanism emphasized human potential and the development of character. It encouraged a life of learning, civic participation, and moral reflection. However, Renaissance thinkers believed in multiple ways of knowing, including reason — but also imagination, moral insight, artistic intuition, and lived experience. This was a world where poetry, politics, philosophy, and painting could all reveal truths about human life and our world.

This belief in many ways of knowing is why the Renaissance produced so many polymaths — or well-rounded “Renaissance men” — individuals with the ability to engage and contribute to many fields.

Leonardo da Vinci is the classic case: an artist, inventor, and scientist rolled into one. Piero della Francesca combined painting with mathematics, writing influential treatises on perspective and geometry. Leon Battista Alberti, likewise, was a philosopher, mathematician, architect, and art theorist who helped to weave humanism, science, and art into a single vision.

As Waqas Ahmed notes in his book The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility, we are probably all born as polymaths until social pressures undercut our creativity and force us to specialize.

Auguste Comte and a New Kind of Humanism

Now let’s fast-forward to Auguste Comte, the French philosopher who lived in the early 1800s. Comte was a major figure in shaping what would become modern secular humanism. While elements of secular humanism can be found earlier in Enlightenment thought, it was Auguste Comte who first spelled out secular humanism as a doctrine.

He rejected theology and metaphysics and insisted that only science could give us real knowledge. In his view, the world had passed through three stages: the theological stage (when people explained things through divine causes), the metaphysical stage (abstract concepts), and finally the positive or scientific stage, where all knowledge would be based on observation and measurable facts.

Comte believed this final stage — the reign of science — was the destiny of humanity. And in an ironic twist, he proposed a new secular religion to go along with it. He called it The Religion of Humanity.

Creating a Secular Religion: Reason Above Everything Else

A secular religion? Yes — one in which humanity and human rationality were to be worshipped. Comte created a new liturgical calendar (with saints like Aristotle and Gutenberg), a priesthood of secular moral guides, and even secular sacraments.

While the early Renaissance humanists were sincere Catholics who emphasized the human world in a largely secular way, Comte was an atheist who tried to build a new religion without God.

It was a strange move to create a totally secular religion. But it wasn’t the first time. During the French Revolution, the Cult of Reason tried something similar, turning churches into Temples of Reason and staging civic festivals in honor of human rationality. All the same, it soon descended into terror, with mass executions and widespread violence. As the Reign of Terror showed, even a seemingly positive Enlightenment idea could be violently misused.

Two Different Views of Knowledge

There is another crucial difference between Renaissance humanism and Comte’s secular humanism: their conflicting views of knowledge itself.

This difference is far more consequential than theological beliefs:

Renaissance thinkers valued reason greatly, but they never reduced the mind to reason alone. They believed that wisdom could be learned from classical sources of the past. History, for example, offered moral wisdom, showing the consequences of human action.

For Comte, however, instrumental reason was all that mattered. This is the kind of reasoning that helps us predict, control, and organize the world through scientific laws. (It is closely related to scientism, the belief that science is the only valid form of knowledge, which Comte endorsed.) Anything that couldn’t be measured or verified by science was dismissed as obsolete. Art, poetry, spirituality, and even philosophy were relics of an earlier stage of development.

This outlook rendered most of the past irrelevant. Comte’s three-stage theory of history didn’t just describe change; it implied that earlier forms of knowing should be discarded entirely. Unlike the Renaissance thinkers who recovered wisdom from antiquity, Comte saw history as a ladder: once you climb to the top, you can kick the ladder away. The past becomes irrelevant.

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What We Lose Without a Deeper Humanism

To be clear, the goal of this article is not to diminish reason or science. From ancient times, both have been valued as powerful tools for understanding the world. Renaissance thinkers admired mathematics and astronomy as much as they admired rhetoric and ethics.

But Comte’s vision of humanism did something different, which was quite damaging. It reduced human nature to the rational intellect alone. It stripped away rich layers of human experience: imagination, feeling, contemplation, and classical wisdom.

Instead of a world alive with symbolic meaning and multiple ways of knowing, we were left with one to be measured, controlled, and managed. The result was not just a loss of richness and depth, but a growing sense of alienation from the world itself. Today, this alienation extends not only to the world but also to society itself.

While Renaissance humanism placed the human being within a meaningful cosmos, modern secular humanism (in Comte’s form) placed the human above a disenchanted world. The cosmos was no longer our home, but a machine, from which we were different and disconnected.

Reviving a Fuller Vision of Human Nature

How could we respond to these developments, which diminish human nature and make the world feel less meaningful?

By following the Renaissance spirit, we could encourage integrating reason with imagination, knowledge with beauty, and science with wisdom. This deeper kind of humanism, like that of the Renaissance, would not reject rationality, but enrich it.

Such a holistic form of humanism would affirm our full range of creative, emotional, and moral capacities. In other words, it would affirm our multiple intelligences. This renewed humanism would not have to be religious, but it would leave room for healthy spiritual traditions, symbolic meaning, and shared practices that elevate and bind communities.

Above all, it would emphasize wonder and awe — “the beginning of all philosophy,” as Socrates said. A healthier humanism would nurture both our inner depths and our bonds with society. It would also restore our sense of connection to the living world, from which we come and to which we belong. In this way, it could help us feel at home again: in ourselves, our communities, and the cosmos.

About the Author

David Fideler explores the role of philosophy and the humanities in modern life. He’s the founder of the Renaissance Program and edits the Living Ideas Journal. His book on the Stoic philosopher Seneca has been published in over fifteen languages. Originally from the United States, he now lives in Europe.

For Further Reading

• How the Renaissance Rediscovered “the Human” — From A Renaissance of Ideas

• Renaissance Humanism and the Modern Humanities — A video recording of a lecture by James Hankins. The discussion of Auguste Comte in the lecture helped to inspire this article.

Are you interested in Renaissance views of human nature and the idea of the polymath who unites science and art? If so, explore the Renaissance Program in Florence, where these themes are studied and discussed.

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Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) is best known for designing the great dome atop Florence’s cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, one of the largest churches in the world.

When the building was constructed in the 1300s, an opening was left for a dome, measuring about 50 meters (165 feet) across. But that opening stayed empty for fifty years, covered over by a wooden roof. A dome of that size had never been built anywhere in the world, and its construction would be extremely difficult and dangerous.

That task was left to Brunelleschi. Beginning in 1420, construction took sixteen years, resulting in the largest masonry dome in the world. Built with millions of bricks, it still towers above the skyline of Florence, and its completion set off a wave of “Renaissance optimism.” It encouraged people in Florence to believe they could accomplish anything.

Recovering the Secrets of Ancient Architecture

Brunelleschi’s biographer, who knew him in person, was Antonio di Tucci Manetti, and we can still read his Life of Brunelleschi today.

According to Manetti, Brunelleschi set off to Rome in 1402, with his friend Donatello, to study the remains of Roman architecture. His goal was to recover the secrets and proportions of ancient architecture by making detailed drawings, taking measurements, and studying the proportions of Roman buildings — or what was left of them.

Manetti describes how the pair spent months in Rome, surveying the buildings. They even built their own devices for making measurements. Local residents referred to them as “treasure hunters” — but the only treasure they sought was the lost knowledge of ancient architecture.

In Manetti’s words, Brunelleschi “decided to rediscover the fine and highly skilled method of building and the harmonious proportions of the ancients.” Brunelleschi also studied the classical forms of architecture, which he would later use in his own buildings.

Brunelleschi’s work reveals him as an intellectual revolutionary. Starting with Brunelleschi, Rome was the one destination that all Renaissance architects sought out. It was “the ultimate standard of reference” for emulation and inspiration. By studying the proportions and methods of earlier architecture, Brunelleschi created Renaissance architecture all’antica — in the ancient style — and all the great Renaissance architects who came later followed in his footsteps.

Importantly, Brunelleschi’s quest was in harmony with the goals of Renaissance humanism: to recover the lost knowledge of antiquity, in order to create a better, more humane, and civilized world, to heal the fractures of Italian society.

And this is exactly the way that humanists and Renaissance architects interpreted Brunelleschi’s work: as a creative renewal of classical principles in architecture, which ran parallel to the humanist project itself.

The Triumph of the Basilica of San Lorenzo

While Brunelleschi designed several buildings in Florence, the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence is certainly the most grand and harmonious expression of his “New Roman Style.”

Built on the site of a much smaller basilica — supposedly the oldest church in Florence — Brunelleschi’s masterpiece was completed shortly after his death. What makes the structure compelling are the bright, Corinthian columns, soaring in a perfect mathematical harmony that embraces and defines the dimensions of the entire nave.

In addition to designing the dome and creatively rediscovering ancient architecture, Brunelleschi did something else that would define the Renaissance: he also discovered the principle of linear perspective, which would go on to transform Renaissance art.

In San Lorenzo, Brunelleschi took the idea of “perspective” out of the two-dimensional world and showcased it in three-dimensional space. This creates a sensation in which every part of the structure is harmonized into a greater whole, through the mathematical proportions on which the interior is based.

This was meant to affect the viewer directly, just as Gothic churches were designed to do. The desired effect, though, was entirely different.

Out with the Gothic — and in with the Renaissance

Renaissance humanists and architects both rejected the Gothic, for two main reasons. But you don’t need to agree with this rejection to understand the humanist way of thinking.

First of all, in the humanist mind, it was the invasion of the Gothic tribes that brought about the fall of the Roman Empire and the loss of classical knowledge. This is exactly the condition that the humanists were trying to reverse with their Renaissance movement of renovatio: recovering and restoring the wisdom, knowledge, and culture of the classical world.

Second, the term Gothic was invented and used as a pejorative. Humanists and Renaissance architects did not like Gothic architecture. They wanted to move beyond it because it departed so greatly from the classical norms of clarity, balance, and proportion — the very qualities they wanted to revive from Roman architecture.

Gothic cathedrals, for example, minimize the human. They focus on an overwhelming, vertical scale, to emphasize the transcendent and eclipse the individual. Gothic churches draw the eye upward toward heaven, with soaring vaults and colored light filtered through stained glass. They were designed to overwhelm the senses and exalt the divine.

By contrast, San Lorenzo creates a horizontal and perfectly harmonious space filled with clear daylight. It invites contemplation and emphasizes the human scale. While walking down the nave, its beauty elevates the spirit, but we still feel rooted in this world. This reflected the humanist worldview: that human beings could understand and recreate divine harmony in earthly buildings.

San Lorenzo’s human-centered proportion and classical inspiration truly embodied the Renaissance spirit, and would influence architecture for centuries. It was a manifesto that reshaped architecture by blending ancient Roman elegance with Renaissance humanism.

To early visitors, San Lorenzo must have felt like another world. Gone was the Gothic twilight, the forest of pointed arches, the restless vertical pull toward heaven. In its place was light, clarity, and order — a calm geometry of columns and arches, each in perfect proportion, stretching out in harmonious rhythm.

This was not just a new style. It was a new way of thinking about space and about humanity’s place in the world. Brunelleschi’s design showed how a human scale could intersect with the sacred.

The Reaction to San Lorenzo

Brunelleschi moved in humanist circles, which surely influenced his thinking. To confirm this, shortly after his death, architects and writers celebrated San Lorenzo and Brunelleschi’s work as a revival of the classical style and a rejection of the Gothic.

One of Brunelleschi’s closest humanist friends was Niccolò Niccoli — an eccentric yet massively influential book collector and thinker in Florence. According to a vivid firsthand account, Niccoli was obsessed with ancient architecture, which he praised in the strongest possible terms. When he spoke about it, he waved his arms wildly in the air, making it hard to believe he did not share these ideas with Brunelleschi. Given his passion, there can be little doubt that Niccoli also hoped to see classical architecture revived.

In addition to knowing Niccoli and other humanists, Brunelleschi became friends with Leon Battista Alberti, the second great Renaissance architect, who also studied in Rome. The two are even pictured together in a portrait.

Alberti was fully dedicated to classical architecture and the revival of the Roman style. In his comprehensive treatise On the Art of Building in Ten Books, he did not mention the Gothic style even once. Alberti deliberately excluded the “modern” Gothic as unworthy of discussion. But in his earlier work On Painting, Alberti published Brunelleschi’s rules of linear perspective for the first time. He also dedicated the book to Brunelleschi, in recognition of his groundbreaking achievements.

Writing just twenty years after Brunelleschi’s death, the Italian architect Filarete made one point repeatedly in his Treatise on Architecture (1464): the Gothic style was barbarous and un-Italian, and it was Brunelleschi who restored good architecture in the Roman style.

This view was echoed later by the great art historian and humanist Giorgio Vasari, who affirmed that the Renaissance was a revival of classical ideals — and firmly rejected the Gothic. According to Vasari, the Gothic was the invention of architects from “barbarous nations,” until “better artists” returned to “the purer” and less confusing style of the classical. For Vasari, too, it was Brunelleschi who revived the classical tradition.

The Inner and Outer Renaissance

What this shows is that there was both an “inner” and “outer” dimension to the Italian Renaissance. The inner dimension began with Petrarch and the humanists, who sought to restore the soul of culture by recovering the ethical, philosophical, and literary wisdom of the ancient world.

But the “outer” dimension began with Brunelleschi and his circle, who revived classical architecture and introduced new ways of seeing, like linear perspective. Their work transformed not just how buildings and paintings were made, but how people saw the world.

If Petrarch taught people how to think like the ancients, Brunelleschi taught them how to build like the ancients. His revival of Roman principles in physical form gave tangible shape to humanist ideals, anchoring them in the world of space, stone, and light.

Together, these inner and outer dimensions created a culture that pursued both intellectual insight and architectural beauty. It was a Renaissance that touched the soul and reshaped the world.

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David Fideler explores the role of philosophy and the humanities in modern life. He’s the founder of the Renaissance Program in Florence, Italy, and edits The Living Ideas Journal. His book on the Stoic philosopher Seneca has been published in over 15 languages. Originally from the United States, he now lives in Europe.

An expanded version of this article, including references for download, first appeared on Living Ideas Journal: “The Man Who Invented Renaissance Architecture”

To learn more about Brunelleschi, Renaissance humanism, and the ideas that shaped the art and architecture of the Renaissance, we invite you to explore the Renaissance Program in Florence, taking place in March 2026. The program will feature lectures, presentations, and guided visits to many significant Renaissance sites, including the Basilica of San Lorenzo.

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The Renaissance was a period of cultural, artistic, and intellectual rebirth, which celebrated the human spirit and emphasized the potential of individuals. However, after the Renaissance faded, the world came to be increasingly seen as a mechanical system, reducing humans to mere components. This change encouraged a utilitarian view of life. In our “modern times,” people began to be valued more for their productivity and economic output than for their intrinsic worth. As a result, the richness of human life is often threatened by the cold, calculating logic of the machine.

Our postmodern era has also fostered a relativistic outlook, in which objective notions of truth, beauty, and goodness have been abandoned in favor of subjective interpretations. As Nietzsche foresaw, “There is no truth, only perspectives.” This relativism has resulted in a widespread loss of personal and civic well-being, as individuals struggle with the absence of guiding principles and ethical frameworks. Consequently, the pursuit of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful — once considered a central aim of human life — has been pushed to the background, with skepticism and cynicism taking center stage.

Humanitas and Eudaimonia: Being Humane and Flourishing

The first step in reclaiming the ideas of humanitas and eudaimonia is to recognize the importance of embracing our shared humanity. This entails acknowledging and celebrating the unique qualities that make us human. The Roman idea of humanitas was largely shaped by the philosopher Cicero (106 BC–46 BC), and it was taken up again in the Renaissance. Humanitas has different meanings, including kindness, benevolence, social responsibility, and humane learning. At its deepest level, it signifies our capacity to cherish civilization and humanity as a whole. While everyone is born human, humanitas is a virtue that is developed over time. In other words, we learn to become more humane as individuals, and certain “humane studies” can contribute to this process.

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Cicero depicted as a child reading. The Roman philosopher Cicero drew on Stoic thought to help shape his idea of humanitas, or the essential qualities of a civilized human being. This idea, that humans could become more humane and civilized through “humane studies,” became a foundational idea of Renaissance humanism and led to the invention of what we now call “the humanities.” (Renaissance fresco of the young Cicero reading, by Vincenzo Foppa, c. 1464. Image courtesy of the Wallace Collection.)

Eudaimonia, often translated as “happiness” or “flourishing,” was the end goal of ancient philosophy. Pursuing eudaimonia encourages us to orient our lives toward individual development, well-being, and the betterment of society by developing the four cardinal virtues: practical wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice. This encourages a shift away from the utilitarian mindset that prioritizes material gain and superficial measures of success. Instead, a life truly worth living depends on nurturing meaningful relationships, personal excellence, and participating in activities that contribute to the common good.

In the same vein, like the cardinal virtues, the guiding principles of goodness, truth, and beauty can serve as a compass for navigating the moral and ethical dilemmas we face daily, fostering a sense of purpose and meaning. By consciously integrating these ideals into our thoughts and actions, we can counter the relativistic tendencies of postmodernism and encourage a renewed appreciation for the qualities that have historically defined human excellence.

The Lost History of Education: Rediscovering “the Original Humanities”

Education plays a pivotal role in this process, as it equips future generations with the knowledge and skills necessary to cultivate humanitas and eudaimonia. Schools and colleges could once again reemphasize the moral and personal development of individuals, which was the goal of “the original humanities” or “humane studies” (studia humanitatis), when they were invented in the Renaissance.

This could be done by reintroducing the practical study of ancient virtue ethics, which focused on the development of good character traits. Renaissance humanists aimed to foster the growth of individuals with well-developed characters through the study of literature and ancient philosophy.

A classical curriculum for this already exists, which could be refined and updated, and which many educators are beginning to rediscover. The ultimate goal of the humanists was to create more virtuous individuals, leaders, and a more flourishing society. Though this original aim of the humanities has long been forgotten in academia, its timeless appeal remains. Reviving this goal could help enliven the contemporary humanities, which have largely lost their relevance due to the absence of a clear objective.

Restoring the ideas of humanitas and eudaimonia in today’s world and educational system would help protect our collective humanity. By embracing the qualities that make us uniquely human — and by pursuing personal and social flourishing — we can counter the dehumanizing forces that have permeated our culture. Further, by emphasizing the significance of these enduring ideas, we can lay the groundwork for a more humane, vibrant, and meaningful world.

About the Author

David Fideler explores the role of philosophy and the humanities in modern life. He’s the founder of the Renaissance Program in Florence, Italy, and edits The Living Ideas Journal. His book on the Stoic philosopher Seneca has been published in over 15 languages. Originally from the United States, he now lives in Europe.

An earlier version of this article appeared on Living Ideas Journal as “The Lost Virtue of Humanitas: The Art of Becoming Deeply Human.”

For Further Reading

• Eric Adler. “From the Studia Humanitatis to the Modern Humanities,” in The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today, pages 33–88. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. This chapter offers a definitive study of the origins and history of the humanities, and how they lost their original aims.

• James Hankins. “The Italian Humanists and the Virtue of Humanitas.” Rinascimento 40 (2020), 3–20.

Would you like to further explore humanitas, the origins of the humanities, and Renaissance traditions of human development? We warmly invite you to join us at The Renaissance Program in Florence, March 2026. One highlight will be a special session: “What it Meant to Be Human in the Renaissance: Human Dignity, Human Potential, and Shaping a Self.” We also connect these themes to education today.

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A City That Invented a New Era

Florence is unique, unlike any other city in the world.

Here, the Renaissance didn’t just happen — it was invented by the Renaissance humanists who sought to recover the knowledge and wisdom of classical civilization.

Walking its streets, you encounter living reminders of the ideas that transformed Europe: the dignity of human beings, the power of education, and the conviction that beauty and knowledge can uplift society.

Why I Created the Renaissance Program

A few years ago, I realized something surprising.

It was actually a bit shocking. While Florence attracts millions of visitors each year, there was no accessible program devoted to the ideas of the Renaissance. There was no dedicated course for exploring how the spirit of Renaissance humanism shaped art, architecture, and civic life.

There were research institutes for specialists, of course. But there were no interdisciplinary programs for thoughtful individuals who wanted to explore how these ideas might still matter today.

That absence inspired me to create The Renaissance Program in Florence.

Florence as an Open-Air Classroom

This program is designed to be engaging and immersive. Each morning begins with a short talk introducing one of the great themes or ideas that shaped the Renaissance. We then step outside into Florence, where the city becomes an open-air classroom, to see how these ideas were embodied in practice.

Together, we visit masterpieces of art, architecture, and civic spaces as part of a larger conversation.

Extending the Conversation

Our explorations draw on insights from history, art, philosophy, and civic life, and we consider how they relate to our world today.

After five days in Florence and a chance to settle back at home, we reconvene online for two follow-up sessions that extend the conversation.

Ultimately, the Renaissance Program is more than a course. It’s a chance to experience the spirit of the Renaissance in the city that gave it life — and to rediscover what its ideas can offer us today.

Registration is now open for the March 2026 program

Read more about the course, the speakers, and the unforgettable sites and masterpieces we’ll visit:

• The Renaissance Program in Florence web page

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David Fideler explores the role of philosophy and the humanities in modern life. He’s the founder of the Renaissance Program in Florence, Italy, and edits The Living Ideas Journal. His book on the Stoic philosopher Seneca has been published in over 15 languages. Originally from the United States, he now lives in Europe.

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The Renaissance humanists reshaped their culture — philosophy, art, and civic thought — by giving birth to the Italian Renaissance and by articulating many values we continue to embrace today.

Shortly before the 1400s, a group of humanists began meeting in Florence to explore how classical learning could enrich the world around them. Drawing on the thought of Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), who had set the stage for their project, they gathered precious texts from the ancient world with the aim of applying this knowledge to contemporary society.

In addition to reviving the cultural spirit of ancient Greece and Rome — along with its lost writings and forgotten wisdom — they created a new educational vision rooted in humanistic values. This vision gave rise to a course of study they called the humanities.

At the heart of Renaissance humanism was a single word with many meanings: humanitas.

Humanitas expressed what it means to be human, including the cultivation of the mind, the development of character, and a concern for the whole of humanity. The earliest humanists inherited this idea from Cicero, who had inspired their vision.

Ultimately, humanitas means developing our full potential as human beings.

In the minds of the humanists, learning should deepen our humanity. However, the world of learning hasn’t always honored this human dimension. This explains the humanists’ conflict with scholasticism — a clash that began with Petrarch himself and continued for decades after his death.

To Petrarch, scholasticism was narrow, rigid, and hair-splitting. Yet the humanists wanted more. They wanted to expand the very idea of what learning could mean and to enrich their own humanity in the process. As we’ll see, they even created a new educational system to support that goal.

A Philosophy for Life: The Revolt Against Scholasticism

“What value is it to know the nature of beasts and birds and fish and snakes and to ignore our human nature?” — Petrarch

In medieval times, philosophy was dominated by a system called scholasticism. It was built around Aristotelian logic and heavily structured debate. Like the formal school system it supported, scholasticism had a narrow focus, leaving little room for questions about how to live well or flourish as human beings. In fact, medieval universities offered only three main subjects of study — law, medicine, or theology. Scholasticism prized technical reasoning and rigid analysis, often at the expense of wisdom, imagination, or personal insight.

It was this approach that Petrarch — and the early humanists — came to reject. While Petrarch respected Aristotle, he hated scholasticism. He felt the scholastics had lost their way in abstract debates with little relevance to real life. He saw their obsession with logic as a sterile exercise, one that failed to nourish the soul or improve character.

As we still recognize today, logic is not the only pathway to insight. In fact, it’s often limited when it comes to generating new ideas. Likewise, even now, we sometimes mistake technical expertise for wisdom.

In one of his harshest critiques, Petrarch took aim at the scholastics’ obsession with pointless details and meaningless arguments. He wrote about a scholar who supposedly knew how many hairs a lion had in its mane and how many coils an octopus wrapped around a drowning person.

Many of these so-called facts, Petrarch pointed out, were false. But even if they were true, they had no real value. “What value is it to know the nature of beasts and birds and fish and snakes and to ignore our human nature?” he asked.

For Petrarch and his fellow humanists, knowledge was meant to serve a higher purpose. Beyond practical training, education should cultivate wisdom, character, and a deeper understanding of the human condition. As the poet Alexander Pope later wrote, “The proper study of mankind is man.”

The humanists believed that learning must engage the full range of human possibilities. It must nourish not only technical skills, but also the soul. With this in mind, they reimagined the foundations of education.

Not surprisingly, they began by creating a new model of learning called the studia humanitatis — a group of “humane studies” meant to cultivate reason, eloquence, and ethical insight.

Today, we know this legacy as the humanities. But in the Renaissance, it was a bold alternative to the narrow, vocational training of the medieval universities. It was a way to educate more thoughtful and responsible citizens.

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From Cicero to Florence: Learning for Human Flourishing

The Renaissance humanists reimagined education to cultivate human development — and to reshape their world . . .

As if by providence, the missing key the humanists had been searching for fell into Petrarch’s hands. He traveled widely across Europe, often venturing north of the Alps, searching monastery libraries for the lost wisdom of antiquity.

During one of these visits in Belgium, he discovered a long-lost speech by Cicero that used the phrase studia humanitatis or “humanistic studies.” Cicero believed these studies could shape character and promote moral and intellectual growth. More than a scholarly pursuit, he saw them as a path to excellence, wisdom, and civic responsibility.

Over time, this idea caught fire. Renaissance scholars, inspired by the ancient vision, embraced the studia humanitatis as both a new educational model and a guiding philosophy.

Nowhere was this revival more vibrant than in Florence. There, references to humanistic learning began appearing in letters, books and educational writings. From Florence, the spark spread. Humanists across Italy — many of whom knew and corresponded with one another — took up the cause of humane learning.

After Petrarch’s death, admirers hailed him as the founder of their movement. They wrote that he had brought humanistic studies back to life after centuries of neglect—that he had “reopened the path to true learning.”

Rejecting the rigid abstraction of scholasticism, the humanist curriculum encouraged the development of ethical insight, eloquence, and civic responsibility. But these were not just academic disciplines. Together, they offered a framework for personal development and a way to navigate the complexities of life.

In fact, the Renaissance embrace of humanitas took Cicero’s idea further than he had imagined. While Cicero had emphasized educated citizenship and virtuous leadership, the Renaissance humanists refined and expanded this vision. They made humanitas the foundation for a broader cultural renewal that shaped education, literature, the arts, and public life.

In this way, they gave birth to the humanities.

But unlike today, these original humanities were guided by a higher aim: to help cultivate people of character and vision — individuals capable of shaping a better world.

Rediscovering the Human

The Renaissance was defined by a deeper appreciation of human nature. Here are four ways Renaissance thinkers diverged from the medieval mindset:

• While some medieval theologians had disparaged the body and human nature, Renaissance thinkers embraced the idea of the dignity of man — the dignity of being human.

• In art, the individual gained new importance. Artists began striving to capture personal essence and inner character — qualities largely absent from medieval works.

• Autobiographies reappeared for the first time in a thousand years, reflecting a growing interest in human experience.

• Beginning with Donatello’s David (c. 1440), the nude human form was once again celebrated as a manifestation of beauty, as it had been in ancient Greece and Rome. In the Middle Ages, the nude body was typically viewed as shameful and was rarely depicted in a positive light.

In all these ways, the Renaissance rediscovered the human. It reclaimed the dignity of human beings and stressed the need to value and cultivate our full nature.

This is just one decisive way the Renaissance became an intellectual and cultural turning point, whose values continue to shape our world today.

David Fideler explores the role of philosophy and the humanities in modern life. He’s the founder of the Renaissance Program in Florence, Italy, and edits The Living Ideas Journal. His book on the Stoic philosopher Seneca has been published in over 15 languages. Originally from the United States, he now lives in Europe.

For further reading

Michelangelo’s David and “the Dignity of Man” (Living Ideas Journal)

If you’d like to explore how the Renaissance rediscovered “the human,” we warmly invite you to join us for the Renaissance Program in Florence, March 2026. This five-day immersive course includes morning talks on the ideas that shaped the Renaissance, followed by afternoon visits to masterpieces of art and architecture where those very ideas came to life in the city itself.

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The Renaissance wasn’t just a historical period — it was also a mindset. But it was also an oasis of sanity and tranquility in challenging times.

Dear Reader,

Welcome to my Substack — A Renaissance of Ideas.

Maybe you’re a friend of mine, or perhaps you’ve come across my work through The Living Ideas Journal, the Renaissance Program, or one of my published books.

I’ve decided to start this Substack as a more personal space — a way to share ideas in progress and to build a thoughtful community of conversation around them.

Much of what I’ll explore here centers on ideas from the Renaissance — and how they might illuminate the world today. But I’ll also leave room for other topics as they arise.

In a more stable world, we’d feel a sense of peace — even when reading the news. But for many people, that’s rarely the case any longer.

And yet, in times of uncertainty and upheaval — especially in periods of rapid change — we often find ourselves turning to lasting sources of wisdom: ideas that help us live more grounded and meaningful lives. Strikingly, few periods offer more inspiration than the Italian Renaissance.

It too was a troubled time, which makes it especially relevant to our own. Writers in Renaissance Florence sometimes described their time as a golden age, but it was no utopia. Their aspirations were luminous, but their world was dark, difficult, and conflicted. Still, they discovered beauty, insight, and meaning in the face of war, plague, and disruption.

Despite the brutality and chaos of the era, the Renaissance remains a remarkable example of cultural renewal — an oasis of sanity, wisdom, and beauty in a dangerous and turbulent world.

That’s the kind of oasis I hope this publication will offer as well — and a place for thoughtful reflection.

If this vision speaks to you, I hope you’ll join us and subscribe.

With kind regards,

David Fideler

David Fideler explores the role of philosophy and the humanities in modern life. He’s the founder of the Renaissance Program in Florence, Italy, and edits The Living Ideas Journal. His book on the Stoic philosopher Seneca has been published in over 15 languages. Originally from the United States, he now lives in Europe.