The word elite today can be conflated with villain. And yet it was not always this way. There was once a time when the elites worked to improve their society, and not to undermine it. Today, the elites fill our public schools with toxic ideology and sully our culture and history with degeneracy and ugliness. They are the elites who destroy the economy, exploit the common man and leave the world ugly, unsafe and uninhabitable while they retire to their opulent mansions and private security.
We long for a world that was good not only for the elite man, but also the common man. Few would look to the medieval world for this, and yet it is from that time period that we uncover beautiful art, literature, and architecture. Does beauty and excellence in the arts tell us about the quality of a society? I believe it does, because it is only a society that cares about even its poorest peasant that would care to make the streets beautiful for him, and the public art of a society says a lot about its values. We can confidently assume that a society whose public art showed a reverence for beauty and virtue, would also have been beautiful and virtuous.
We often associate the Renaissance with names like Da Vinci and Michelangelo and Raphael. But the patrons must be celebrated for making the great projects of the Renaissance possible at all. Chief among these patrons is Cosimo de Medici. Modern day Christianity looks down upon wealth and power, but it was wealth and power that permitted the creation of such a glorious culture that people of all religions, backgrounds and cultures today still make pilgrimages to Florence and Rome. And in fact, one may say that it is because good people in the modern world use religion to justify their lack of wealth and power, that evil people fill that power vacuum and have such ineluctable control over modern culture. Imagine if good people were in charge of the film industry, the media, publishing and architecture? Imagine what beautiful, uplifting and glorious things would be created? We don’t need to imagine because this is precisely what the Renaissance was: when good people weren’t afraid to be rich and therefore controlled culture.
The domain of the sacred and the profane often overlapped in medieval Italy.
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