A profile of one of the last American public intellectuals
Although producing films about the Italian Renaissance is unquestionably one of the best day jobs imaginable, the deeper I dive into the subject, the harder it is to suppress a gnawing sense of pessimism as I sample the captivating works of some of history’s broadest and most penetrating scholars, from Jacob Burkhardt to Euginio Garin to Frances Yates to Paul Oskar Kristeller to many, many more besides.
So why the pessimism? Well, because the more I read, the more I’m confronted with the fact that so many of those great Renaissance scholars I’m avidly reading are no longer with us. Worse still, a disproportionate number appear to have died within the past 25 years or so.
Two people I greatly depended on to enlighten me about aspects of Raphael’s life were John Shearman and Nicole Dacos, both of whom died in the 21st century, as did (glancing quickly at my “Raphael references spreadsheet”) Ernst Gombrich, Creighton Gilbert, Mark Zucker, Michael Hirst, Rona Goffen, Adam Foley and Amedeo Quondam.
And as I turn my attention to Botticelli, the same thing seems to be happening.
To take one example of many, I’m currently trying to understand how, exactly, Girolamo Savonarola came to have such an extraordinary influence in late 15th-century Florence, and there are three wonderful books that are helping me to get a sense of things: two by Donald Weinstein (1926–2015) and one by Lorenzo Polizzotto (1939–2022). You see what I mean?
And along with these moribund musings comes another even more depressing thought, precipitated by living in an age when the phrase “public intellectual”—particularly in its American rendering—has become little more than a laughable contradiction in terms. Where, I have been despairingly wondering (and sometimes even writing about) are today’s equivalents to the likes of Richard Feynman, Lewis Thomas, Jacques Barzun and Tony Judt?—profoundly accomplished thinkers who willingly communicated their penetrating insights to a large general public—not for petty self-aggrandizement, but simply because they had something important to say.
Well, I think I found one: James Hankins. Hankins, a Harvard professor, unsurprisingly has an impressive number of papers and citations to his name.
But there are three factors that I believe transform him from simply another academic specialist to someone a very wide range of people should pay attention to.
1. His depth
Take a look, for example, at his 1991 article “The Myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence”, a stunning masterwork of comprehensiveness that carefully cites virtually every source imaginable on the subject at hand. No knowledge of the Italian Renaissance is required to recognize that what we are dealing with here is someone who expends a veritably superhuman amount of time and effort to develop his argument to the highest possible standard.
2. His breadth
Virtually everywhere I turn in my efforts to get a deeper understanding of the period, from vernacular literature, to the essence of humanism to Renaissance philosophy to Machiavelli, Hankins is there, front and center. Not to mention his extraordinary accomplishment as Founder and General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library.
3. His public involvement
I was, I have to admit, somewhat put off by this at first, wondering why on earth an illustrious Renaissance historian would feel compelled to plunge into the turbid waters of what is generously called “American public debate”. But on reflection it makes perfect sense. If you’ve spent your entire life reading, writing and thinking about topics like public virtue and associated governance structures, wouldn’t you want to weigh in when you see your entire country rapidly disintegrating before your eyes in a miasma of toxic irrationality? So Hankins does so, and with increasing fervor.
For all his manifold public activity, however, Hankins hardly does this perfectly. He is frequently brusque and can certainly be condescending. He has a disturbing tendency to publicly rub shoulders with those who are obviously determined to use his reputation to buttress their own thinly-veiled (or sometimes not veiled at all) political agenda.
Worse still, his occasional choice of wording can often go a considerable distance towards perpetrating key aspects of the very mindless tribal dichotomies the content of his essays is determined to redress, leading him to be unthinkingly categorized by many as “right wing” (see, for example, the unhelpfully titled but otherwise splendid essay, “Put Down the Woke Man’s Burden”).
But if you go beyond the childishly inappropriate labels so endemic to our current zeitgeist (You write for the Wall St Journal? You must be a fascist!) and just read what he has to say, I can assure you that you will find it very much worth the effort.
Let’s hope many do.
Howard Burton, August 1, 2024
Howard is the Director of Pandemic Perspectives (2022), Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023), Raphael: A Portrait (2024) and Botticelli’s Primavera (2025) which is the first film in our Renaissance Masterpieces Series.
