Giovanni Caroli and the New Humanist Aesthetics

The relation between two dominant traditions which converged during the Renaissance – the scholastic, religious, and traditional culture whose duration is wrongly confined to the Middle Ages, and the younger humanist culture that is usually associated with modernity – stand at the heart of this article. The argument here is that to understand the intellectual history of the Renaissance there is a need for a much more nuanced approach that is sensitive towards both these traditions and alert to the ways in which they interacted and overlapped. Our case study is provided by the Dominican friar Giovanni Caroli (1428–1503), who was a leading theologian in Florence during the second half of the fifteenth century. This article focuses on Caroli's reaction to the new aesthetics in the context of a deep spiritual crisis.