The Great American Dream, The Renaissance Period and the Modern Life

The Great American Dream, The Renaissance Period and the Modern Life

The Renaissance was a period that marked the development of the human race sharply. It all started in Italy during the 14th and 15th centuries. It was period that came immediately after the Middle Ages - a period characterized by religious devotions and connection with the spiritual world in quietness, meditation and spiritual contemplation.

The Renaissance period is considered to be the age of progress, it was the time when man, (the term used to refer to the human race) was the centre of life. Man, said the scholarly Italian Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494), "was restricted by no limit, defined by no one but himself". At the same time another Italian Leon Battista Alberti puts it clearly; "what man needs is "house, property and shop" - external possessions, riches and wealth. And so the message was clear: focus not on another world but on the here and now, on home, on friendship and pleasure. [The Renaissance people in describing life probably forgot about the shortness of life, pains during old age and death.]

The Renaissance period was a contrast of the period of the Middle Ages which was about "the men who were connected and prayed to the heavens".

What is now interpreted as the American dream - a yearning for success and indulgence in fun and pleasure is in fact in exact terms description of the Renaissance period. The current interpretation of the term American dream is successful life - life of luxury, pleasure and fun placed at the heart of the individual; to be driven principally by an aspiration for this kind of life without God or if God is involved at all He is merely an afterthought or secondary or on the periphery or some servant just like the Renaissance period, when the merchant Agnolo Pandofini married, he knelt down with his wife and prayed, asking God for "wealth, honor, and friends" for her wife to be "blameless, and honest", that she might be a good housekeeper.

We can ask the question "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" in this world really? Leo Tolstoy wrote a short story called How Much Land Does a Man Need. The moral of the story in this short story is that at the end all the things we spend the best days of our lives chasing things in the name of success those things really don't matter that much. All that we really need once our lives end does not amount to too much more than worms crawling on our rotten bodies and then turning to dust and soil.The Great American Dream, The Renaissance Period and the Modern Life - Tobecool General Business - Directory Seo - Business Directory