earticle

영어

This study is an attempt to re-examine the notion of Renaissance individual with the new conceptual categories, the self and the selfhood.
The turn of the twenty-first century, in almost every area of academia, has witnessed explosive intrusions of so-called post-modern discourses.
Under the impact of them, many historians have criticized or even ironized Burckhardt's ground-breaking notion of the emergence of the Renaissance spiritual individual as a myth. One of the aims of the present study, although it is also influenced by these intellectual trends, is to revise rather than simply abandon the Burckhardtian notion of Renaissance man, by investigating the practice of self-representation of Leon Battista Alberti, the typical Renaissance 'uomo universale ' ever since Burckhardt.
Generally speaking, in a precarious society like Renaissance Italy, in which social relationship between individuals and outer worlds were newly reformulated and abruptly reordered with the noticeable growth in social mobilization, a demand for ones to look at themselves as objects of their perceptional system became urgent. With regard to this, a humanist of the time called the society 'theatrum mundi ': significantly the notion also implied a new idea of man as an actor staged on theatrum mundi.
Alberti's literary works bear witness to the rise of these ideas of society and man since they yields a portrait of self as the restless, multiple one.
The present study claims that this idea of self has significant implications: if one's self began to be conceived as something not innate but acquired through social relations, then many masks which one would Leon Battista Alberti, The Renaissance, Self-representation, De commodis litterarum atque incommodis, Della famiglia, Intercenales
wear according to the social roles he should play in those relations also become malleable artifacts, created by an individual's willful interaction with social imperatives. In consequence, Renaissance selfhood Alberti represented shows his strategic tools for communicating with others, in which his authorial or subjective intentions are revealed not by the Petrarchan idea of self-assertion but by textual performance. Under the rubric of new social, intellectual and cultural ambience, Alberti precociously recognized the doubleness of self as both the subject and the object, based upon which he represented his self as an artifact with multiple voices.