The Return of the Renaissance Man

With the Industrial Revolution came specialization: the idea that one must become the master of one thing. Medicine, Entertainment, Science, Law, nearly all industries and fields of study have experts. Even in something as common as real estate, everyone knows who to call about selling warehouses or penthouses. It’s efficient and easier for corporations, but is it the best? The modern age, as it continues forward into the Digital Revolution, doesn’t seem so sure anymore. Gutenberg’s Printing Press created a brand new, unfiltered, market of information, and the world has found itself with a similar market only forty years after Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf’s World Wide Web. The Printing Press created the Renaissance Man, and the Internet has brought him back into demand.

The Renaissance Man is “a man [who] can do all things if he will[s],” as Leon Battista Alberti defined him. Being one himself, Alberti is credited with having the most precise definition of what a Renaissance Man is. The only obstacle between the man doing all things is his will. At the time of the quote, Leon Alberti had somewhat of an advantage with his formal education at the University of Bologna, so that wasn’t completely true, but that knowledge quickly left that elite few. Gutenberg’s presses, after a few decades of wandering across Europe, found themselves becoming the main platforms for Italy’s intellect. Texts from the Classical Greeks and knowledge from the Arabic world that had been translated suddenly had a way to the mainstream. This allowed for men like Alberti to suddenly grow in popularity. This type of man continued well into the late 18th century, but then it all quickly changed.

With creativity and invention being so prosperous because of the Renaissance, many machines and tools were being created to maximize all processes. One man noticed something in particular. Adam Smith pointed out that the most efficient division of labor is one task per person. His example for this in “The Wealth of Nations” was a pin manufacturer. If eight uneducated men were to make a complete pin on their own, the expected outcome would be a pin a day from each man. This was then compared to a factory he observed. It had only two more men, but the tasks were divided up among the ten. “One draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it;…” and this went on to the tenth. There Smith noticed twelve pounds of pins made in a day. And then of course the process yields more results with more divisions of labor. This “division of labor” was perfected by one Henry Ford who coined it the Assembly Line. In the making of the car, one group was tasked with installing the engine, then it moved down the line for the wheels, and so on. A simpler word for this division of labor is specialization. From the Industrial Revolution on, specialization is what made any organization efficient. Why has a general accountant done any research into trusts when your firm could simply hire a trusted accountant to manage trust clients?

Even something like medicine, which had to have a Polymath in Colonial America, was quickly regulated and specialized alongside the market. In a hospital, the patient will arrive and describe symptoms to a doctor with minor knowledge of all conditions so he can run tests. Once those tests give a diagnosis, the patient is then sent to a specialist whether they are a Neurologist or a Cardiologist. This new movement in the West brought about the regulation and specialization of labor which slowly removed the Renaissance Man from the labor market. Regulation means there’s a limit to where and what knowledge can be learned, and specialization means only experts have a place in a business. So, the Western World continues down this path for some time, but as corporations, institutions, and organizations leave their geographical borders, communication must be expanded. From the telegraph to the telephone, there was a need to decrease the amount of time it took for messages to reach one another. Scientists want to share results, lawyers trying to pick the legal brain of another, and newspapers looking for any information on the latest story. Now these same tools were being used by the individual, but not to the extent Renaissance Men used the printing press. This is mainly because these tools are still in a somewhat gatekept environment. What was needed was another unfiltered form of information, one that came about in 1983.

Just like how the printing press had to reach the right place before its value could be appreciated, so did the internet. Yes, it was being used from the very beginning, but it didn’t have the platforms that fully utilized it yet. The printing press needed to find the intellectuals to reach the mainstream, and the internet needed the minds necessary to create proper platforms. And we’ve reached that point today. Renaissance Men are goal/vision orientated; whatever skills must be learned to achieve the goal, will be. Back in the Renaissance, that meant reading the many translated copies of classical texts to understand. Today, that means graphic designers put tutorials on YouTube, professors post their lectures, and an author can be in a back pocket instead of on a shelf. With the speed of the internet reaching another computer, the time it takes to learn has dramatically reduced compared to the Renaissance period. Much of the media Millennials and Gen-Z consume is from Polymaths. To be a YouTuber, one has to know writing, editing, lighting, camera work, algorithms, trends, etc., but in their mind, it’s simply to make a popular video. The Industrial Revolution didn’t really allow for such a mindset. A corporation’s goal is simple: make a profit. Sometimes that means retooling or rebranding, but most of the time, it just means doing what they already do, just better, which doesn’t allow a lot of room for creativity. The question becomes though, does the market want the Renaissance Man or even another Renaissance? The answer seems to be yes.

As with the last Renaissance, the best metric to show the rise of these kinds of professionals is in art. To start, we’ll jump to music. Raine Group, a large merchant banking group, did a thorough investigation into the rise of profits amongst the Independent Artist Sector since they invested in SoundCloud circa 2017 and wanted to know their return on investment. In their investigation, they found independent artists had made $1.61 billion in 2019 and were projected to increase that number by 32% in 2020, putting them at a very close second to Warner Music Group which made $2.22 billion in streaming music during 2020. The average SoundCloud artist automatically needs knowledge in sound editing, composition, songwriting, and, if they want one, video directing for their music video. In the art world itself, we see new independent online galleries opening to show the art from the younger generations. If we continue following the money, we’ll see that the average consumer wants these Polymaths to succeed. Since its founding in 2009. Kickstarter has raised $1.5 billion for more than 80,000 art projects, surpassing the Nation Endowment for the Arts which began in 1966. Games, films, books, paintings, and shows, all have been funded by the public, another parallel with the Renaissance.

Most art in the Medieval period came exclusively from a gatekept institution, the Church. In the Renaissance, though, banking families, most notably the Medici family, put large sums of money into artists’ projects and education along with the Church. Some for their own enjoyment, but for the prestige to be brought to their respective city-states. Today, with it being crowd-funded, shows that the market is in demand for true creative visions. Art, not content, and only a Renaissance Man or Woman can produce that because they’re the ones with a vision for it.

References

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Clarke, Roddy. Forbes Lifestyle. 6 April 2022.

<https://www.forbes.com/sites/roddyclarke/2022/04/06/the-future-of-the-art-world-how-a-newcomer-indie-art-gallery-is-shaking-things-up-under-the-radar/?sh=1c2a1d38208e>.

Ingham, Tim. Rolling Stone Pro. 16 March 2020.

<https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/raine-group-independent-artists-2-billion-in-2020-967138/>.

Kelly-Gadol, Joan. Leon Battista Alberti. 21 April 2023.

<https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leon-Battista-Alberti>.

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<https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/001936.htm>.

Roos, Dave. 7 Ways the Printing Press Changed the World. 27 March 2023. <https://www.history.com/news/printing-press-renaissance>.

Smith, Adam. "Of the Division of Labor." Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. 1776. 10-15.