Renaissance in Scotland

Since the twentieth century, the uniqueness and unity of the Renaissance has been challenged by historians, but significant changes in Scotland can be seen to have taken place in education, intellectual life, literature, art, architecture, music, science and politics.

While church art suffered iconoclasm and a loss of patronage as a result of the Reformation, house decoration and portraiture became significant for the wealthy, with George Jamesone emerging as the first major named artist in the early seventeenth century.

Combined with the Union of Crowns in 1603, the Reformation also removed the church and the court as sources of patronage, changing the direction of artistic creation and limiting its scope.

However, the association of Baroque styles with Catholicism in predominantly Protestant Scotland tended to result in this trend being overlooked and the period from about 1620 to the end of the seventeenth century is sometimes characterised as a late Renaissance.

[1] In the twentieth century, historians disputed the validity of the concept of a Renaissance as unique, as a reaction against the "dark age" of the Medieval, as a clear break with the past[1] and as a unified movement.

[5] New Monarchy can also be seen in the reliance of the crown on "new men" rather than the great magnates, the use of the clergy as a form of civil service, the development of standing armed forces and a navy.

[4] However, the royal image of James in Scotland may have competed with that of his wife Anna of Denmark who maintained a separate parallel court with a distinct identity, and in the first years of the 1590s she and her courtiers wore Danish fashions.

[18] These international contacts helped integrate Scotland into a wider European scholarly world and would be one of the most important ways in which the new ideas of humanism were brought into Scottish intellectual life.

[16] The continued movement to other universities produced a school of Scottish nominalists at Paris in the early sixteenth century, the most important of whom was John Mair, generally described as a scholastic, but whose Latin History of Greater Britain (1521) was sympathetic to the humanist social agenda.

Influenced by the anti-Aristotelian Petrus Ramus, he placed an emphasis on simplified logic, elevating languages and sciences to the status enjoyed by philosophy and allowing accepted ideas in all areas to be challenged.

After her deposition in 1567, his works De Jure Regni apud Scotos (1579) and Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582) were among the major texts outlining the case for resistance to tyrants.

[23] Although there are earlier fragments of original Scots prose, such as the Auchinleck Chronicle,[24] the first complete surviving work includes John Ireland's The Meroure of Wyssdome (1490).

[28] Before the advent of printing in Scotland, writers such as Dunbar, Douglas, together with Robert Henryson and Walter Kennedy, have been seen as leading a golden age in Scottish poetry.

[30] He became patron and member of a loose circle of Scottish Jacobean court poets and musicians, the Castalian Band, which included William Fowler and Alexander Montgomerie.

[31] By the late 1590s, his championing of his native Scottish tradition was to some extent diffused by the prospect of inheriting the English throne,[32] and some courtier poets who followed the king to London after 1603, such as William Alexander, began to anglicise their written language.

[36] The re-adoption of low-massive church building with round arches and pillars, in contrast to the Gothic Perpendicular style that was particularly dominant in England in the late medieval era, may have been influenced by close contacts with Rome and the Netherlands, and may have been a conscious reaction to English forms in favour of continental ones.

It kept many of the features of the high walled Medieval castles that had been largely made obsolete by gunpowder weapons and may have been influenced by the French masons brought to Scotland to work on royal palaces.

[52] There are also a relatively large number of elaborate devotional books from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, usually produced in the Low Countries and France for Scottish patrons.

[57] Scotland's ecclesiastical art paid a heavy toll as a result of Reformation iconoclasm, with the almost total loss of medieval stained glass, religious sculpture and paintings.

One result of this was the flourishing of Scottish Renaissance painted ceilings and walls, with large numbers of private houses of burgesses, lairds and lords gaining often highly detailed and coloured patterns and scenes.

These were undertaken by unnamed Scottish artists using continental pattern books that often led to the incorporation of humanist moral and philosophical symbolism, with elements that call on heraldry, piety, classical myths and allegory.

[59] Later in the sixteenth-century anonymous artists made portraits of important individuals, including the Earl of Bothwell and his first wife Jean Gordon (1566), and George, 7th Lord Seton (c.

[58]The captivity of James I in England from 1406 to 1423, where he earned a reputation as a poet and composer, may have led him to take English and continental styles and musicians back to the Scottish court on his release.

[63] In the late fifteenth century a series of Scottish musicians trained in the Netherlands, then the centre of musical production in Western Europe, before returning home.

The antiphon "Oh Bone Jesu" was scored for 19 voices, perhaps to commemorate the 19th year of the reign of James V. His complex polyphonic music could only have been performed by a large and highly trained choir such as the one employed in the Chapel Royal.

[58] The Lutheranism that influenced the early Scottish Reformation attempted to accommodate Catholic musical traditions into worship, drawing on Latin hymns and vernacular songs.

The most important product of this tradition in Scotland was The Gude and Godlie Ballatis, which were spiritual satires on popular ballads composed by the brothers James, John and Robert Wedderburn.

[71] There is some evidence that polyphony survived and was incorporated into editions of the psalter from 1625, but usually with the congregation singing the melody and trained singers the contra-tenor, treble and bass parts.

[84] Part of the explanation for the sudden flowering of the Scottish Enlightenment, is that the country already had a history of achievements in philosophy, poetry, music, mathematics and architecture and was in close touch with intellectual trends in the rest of Europe.

[81] Among these ideas the limitation of royal sovereignty over the people remained present in Scottish intellectual life and resurfaced to contribute to the major debates of the eighteenth century.

A red stone courtyard with a doorway in the middle background and an ornate fountain in the mid-ground.
Linlithgow Palace , rebuilt for James V to suggest an open-air Renaissance courtyard
Images of a silver coin: one side showing a crowned king and the other the heraldic lion rampant of Scotland on a shield, both surrounded by writing.
Groat of James V, showing him wearing an imperial closed crown
A black and white reproduction of a painting of a man with a bishop's mitre and crook praying, with a window in the background
William Elphinstone , bishop of Aberdeen, founder of the University of Aberdeen and probably the architect of the Education Act 1496
A coloured painting showing a man in a cap and black gown over red clothes with writing materials on a table in front of him
Hector Boece (1465–1536), a major figure in European humanism, who returned to be the first principal of the University of Aberdeen
A black print on a yellowed background showing Adam and Eve with a tree between them on which is a shield with the initial WC and the name Walter Chapman printed below.
Front page of William Dunbar 's The Goldyn Targe (a 1508 print)
The side of a stone building with windows and figures on pedestals.
The sculptural decoration of James V's place at Stirling Castle
A stone church with a tower in a church yard with grave markers, which is partially covered with snow.
Cawdor church, built in 1619 on a Greek cross plan
Four wooden beams with three sets of coloured paintings between them, made up of fruit, flowers and other patterns.
The seventeenth-century painted ceiling at Aberdour Castle , Fife
The interior of the Chapel Royal, Stirling Castle , a major focus for liturgical music
A colour painting of a woman in a red sixteenth century dress playing a lute and looking at a book of music on a covered table, a decorated object can be seen in a window niche in the background.
The playing of instruments, including the lute , became one of the major accomplishments expected of a Renaissance courtier.
A colour painting of a man with white hair that may be a wig, in a dark gown with white sleeves and collar, he holds a book in his hand.
Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), a major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment , product of the Scottish university system and humanist tradition that had their origins in the Renaissance.