We are used to thinking of imitation in a reduced, deracinated sense of copying or simulation, as something almost dishonest or at least distasteful. It is a view that fits in with our misunderstanding of creativity, our present-day cult of originality, and our academic witch-hunts of plagiarists. The ancient world, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance understood the matter differently. At the very least it was what Thomas Mann (in his speech "Freud and the Future," quoted by McGilchrist) calls "mythic imitation."
This is no mere act of copying, but of becoming; not a matter of Napoleon behaving like Charlemagne, but of becoming Charlemagne, as Mann would have it. The left hemisphere will only allow the former interpretation of imitation as legitimate or possible; the right hemisphere, open to paradox and metaphor, is accepting of the latter. We find this type of imitation operating among the early Caesars, but clearly in trouble by the time of the late Roman emperors, such as Julian in the 360s. It seems to have resurfaced in the Middle Ages, not discussed by McGilchrist, where it was present not just in the mystical Imitation of Christ, but also in much of the behavior discussed by Johann Huizinga in his classics, Waning of the Middle Ages and Homo Ludens, examinations of symbolic and play behavior in civilization.
This mythic imitation, which we might also call creative imitation, is central to the Renaissance. Literally nothing about the age is explicable without this understanding. For the writers, thinkers, artists, musicians, craftsmen, and rulers who directly participated, it was necessary to absorb as much of the ancient world as possible. It was not about memorizing facts or techniques, but about absorbing antiquity into their very being. Recovery of the past became a creative act, and imitation became a necessary part of an old world renewed.
In a very real sense, they still thought of themselves as part of the Roman Empire. Much of the political propaganda of the late Renaissance and Reformation established the national monarchies, not just the Holy Roman Empire, as legitimate successors to Augustus and Constantine. When Leonardo Bruni and Machiavelli sought military reform, they turned to the Romans; in the former case by analyzing their military terminology to prove that the legions were primarily composed of foot soldiers; in the latter, by consciously and unconsciously adapting Roman military formations to the modern world of cannons and arquebuses. Machiavelli took imitation directly into his political works, the most important of which, The Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, was couched as a commentary on the Roman historian Titus Livy. This was not entirely a conscious effort; as Sydney Anglo points out, many of the examples Machiavelli picks support his arguments badly and sometimes contradict his points. There was an unconscious reworking of the material. Machiavelli may also have been imitating his own father, who had edited an early printed edition of Livy when the great political writer was a boy.
You will have gathered that little of what we think of as imitation was involved in the Renaissance idea of imitation. It was not a superficial, external affectation, but, as in the case of Napoleon two centuries ago, and Churchill in the last century, a dynamic process of absorbing and re-imagining the past with both conscious and unconscious aspects.
In my next post, I want to look more deeply into this process by looking at the work of Albrecht Durer.
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