✨ Modern · Integrative

Renaissance Humanism — Human

"Man is the measure of all things"

페트라르카 (Petrarch, 1304~1374) · 미란돌라 (Pico della Mirandola, 1463~1494) · 14~15세기

📜 Origin

For a thousand medieval years, Europe placed God at the center. Then in the 14th century, Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux and noted in his journal: "My feet tremble. The very fact that I see this mountain is meaningful." A century later, Pico della Mirandola in his Oration on the Dignity of Man proclaimed — God gave humans no fixed place (unlike animals) so that humans might shape their own.

💡 Meaning

Renaissance Humanism did not deny God — it moved humans to center stage. Leonardo's Vitruvian Man — limbs outstretched within circle and square, becoming the measure of the cosmos. One drawing as humanism's visual manifesto.

🌏 Eastern Classic Cross-link

Donghak's Choi Je-u: "In Nae Cheon" — Human is Heaven. Renaissance Humanism said "human is the measure"; five centuries later Donghak said "human is the divine." East and West reaching the same summit by different paths.

人

Compressed into One Hanja

"人" depicts a person standing on two legs, seen from the side. The simplest hanja, and the deepest. All of humanism compresses into this one character — that a human stands is itself the cosmos's greatest event.