The Formation of the Dance System in the Italian Renaissance and the Origins of Classical Ballet: A Humanistic Aesthetic Perspective
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Research on Renaissance art has largely focused on static artistic forms such as painting, sculpture, and literature, while dance, as a dynamic artistic medium, has often been marginalized by scholars and regarded merely as courtly entertainment or an auxiliary component of festive performances.Based on the broader intellectual context of fifteenth-century Italian humanism, this paper develops a three-dimensional analytical framework encompassing urban-state social structures, humanist textual innovation, and bodily aesthetics.It advances the central argument that the Italian Renaissance fundamentally reshaped dance aesthetics through the integration of classical ideals of moderation, theories of bodily rhetoric, and the Pythagorean conception of a mathematically ordered universe.At the same time, driven by the humanist movement of textual compilation, a standardized and systematic framework of dance theory was established.This comprehensive dance paradigm, which emerged in Renaissance Italy, spread across Europe and provided the common aesthetic and technical foundations for early modern European court dance and classical ballet.Renaissance dance was never merely a form of entertainment, but a visualized bodily medium carrying the ideal of the universal man, urban-state political order, and classical cosmic cognition.Moving beyond the limitations of a purely technical history of dance, this paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach integrating social culture, aesthetic thought, and artistic institutions.It demonstrates how Renaissance aesthetics reshaped the standards for evaluating dance, generated systematic theoretical frameworks, and exerted a lasting influence on the development of ballet, thereby addressing the relative neglect of the historical continuity between Renaissance dance and classical ballet in existing scholarship.
Author: Shi Yumeng
Institution: University of Bologna
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funder: Università di Bologna
OpenAlex ID: W7221680141