Emerging from the dark age of the pandemic, we should celebrate our own renaissance 

“When did everyone get so good-looking?” asked my companion across the table.

It’s true: to sit outside a bar, pub, or café this past fortnight has been to see the paintings of the Borghese let loose; the love-bitten belladonnas and bell’uomos sprung free from their frames, our faces and fashion flushed with colour. Gone is the grey, formless loungewear – monkish and sexless – instead replaced by vibrant palettes and figure-hugging finery. Once again, it is a pleasure simply to look, and be looked at.

Restricted to the same four walls, the same few faces, we forgot the beauty of the new, the unique. Compared to our medieval, cloistered existence of the past twelve months, this period is nothing less than a Renaissance in our culture, and our lives.

In our year of pestilence and pyjamas, we saw the girdling of our ancient instincts – a new, necessary religion shrouding our world in darkness. What was saintly became sinful, our individuality sacrificed at the altar of uniformity in behaviour and mind. It’s often said that we live in personalised bubbles online, but in reality they more often act as chambers of the same memes and mantras; a collective numbing, stifling cognition and creativity.

Art takes the temperature of a time, and fashion is its cousin. A restrictive culture is mirrored not only in its art, but its clothes. Some even claim fashion has a predictive quality: Eric Hobsbawm called the curious ability of designers to anticipate the future “one of the most obscure questions in history”, noting that World War One and the breakdown of liberal bourgeois society was preceded by an iconoclastic milieu in art and attire. In our own time, the introduction of face masks precipitated further restrictions in our lives, but perhaps the first dashes of colour we see returning to our streets are indicative of an impending cultural revival. It is surely no coincidence that in a year when no one could dress up, one of the most popular programmes was RuPaul’s Drag Race, offering viewers splashes of exaggerated style and exuberance.

There is nothing collective or uniform about meeting friends at a restaurant. We dress to stand out, to dazzle, and restaurants – in turn – dazzle us. We shut out the world and focus on what is directly in front of our eyes: the plate stacked high, the shimmering wine glass, our own Roman banquets infused with the surviving vestiges of the classical spirit. The most intuitive of languages – that of the body – is restored to us; we notice the glances down, the placing of a hand on an arm, the eyes dancing left and right. 

Just as the lifting of restrictions encouraged us to reopen our wardrobes, so the reopening of our bars and pubs represents the lifting of certain barriers of expression. One only need consider the coffee houses of fin de siècle Vienna, the dissident jazz clubs of Cold War Prague, and the taverns of Victorian London to see their role as arbiters of freedom. Karl Marx –  ironically, one might say – adored the latter, once going on a pub crawl between Oxford Circus and Hampstead Road, taunting locals by trumpeting the names of great Germans: (“Beethoven! Mozart! Handel! Haydn!”) before drunkenly tossing stones at a street lamp. Imagine sitting opposite a hungover Marx at the British Library.

And yet this rebirth is not universal. Many restaurants remain shut, and only 40 per cent of pubs have been able to reopen. The psychological impact of the pandemic is not yet a slowly-healing scar, but an open wound. Last week I got chatting to an elderly man in my block of flats. Over the course of our conversation, he revealed that I was the first person he had spoken to – apart from his cat – for fourteen months. “I had almost forgotten how to speak,” he said. Likewise, for every person out enjoying themselves, there is likely another who cannot afford to do so financially, or mentally. There will be millions for whom the thought of going out induces awful anxiety, whether for fear of catching the virus or for the simple reason they feel they don’t look as good as they did a year ago, fearing the judgement of those who last saw them when the gyms were open and they felt their best selves.

To live in the future is the death of happiness. Our Great Isolation has wrought an incalculable cost. But as we are reborn from our modern Dark Age, we should look to history for light and optimism: as the poet-polymath Giacomo Leopardi noted, the Renaissance “did not create beauty but it preserved the idea of it intact”. Our collective confinement can give way to celebrating individualism once more, comparing ourselves to those with whom we are reunited, and remembering what we have forgotten: the value of good food, good wine, good health, and good company.

One of my favourite poems is by Horace, whose ancient works were cherished during the Renaissance. At the end of one of his Odes, he writes:

“…Don’t ask what will happen tomorrow.

Whatever day Fortune gives you, enter it

as profit, and don’t look down on love

and dancing while you’re still a lad,

while the gloomy grey keeps away from the green.

Now is the time for the Campus and the squares

and soft sighs at the time arranged

as darkness falls.

Now is the time for the lovely laugh from the secret corner giving away

the girl in her hiding-place,

and for the token snatched from her arm

or finger feebly resisting.”

Now is the time. To be saints now, we must remember how to be sinners once more, releasing our inner ancients – dressed to the nines – and raising a glass to the heavens.

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