The Renaissance

Alison M Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317884057
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del Renacimiento europeo

First published in 1988, Alison Brown's The Renaissance soon established itself as one of the most popular and useful books on this complex topic. For this expanded Second Edition the author has rewritten the text entirely in the light of the wealth of literature published over the past decade. It contains two new chapters, one on the rise of lordships and the impact of the Black Death and one on Renaissance theatre. As ever, the main focus of the book is on the influence of classical ideas on Italy, and although Florence is still central to the book its uniqueness is now viewed more critically.

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

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1 THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION

‘If we are to call any age golden, it must be our age which has produced such a wealth of golden intellects … and all this in Florence’ [Doc. 1]. Of all the images of the Renaissance, this image of a golden age in Florence is the most seductive. It is also the way most people idealised the Renaissance until quite recently. In listing as his golden people the poets, writers and artists who revived subjects that had been forgotten or neglected in his day, Marsilio Ficino was contributing to the idea of the Renaissance as ‘a revival of classical antiquity’ – the revival of subjects like poetry, history and drama, architecture and painting, that had been studied in Ancient Greece and Rome but not in the Middle Ages.

Not long ago, we would have considered Ficino’s letter first-hand evidence for describing the Renaissance as a dynamic period of revival – a period when ‘life reeked with joy’, as one student has described it. But few historians would now interpret it uncritically as evidence of an optimistic new birth. Instead, they would call it a piece of publicity, or propaganda, written to praise not only Florence (Ficino was writing to a German, albeit a famous astronomer and intellectual) but also the Medici family, who were his own patrons and helped to promote this cultural revival.

The same can be said about an even more influential account of the Renaissance, The Lives of the Most Excellent Vainters, Sculptors and Architects by Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) [27] and [Doc. 4], Written in the middle of the sixteenth century, Vasari’s Lives provides us with full and lively biographies of all the Italian artists at work during the Renaissance. Starting ‘from small beginnings’ with painters like Cimabue and Giotto in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries ‘to reach the heights’ with Michelangelo in the sixteenth, it is still the most-quoted source of evidence about these artists today. But since Vasari was a painter and architect in the Medici court, he could – like Ficino – be suspected of bias in praising the Renaissance largely in terms of Tuscan achievements – a bias that recent books like Evelyn Welch’s Art and Society in Italy, 1350–1500 [157] works hard to counteract in describing workshops and contexts throughout Italy instead of individuals clustering around Florence.

In describing the arts as human bodies, which ‘are born, grow, become old and die’, Vasari also encouraged the idea of the Renaissance as a process of inevitable progress and decline. This was an idea that appealed to later writers, especially in the nineteenth century – like Jacob Burckhardt, discussed below – when people wanted to trace the origins of their newly-won freedoms and secularism; but no longer today. Surely the arts are not* like human bodies: now we are much more likely to think that they are subject to the changing whims of fashion, not to nature’s deterministic cycle.

For these reasons, writers like Ficino and Vasari are no longer accepted as reliable sources for describing the Renaissance. Far from being valuable witnesses of the revival, they now seem like prejudiced salesmen of a movement that appears to be ‘receding from us, becoming more alien every year’, as one historian has recently put it [45 p. 210]. Strictly speaking, this is of course true. It is also anachronistic to see the Renaissance as ‘modern’ according to our scale of values, as the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt did in his path-breaking book, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy. Burckhardt, whose book was published (in German) in Basel in 1860, was also the first person to attempt to define the Renaissance as a historical period that involved all aspects of Italian life at the time – political and social as well as cultural. His book is a classic which even today provides the starting-point for anyone studying the Renaissance. But because of its scale and richness, it is easy to overlook the implicit value-judgements it contains about progress, ‘civilisation’ and Renaissance individualism [44 pp. 81, 84, 104].

To illustrate this, we can look at a book about the Renaissance by the English woman-writer and novelist Vernon Lee, written some twenty years after Burckhardt was first published and soon after its first English translation. ‘While in the rest of Europe’, she writes in Euphorion (London, 1885), ‘men were floundering among the stagnant ideas and crumbling institutions of the effete Middle Ages with but a vague half-consciousness of their own nature, the Italians walked calmly through a life as well arranged as their great towns, bold, inquisitive and sceptical’ (p. 28). By acting as a conduit for transmitting Burckhardt’s ideas to England, she helps to explain not only his influence on the way we still see the Renaissance but also why it seems so outdated today. Not only would medievalists feel aggrieved by her account of the Middle Ages as effete, but anyone would dislike the assumptions on which her generalisation is based.

Underlying this is another criticism of Burckhardt, and that is his idea of the Renaissance as all-embracing. According to Ernst Gom-brich, it is dangerous to assume that its spirit (Zeitgeist) influenced every aspect of life at the time, when in fact we know that a large part of the population was totally unaffected by the new ideas. For this reason he would prefer to describe it as a cultural fashion that caught on – a return in art, for example, to primitive simplicity after the richness of the florid International Gothic style, like the later Pre-Raphaelite or Fauvist movements. His criticism stimulated a debate in the 1960s and 1970s about the Renaissance as a movement rather than a period and the extent to which it differed from earlier and later classical revivals [78; 80; 150].

In the last ten years the debate has developed in different directions. Emphasis on patronage has helped to undermine the importance of artists and writers in creating the Renaissance: more important than their individual talent were the patrons – institutional and private – who commissioned and paid for their work [100]. At the same time, other limitations of Renaissance individualism were pointed out by gender historians and historians of popular culture – like Joan Kelley, who challenged Burckhardt in a now famous article, ‘Did women have a Renaissance?’ [96]. Whereas he thought the classical revival encouraged equality between educated, upper-class men and women, in fact it did quite the opposite, Kelly argued, by re-introducing gender differences and reinforcing male supremacy in the sphere of culture as well as politics. He also leaves too much out of his apparently all-embracing description of the Renaissance – too many ordinary people, with deep-rooted superstitions and religious beliefs that were remarkably impervious to the new ideas. Books like The War of the Fists in Venice [61], Words and Deeds in Renaissance Rome [54] and the essays in the recent volume Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy [40] attempt to recover the voices of these ordinary people by describing their lives on the streets and their gender relationships, together making the highly literate culture of the Renaissance seem increasingly elitist and remote from the interests of most people then and now.

This criticism has been reinforced by the use of post-structuralist techniques to ‘deconstruct’ Renaissance language and reveal its ambiguities and uncertainties – as Patricia Simons explains in her model study of Renaissance portraiture [141], They also help us to understand much better the underlying political and social function of Renaissance ideas and images, which acted not only as a source of inspiration but also as power structures, or ‘systems of representation’. All these approaches, reflecting the dominant models or ‘paradigms’ of explanation from the 1960s to the 1980s, Marxism, the ‘Annales School’ and post-structuralism, have provided useful ways of understanding the limitations and the bias of Renaissance texts, teaching us how to read them more critically. And they in turn have encouraged a more open, consumerist approach to the Renaissance, which adopts the non-evaluative language of commerce to explain the circulation of Renaissance ideas as an interactive, two-way process of exchange.

Is there a danger that in pursuing these paradigms, we are losing sight of the historical Renaissance, a cultural movement firmly rooted in the social and political structures of the period? Here it may be useful to compare this cultural movement with a parallel development in the Church. Writing about an important theological shift that took place between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the French historian Michel De Certeau explains it in terms of historical and anthropological changes – the break-up of old social networks and the growth of a new specialised elite (‘and new conceptual models to make it thinkable’), which in turn helped to marginalise those excluded from it. The Church’s attempt to re-exert control and reintegrate society through the use of visual techniques – ‘showing in order to inspire belief’, targeted sermons using images and exemplars, the ‘monstrance’ or display of the Host, exorcisms and miracles enacted and depicted – paralleled that of secular authorities involved in the same process [63 pp. 85–7]. From this point of view, classical culture not only offered a ‘conceptual model to make [the new elite’s status] thinkable’, it also offered a visual language of imposing classicising forms and images to make its effect in public and private spaces – in government palaces and squares, in churches, in theatres and in private homes.

To anchor the Renaissance in this way through its social and political roots is not to deprive it of the element of excitement and novelty that still emanates from the writings of Renaissance people themselves, when they describe their passion for books, their love of Ovid ‘as a kind of door and teacher’, their admiration for Brunelleschi’s immense dome, ‘broad enough to cover all the people of Tuscany with its shadow’. The novelties of the period included the rediscovery of lost texts, like Lucretius’s On Nature of Things, ancient statues, and the paintings in Nero’s Golden House, as well as genuinely new discoveries, such as the inventions of gunpowder and printing, and the discovery of the ‘new-found’ lands in America. And even its prejudices and silences – marginalised ‘barbarians’ and dangerous texts that were recovered but suppressed – are useful in balancing the humanists’ own high-brow view of themselves. So when writers and artists called their period new, or re-born, and the preceding period dead, they were not simply recycling an old theme but were expressing genuine belief in its novelty, frightening though they sometimes found it.

Clearly, the Renaissance is not dead either – if anything, it is more alive as a subject than it was when I last wrote about it. This is why I was persuaded to return to this book after ten years. I have revised it, not by restricting it simply to an account of the classical revival, nor, like one recent book [101], by simply expanding it to include topics of current interest that Burckhardt excluded, but by describing the Renaissance as an integrated and self-constructed movement. Like the Enlightenment, it was a movement that represented a ‘capsule’ of values and concerns regarded by its protagonists as progressive, in being based on reason and light in place of superstition and darkness [120]. The Renaissance, too, is difficult to describe as an all-encom-passing period, confined by certain dates and places; but although the emphasis and pace were different in different places, a similar process of interaction took place between these ideas and the social and political structures of late medieval—early modern Europe, giving the period coherence from this point of view.

To explore the ideas encapsulated in this Renaissance pill or package, I follow the same trajectory as before, discussing its name and the context in which it developed before going on to describe its ingredients and its impact. Although Florence is in many ways the ‘well-equipped laboratory’ [as it has been called: 100 p. 3] that experimented with many of these ingredients – and so remains central to this book – we can no longer regard it as unique in its achievement, especially in the light of recent studies of court culture at this time. It is also in response to the new direction Renaissance studies have taken since 1992, that I give more attention to those excluded from this culture, as its other, ‘dark’ face, and to consumerist expansion and the exploration of new spaces. The bibliography has been updated and two new texts have been added. Otherwise, respecting the strict confines of this Seminar Studies series and my own understanding of what the Renaissance was about, I retain the same thematic approach as before – that is, pursuing the thread of interest and excitement in these new discoveries as a guide to a critical understanding of the outlook and mentality of this dynamic period.

2 THE CONCEPT OF REVIVAL

There is nothing new about the idea of ‘rebirth’, although the word ‘renaissance’ was scarcely used until the early nineteenth century. Christianity itself had popularised the concept of rebirth through the ritual of baptism which created a ‘born-again’ person with a new, Christian name. Cicero had already used the word renovatio to describe the Stoic theory of the cyclical destruction of the world by fire and its regeneration or rebirth (De natura deorum II, 46, 118); and throughout the Middle Ages this word remained in use. So when Petrarch (1304–74) suggested the dawn of a new period in the fourteenth century as men ‘broke through the darkness’ to ‘return to the pure, pristine radiance’ of antiquity, it was not in itself a novel idea. What was new was that this time it caught on and became the battle-cry for a widespread reform movement.

Soon after Petrarch talked about the dawn of a new period, his friend Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) described how the painter Giotto (c. 1266–1337) had ‘brought back to the light that art that had been buried for many generations’ and, elsewhere, how Dante had ‘restored to life’ the dead art of poetry. After Petrarch’s own death, Boccaccio praised him in turn for bringing back the Muses to their ‘pristine beauty’, ‘reviving in noble spirits the hope that had almost died … that the way to Parnassus is open and its summit accessible’. By the fifteenth century the idea of rebirth was becoming commonplace to describe the cultural revival in Italy at that time, as writers and artists in turn joined a growing list of men who contributed to a rebirth of the lost arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and literature [Doc. 2].

The idea of rebirth was accompanied by a new periodisation of history. As Robert Black has said, the concept of the Renaissance presupposes a historical scheme: ‘for there to be rebirth, there must have been birth followed by death’ [34 p. 51]. Although there were many different schemes that survived into the Middle Ages, some dividing history into four ages, others into six, there was a fundamental contrast between the classical belief in revolving cycles of history (condemned by St Augustine) and Christian chronology which firmly separated the period before Christ (BC) and after Christ (AD, Anno Domini, or ‘in the year of Our Lord’). Petrarch first suggested the idea of a rebirth and referred to the period between classical and modern times as ‘the dark ages’, but it was the fifteenth-century historian, Flavio Biondo (1392–1463), who first called it the medium aevum or middle age. Initially there was little agreement on how long this dark period lasted – one humanist, Domenico Bandini of Arezzo (c. 1335–1418), suggested only one hundred years, from the twelfth-century revival to his own day, whereas for Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444), it lasted seven hundred years, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the revival of self-governing Italian city-states in the twelfth century. By the middle of the fifteenth century, it was generally agreed that it lasted for a thousand years, from the fall of Rome in 412 until 141...