A Short History of the Renaissance

Edith Sichel

• Publisher: Ozymandias Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781531291600
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte der Renaissance

MICHAEL ANGELO'S great painting of the newly created Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel might be taken as a symbol of the Renaissance, of the time when man was, as it were, re-created more glorious than before, with a body naked and unashamed, and a strong arm, unimpaired by fasting, outstretched towards life and light. Definitions are generally misleading, and it is easier to represent the Renaissance by a symbol than to define it. It was a movement, a revival of man's powers, a reawakening of the consciousness of himself and of the universe - a movement which spread over Western Europe, and may be said to have lasted over two centuries. It was between 1400 and 1600 that it held full sway. Like other movements it had forerunners, but, unlike other movements, it was circumscribed by no particular aim, and the fertilizing wave which passed over Italy, Germany, France, England and, in a much fainter degree, over Spain, to leave a fresh world behind it, seems more like a phenomenon of nature than a current of history - rather an atmosphere surrounding men than a distinct course before them. The new birth was the result of a universal impulse, and that impulse was preceded by something like a revelation, a revelation of intellect and of the possibilities in man. And like the Christian revelation in the spiritual world, so the Renaissance in the natural, meant a temper of mind, a fresh vision, a source of thoughts and works, rather than shaped results. When it crystallized into an æsthetic ritual, it fell into decadence and corruption...

THE MEDICI IN FLORENCE, 1434-1492

I. THE RENAISSANCE IN FLORENCE

IT WAS NOT ONLY IN different countries that the Renaissance took different forms. In Italy every great town or province had in a measure its own Renaissance. Romans, Tuscans, Umbrians, Venetians, Sienese, the Schools of Naples, Mantua, Ferrara, could each show an art distinct from the rest. Rome was, as behoved the capital of the West, the meeting point of all the arts; it collected, it excavated, it criticized; possessing no creative gift of its own, it developed the Renaissance of the amateur; Florence, divided between intellect and religion, linking them together through beauty, sublimated the senses and, at once natural and ideal, gave us Giotto, Donatello, Botticelli; Umbria, in a varying form, fulfilled much the same purpose, with something more of intellect; Mantua and Ferrara were still more elaborately intellectual; Venice and Naples were pagan, splendid, of the earth; Siena was purely mystic, symbolic, almost consciously archaic. What, amid all this variety, was the bond which made the many Renaissances of all the states and towns and nations into one? There was obviously the search after beauty, but there was a far deeper quest of which this was but the part: there was the search after unity – the central truth of all these movements and one which made their best days what they were.

The great men of the prime of the Renaissance were reconcilers. They sought for knowledge as if it were the philosopher’s stone, but solely on condition that thought should be made one with Christianity. Petrarch’s position between Augustine and Virgil only heralded that of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) who spent a great part of his life in harmonizing Christ and Plato – and these strivers were types of all cultivated people. “Much noted for the sanctity of his life and for being learned in Greek and Latin” is a phrase which, in the biography of the day, served as a common passport to reputation. Saints and pagan gods, the Virgin and Aphrodite, were placed indiscriminately together; Cato and David were put into the same rank in heaven. Law, science, medicine, mathe- matics, each man thought he could master them all, and that all religions, all branches of knowledge, were one. This vision even affected conquerors and their lust of possession. The French King, Francis I, dreamed of universal Empire, and of joining East and West. Men saw that intellect which led you where it would was the natural enemy of the pale Galilean; they desired neither of the two to conquer; they wanted reconciliation, not victory, and they set to work to discover the link between hostile forces. That link they found, or thought they found, in beauty.

Had this ideal been practicable, the Reformation, as a new religion, a cause of insuperable division between reason and authority, need, perhaps, never have existed. Luther and his comrades, proclaiming as they did the rights of natural instinct, were quite in the spirit of the Revival, and it seems as if at one moment the Renaissance and the Reformation might have gone hand in hand. But the passion for classicism then reigning had to be reckoned with. It was a pagan passion, irreconcilable either with a spiritual outlook or with strong religious conviction. And the great blunder of the new movement was to plant this classicism – the most polished and sophisticated art – in a soil where it could not grow, the soil of raw and truculent Nature reasserting long sequestered rights. The good in one and the other was unable to make common cause, and withered; like found like, and primeval licence fusing with the licence of satiety ended in a corrupt materialism, a materialism so wholly inimical to the interests of religion that any alliance between the two was impossible. Luther with his direct vision saw as much, and made for conquest not for peace. But had this not been so, who knows if Erasmus might not have won the day?

Florence from 1400 till the last decade of the century may be taken as the central hearth of this faith in unity, in the ultimate harmony of clashing elements – Cosimo de’ Medici and his grandson, Lorenzo (1449- 1492), as representatives of this ideal. After that reigned Savonarola, a living protest against it, an iconoclast with regard to all that it involved; and the shattered fragments were never pieced together again. When Cosimo, the sumptuous banker, defeated the Albizzi and, after two years of exile, came into power and became the popular head of a Republic (1434), the new movement was still at the spring. The Medici were true princely democrats, born organizers, born patrons, not too common a combination. Cosimo suited the world he lived in, and that world, in so far as art was concerned, was one in which new vistas were always opening. The young art was, indeed, rapidly growing towards maturity; the old and highly perfected art of Byzantine tradition was played out. Its once living emblems were becoming formulæ, ill-suited to current needs. Duccio di Buoninsegna (1285-1320) was the last representative of their majesty. When Giotto and Niccolo Pisano reasserted in painting and in sculpture the truth of Nature as against the truth of convention – the claims of men and things as they were, as against the claim of symbols; when they and their followers, Memmi and Orcagna and Spinello, with the uncle, Andrea, and the greater nephew, Giovanni Pisano, had the instinct to leave the known forms, the genius to try to see for the first time, they still unconsciously kept some traces of Byzantine style.

A certain stiffness in their work, a generalizing quality, came to some degree from inevitable technical difficulties; but as much, or more, these were the involuntary heritage from the past. By 1400, however, such archaisms had practically disappeared. With miraculous rapidity the new art sprang up almost full-grown. Masaccio, who died, a fully ripened master, at twenty-seven, had painted on the walls of the Carmine Chapel scenes from Genesis and the Life of St. Peter, as rich in modelling as in power of dramatic narrative. He had but followed in the footsteps of his master and colleague Masolino (1383-1440?) and of Paolo Uccello (1397-1476), whose green frescoes of Noah’s adventures in the cloisters of Sta. Maria Novella show his genius for grafting serene classical form upon the live reality of Florentine life; while his potent battle-pieces, the first of their kind, with horses rearing beneath jewelled trappings and gleaming condottieri, solve problems of perspective and foreshortening hitherto unattempted. And, secluded in the Monastery of San Marco, Fra Angelico (1387-1455) was trying to bring heaven to earth, and technique into heaven, with colours that were as clear as his inspiration.

In sculpture, meanwhile, Donatello had made the same revelation. Putting behind him the tangle of mediæval tradition, its mingled naïveté and subtlety, its dogma, its mythology, Donatello (1386-1466) went straight with his mighty chisel to original sources – to youth and manhood, and the love of living, above all, to the life of children – and gave us a world of marble and bronze at once real and ideal; or, rather, showed us the ideal in the real, alive with the very breath of creation. More than any man, perhaps, since the days of Greece, has he contrived to render movement and to stamp it with a final tranquillity: whether tragic movement, as in his Crucifixions and Depositions, or the dance, as in his Cantoria, where his children, their robes blown and tossed by some vital energy from within, leap and circle and chase one another like waves on a summer morning. His ally and disciple, Michelozzo (1391-1472), was, with a style and genius all his own, making for the same ends; and nearer still to Donatello was Luca della Robbia (1399-1482), whose marbles and terra-cottas showed a grace and majesty later rather hidden by the attractions of his coloured glazing. In architecture, too, Michelozzo and the famous Brunelleschi (1379- 1440), the designer of the Dome of the Cathedral, initiated the new development in architecture, the free application of the antique to modern uses, the formation of a native style; and their mantle fell upon Alberti (1405-1472), who went on beyond them. While in the sculpture of reliefs, Ghiberti (1378-1455), the author of the two great Baptistery doors and of the font in the Duomo at Siena, worked magic in bronze and gold and silver.

It was small wonder that art was so vital. It was fed in Florence by every common sight in the streets, by every civic custom and institution, first and foremost by those of the Guilds; and, in its turn, it gave back with interest what it received. The Guilds stood for more than picturesqueness. Each, under the protection of its patron saint, acted not only as a trade-union, but as a corporation for conduct. They associated commerce and religion and supported the treaty by laws so stringent that we wonder how any apprentice submitted to them. Artists and sculptors were only craftsmen like any others, and the standard of work was so high that the distinction between skilled and unskilled workmen would have scandalized them. If a wool-stapler or a butcher gave his customers the smallest fraction of underweight, if artists used inferior material, or wood that would warp, the penalties were inevitable. No Mosaic Dispensation could be severer. But the Florentine Dispensation was as merry as it was strict. There were festas on every saint’s-day, there were dances and masques and snowball-battles; each Guild had its own pageants, and there was a natural equality between masters and men that fostered a real living gaiety linking each to all, so that pleasure was a bond, instead of a division, between the classes.

Giotto’s Campanile, Giovanni Pisano’s Fountain, were a kind of sculptured primer of ethics in which Florence and Perugia wrote lessons for their citizens; the medallions of the Virtues, of the Seasons with all their occupations, and of the Arts and Sciences; of Grammar, no mere dry-nurse, but a mother with her child at her knee, and of Philosophy pouring his wisdom into the ears of eager boys, were visible to every loiterer in the public places – part of the life of the people, of that wonderful general intelligence which then so permeated the air that it is difficult to say whether it was cause or effect.

In spite of all our books and pictures, it is not easy to rebuild the Florence of 1435- 1440. The Medici lived in the Riccardi Palace; the Palazzo Vecchio designed by Arnolfo Cambio (1232-1300) which they afterwards inhabited was, and continued till 1582 to be, the seat of the Signoria; the Bargello was that of the chief Magistrate, or Podestà. The Duomo, its white marble rather too dazzling, perhaps, against its black stripes, was only consecrated in 1436; Ghiberti’s doors, all glorious without, had been partly set up by 1424, though the last was not fully ready for another eight-and-twenty years. San Lorenzo, planned by Brunelleschi, the nearest church to the palace of the Medici, had been built by 1425. The rough stronghold of Sta. Croce, begun almost a century and a half back by Cambio, was still unfinished; and Sta. Maria Novella, completed inside since 1350, yet lacked the resplendent upper façade added later by the hand of Alberti. Or San Michele – the handiwork of Orcagna – with its granary above the church, stood, as it stands at present, and held within it the wonder of the age – that great sculptor’s marble shrine, carved with the story of the Virgin and with the Virgin’s attendant guard of Virtues, Apostles, Saints and Angels. And across the way, then as now, rose the Arte della Lana, the Woolstaplers’ Hall, with its stone emblem of a fleecy lamb above the doorway. Close by, too, the chaffering Mercato was held in the wide Piazza, now the Square of Vittore Emmanuele and the pride of a blatant civilization. In those days it was the centre of the life of Florence. All round it were huddled and piled – leaning, squinting, swarming, jutting out into the street – booths and gables, balconies and windows, bottegas and houses, the poorer sort hung with flowers, or bright rags drying in the sun, the better, with blazoned or carved devices. At one end was the famous cook shop, still standing within the last fifty years, where all the painters and craftsmen went to get their dinner. There Squarcione, goldsmith and painter, one day to be Verocchio’s master, stood side by side with Filippo Lippi and talked of the skill of Fra Angelico’s young pupil, the lad, Benozzo Gozzoli; while Rossellino and Andrea della Robbia discussed with gesticulating thumbs the merits of marble and terra-cotta, and Andrea’s last effect in glazing. His uncle, Luca, could not leave his Cantoria – his wide-browed singing maidens, and his boys with pipes and tabors – the pendant work to that of Donatello for the Duomo, the pendant and the rival. Who knew if he, Luca, might not even excel him, though he was the greatest master in the world? And in their midst stood the artist who regarded himself as the greatest of all, the famous cook, their host, ladling out to each his portion of minestra steaming from the pot. All was shifting colour and movement and noise – purposeful noise and movement – nor did the din flag unless it were when a street singer, perhaps the popular “Rhyming Barber,” Burchiello, came in acclaimed by a nickname, in striped jerkin and breeches, his cithern slung round his neck, and sang some of the Tuscan Beone, the drinking-songs; or else city songs, or May-day songs, or the age-old Ballate, the dance-measures of the country-side set to trenchant stories in rhyme. Everyone, cook and all, would join the chorus; some, after their stoup of good red wine, would dance, and there were jokes and there were kisses – for the flower-girls came in from the Campagna with fresh roses and sweet herbs for the mouth; and then, as the great bell boomed the hour, back to work through the blue and golden blaze of the square, with zest and no repining, for love-making was but an episode, and work was the background of life, interwoven with every part of it.

Meanwhile you might meet the great Cosimo, Pater Patriœ, crossing the sallow waters of the Arno by the crowded Ponte Vecchio, on foot most likely, homely and magnificent, in golden tissue and violet; his jewelled chain with its pendant medal, designed by Pisanello, round his neck, a pearl from the East in his cap, his hand laid on the shoulder of his companion, the Greek philosopher, Agyropulos, his retinue behind him. Now and again he stops to look at some bauble, perhaps to buy it, on the booths along the bridge, and to put a pertinent question to the craftsman who sells it; or to converse with the contadini who have carried in their flat fruit-laden baskets from the country, and to find out all he can of their manner of sowing and planting. But artists he loves better than gardeners, and sculptors best, he owns, among artists. He is now on his way to the Bottega of Donatello, his “molto amico,” to watch the progress of the bronze doors that he commissioned him to make for the Sacristy of San Lorenzo. Nothing is too good for this his favourite artist. The Bank of the Medici has been ordered to give him a weekly sum that will suffice for him and for four underlings. And “because this Donatello did not go clad as the said Cosimo would have wished, he gave him a rose-coloured cloak and a hood, and another garment below the cloak, and thus he thought to clothe him anew from top to toe. And one feast-day morning he sent these clothes to him that he might wear them.” Donatello appeared in them once or twice, but after that “he would no longer put them on, for that, said he, they seemed too delicate in his eyes.” If Cosimo desired strenuous men to have luxury, he knew how to refuse it to those who were not. When a certain Fra Roberto from Milan, once a frugal and pious friar, but spoilt by the great Duke, Francesco Sforza, came to visit him in Florence in a robe of rich Flemish cloth, Cosimo begged him to sit down by his side and took it between finger and thumb. “Is not this very rich?” said he. “ Duke Francesco gave it me,” answered the friar. “I did not ask you who gave it you – I asked if it were not very rich,” said Cosimo again. There was silence. The court looked on from a distance. Then Roberto whispered in his ear a petition for two hundred ducats. Cosimo had never yet denied any of his requests, but now he whispered back a refusal, and at the same time his sorrow for the change that caused his reply. “And all of this he told with such courteous consideration that no man present could hear it.”

Gracious, shrewd and merry was Cosimo, simple of heart and manners and high of soul, with a fervent taste for discussion. What he enjoyed was talking of Immortality with men wiser than himself, more particularly with Agyropulos. “He made more deeds than he made words. . . . His answers were short and sometimes dark, so that men might take them in divers senses. And he had an everlasting memory. Also he knew men at once when he looked into their eyes.” So writes his intimate, Vespasiano. If he was as cruel as his compeers – and he could be terribly cruel – he was generous even in a generous age and as great a forgiver as an avenger. He gave without limits, and with delicacy. Scholars, holy men, needy envoys, were alike bidden to draw as they willed upon his Bank. And, unlike most potentates, he respected independence and scorned the convenient current fashion of rewarding service by posts about his court. He preferred to give houses or freehold farms. No less had he the art of the higher generosity. Pettiness was far from him. “There is,” he used to say, “a weed the which grows in many places. Men,” quoth he, “should not nurture it but let it wither up, yet the most give it careful fostering . . . and the weed is that most evil plant called envy.” Envy, indeed, bred gloom, and gloom was his bugbear. Grumblers, men with grievances, he regarded as his foes. He kept his most “salted” retorts (and his talk is recorded as always salted, even when he pardoned) for rich men who groaned over their possessions and other like croakers. One such he practically banished, bidding him go and live at his country estate, since his absence from it had, he gathered, caused the outrages so tediously complained of. Yet outrages against himself, if they were not conspiracies, he could pass by; he would dismiss a cheat, a thief, with a shrewd joke, whatever the sum of which he had been defrauded, but then the man whom Cosimo dismissed was not likely to be employed by any other.

A nature like his implied a big intellect. He was a keen reader of history and philosophy, he loved the sport of debate, and he always took the side of the weakest, whatever his own opinion. And then suddenly he would throw thought aside and go off to garden at his spacious Villa of Careggi.

Such was Cosimo, a type of early Renaissance manners and morals – of regal commonsense, of simple piety and simple cruelty, of splendour and of soberness. His conscience was a Renaissance conscience, at once in delicate and scrupulous. When Pope Eugenius IV was in Florence (1430) Cosimo confessed to him that a sum of ill-gotten money was weighing upon his mind and asked how he could best repair his offence. Eugenius lost no time in recommending him to rebuild the Monastery of San Marco, then insufficient for the needs of the monks. Cosimo obeyed; he maintained them there; and – finest gift of all – he gave to the monastery the library which afterwards grew so famous. It became his hobby. For this he bought priceless manuscripts and consulted bibliophiles and scholars.

Florence was indeed at this moment the centre of great men of learning. There were others who worked in Venice, Rome and Naples, notably Guarino of Verona, the famous classical teacher at Venice and Ferrara; but the majority preferred the patronage of Cosimo. They abounded in the first half of the fifteenth century, like an army of engineers, cutting the way over ice and snow for the Renaissance to pass over. But they began, as we have seen, in Petrarch’s day, and increased towards the close of the fourteenth century. Such men as the Greek grammarian, Chrysoloras, who lectured at Florence from 1397-1400, and his compatriot, Aurispa, the seeker after manuscripts, who first found texts of Sophocles and Æschylus, or the noble patron-connoisseur, Niccolo de Nicoli (d. 1437) to whom Aurispa brought his treasure-trove, were but the advanceguard. Cosimo beheld the prime of the Humanists, those disseminators of knowledge and enlightenment, the real exterminators of the Middle Ages. Only...