Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance

Revised Edition

Hans Baron

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780691007526, 9780691051147
• eBook ISBN: 9781400847679
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

Hans Baron was one of the many great German émigré scholars whose work Princeton brought into the Anglo-American world. His Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance has provoked more discussion and inspired more research than any other twentieth-century study of the Italian Renaissance.

Baron's book was the first historical synthesis of politics and humanism at that momentous critical juncture when Italy passed from medievalism to the thought of the Renaissance. Baron, unlike his peers, married culture and politics; he contended that to truly understand the Renaissance one must understand the rise of humanism within the political context of the day. This marked a significant departure for the field and one that changed the direction of Renaissance studies. Moreover, Baron's book was one of the first major attempts of any sort to ground intellectual history in a fully realized historical context and thus stands at the very origins of the interdisciplinary approach that is now the core of Renaissance studies.

Baron's analysis of the forces that changed life and thought in fifteenth-century Italy was widely reviewed domestically and internationally, and scholars quickly noted that the book "will henceforth be the starting point for any general discussion of the early Renaissance." The Times Literary Supplement called it "a model of the kind of intensive study on which all understanding of cultural process must rest." First published in 1955 in two volumes, the work was reissued in a one-volume Princeton edition in 1966.

Part One

CHANGES IN POLITICS AND HISTORICAL THOUGHT

CHAPTER 1

THE ELEMENTS OF THE CRISIS: CLASSICISM AND THE POLITICAL TRANSFORMATION

EVER since the humanists’ own days, the transition from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century has been recognized as a time of big and decisive changes. In the realm of art, the break between the late Trecento schools, still half medieval, and the first Quattrocento generation of Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Masaccio is more radical than that between any other two generations in the course of the Renaissance. In the development of Renaissance thought, it is by humanists roughly coeval with Brunelleschi and Donatello—Niccoli, Bruni, and Poggio in Florence, and such men as Vergerio and Guarino in northern Italy—that Petrarch’s Humanism and the mind of the Trecento were profoundly transformed; so profoundly indeed that, in the history of Humanism no less than in the history of art, the beginning of the new century coincides with the emergence of the full pattern of the Renaissance.

Students of the Renaissance, if asked to indicate the most conspicuous factor in the change, will point without hesitation to the new relationship of artists as well as humanists to antiquity. A new, almost dithyrambic worship of all things ancient pervaded the cultural atmosphere. Brunelleschi expended his small patrimony to pass some time studying, drawing, and measuring among the Roman ruins so that his art might become rooted in the world of the ancients. Niccoli, scion of a well-to-do Florentine merchant family, spent most of his fortune on ancient manuscripts and relics of classic art, until in the end he had to depend on Cosimo de’ Medici’s financial support. Only ancient authors were to be read and imitated—ancient authors in their genuine texts, unadulterated by the hands of medieval copyists; there was to be a break with the traditions founded by Dante and Petrarch in the Trecento. The time had come for the emergence of a brand of classicism characterized by a single-minded, even militant dedication to antiquity such as had been unknown to earlier centuries.

But classicism, however essential its part in the transformation, was not the only factor. No student of Renaissance art today will stress only the progress of classical imitation. We are accustomed to point out that the art of the Renaissance, in spite of its boundless enthusiasm for antiquity, became something vastly different from a mere return to classical forms and that many elements combined to produce a result which was as different from antiquity as it was from the Middle Ages. In reconstructing the development of culture and thought, it is also not enough to say that the revival of classical studies was merely a ferment in a much broader change. We must clearly define the other elements which acted in their own right, partly seconding and partly counteracting and reshaping the influence of antiquity until the results came to be much more than a crude preference for all things ancient.

Among those other elements, the most important was a new position assumed by the Florentine city-state republic.

During the greater part of the Trecento, Humanism had not been grounded in civic society, nor had it been closely associated with any particular one of the Italian communes. It is true that around 1300, in the days of Albertino Mussato of Padua, a beginning had been made toward a union of pre-Petrarchian Humanism with the civic world. At that time, a new type of civic culture inspired by ancient literature had been growing in the old city-republics of northern Italy, such as Padua, Vicenza, Verona, and Milan. But these beginnings had not gone very far when the independent life of the city-republics in northern Italy gave way to tyranny. In the advanced stages of its fourteenth-century development, Humanism was a literary movement some of whose exponents lacked all identification with any specific group of Italian society, while others began to be attached to tyranny. Humanism at that time was carried on chiefly by grammar-school teachers and the chancery officials of a multitude of secular and ecclesiastical princes, particularly in northern Italy, in Papal Avignon, and in the central-Italian territories of the Church. Petrarch, though Florentine by descent, had begun the essential training of his mind in Avignon. In the 1340’s, he became spiritually an ally of Cola di Rienzo’s republican revolt in Rome, and took part in it through political letters and manifestoes. In his later years, he was associated with several of the tyrant courts in northern Italy. There was in his native Florence, it is true, a circle of his admirers, led by Boccaccio, who slowly prepared the ground for the reception of Petrarch’s aspirations among Florentine literati and clerics; but it was not to Florentine culture and politics that Humanism in Florence during and shortly after Petrarch’s generation owed its direction of studies and its guiding values. Not until the last few decades of the Trecento, when Coluccio Salutati was the head of the Florentine chancery, and Filippo Villani, last of the three famous members of the family of Florentine chroniclers, wrote his book On the Origin of the City of Florence and on Her Renowned Citizens, did a gradual process of fusion begin between the humanistic and the civic outlook—whatever fusion there could be between the outlook of citizens who were required to conduct themselves as the members of a city-state republic, and the ideas of a movement still bearing the marks of scholarly aloofness and of the life at north-Italian tyrant courts.

Only a generation later, in the very first years of the Quattrocento, the cultural atmosphere had been transformed. From then on, through thirty years or more, Humanism and the development of Florentine culture were so closely united that for all practical purposes the history of Quattrocento Humanism begins in Florence. Not only did humanistic scholars all over Italy look to the new Athens on the Arno; the most significant effect for the future was that from Florence ideas and interests, such as could develop only in the society of a free city, spread through all Italy. This influence changed most of the ideas held by the humanists of the Trecento. There arose a new historical outlook, a new ethical attitude that opposed the scholars’ withdrawal from social obligations, and a new literature, in Volgare as well as Latin, dealing with the family and civic life. Indeed, the more historical scholarship has explored the sociological setting of the early Renaissance, the more clearly has the significance of this Florentine civic component been recognized.

The histories of the Florentine Commonwealth from Leonardo Bruni onward, for instance, served as models of historiography outside Florence not only in so far as they introduced significant innovations of literary form and historical criticism; they also taught a new dynamic concept of history which had grown out of the Florentine experience of civic liberty and the independence of citystates. Within Florence itself, the historical ideas created by Florentine humanists survived to reach maturity in the days of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Giannotti—although by then Volgare had become the accepted language and the humanistic technique of presentation was considered obsolete. The link connecting the great Florentine historians of the early sixteenth century with the Florentine humanists of the early fifteenth was their common approach to history from the political experience of Florence.¹

Again, a civic hue, originally found in the Florentine group, characterizes the voluminous Quattrocento literature of humanistic dialogues and treatises on the philosophia moralis. It is not simply that in this literature secularism has gained the ascendency over asceticism; nor is it sufficient to say that classical models have been revived. The heart of the change since the early Quattrocento is that a revolt had taken place against the earlier philosophy of humanistic scholars who, compounding medieval ascetic ideals with stoic precepts, believed that the true sage ought to keep aloof from society and public duties. From the end of the Trecento onward, the ever-recurring themes in the humanistic philosophy of life were the superiority of the vita activa over “selfish” withdrawal into scholarship and contemplation, the praise of the family as the foundation of a sound society, and the argument that the perfect life is not that of the “sage” but that of the citizen who, in addition to his studies, consummates his humanitas by shouldering man’s social duties and by serving his fellowcitizens in public office.²

Once we are familiar with these early Quattrocento traits and the change in the role of Florence, we can no longer doubt that the cultural transformation from the end of the Trecento onward must have been accompanied by changes in the external setting. Like other cultural revolutions, this crisis must have included more than the unfolding of the intellectual and artistic elements prepared by preceding generations. There came a moment when new standards and new values arose and demanded their place—a place which the political and social framework of the Trecento had not allowed.

The period of transition about 1400, therefore, must have been marked not only by the rise of classicism, but also by a modification of the material frame in which the ideas of the Trecento had developed. This modification need not mean that the crisis had socio-economic causes. Although even in the economic field there may have been greater differences between the Trecento and the Quattrocento than are usually assumed, it is quite clear that since the late Trecento social and economic change was slow in the Italian Renaissance. Nothing in our sources suggests that the rapid transformation about 1400 was primarily rooted in this sector of life. No revolt with either social or economic overtones occurred in Florence between the 1370’s and the Savonarolian revolution of the 1490’s; and the unsuccessful rising in 1378 of the “Ciompi,” the workers of the Florentine woolen industry, had left no traces that might have shaped the outlook and culture of the citizenry about 1400.

If fresh experience in the citizen’s life was responsible for the rapidity and depth of cultural change in Florence, it must have been in the political arena—experience gained in the defense of civic freedom and the independence of the Florentine Republic. And, indeed, around 1400 great dislocations in the political interrelations of the Italian states came to a head and produced a violent upheaval that had long been in the making.

The Italy of the medieval communes had differed significantly from medieval Europe north of the Alps. It had not produced genuine feudalism. The hierarchy of feudal lords which began to develop in the early Middle Ages had been nipped in the bud, and the seigneurs of large landed estates had been forcibly transformed into city-dwellers and members of town society. But communal Italy had no more escaped local dismemberment than had the rest of medieval Europe. The many communes, each ruling over the neighboring countryside, were semi-autonomous and only affiliated with each other by the special bonds binding some of them to the Ghibelline group of princes and towns, others to the opposing camp of the Guelphs. Allegiance beyond the local sphere, therefore, was given only to the universal institutions of the Empire or the Church; in Italy no less than elsewhere, political and historical thought was either Ghibelline or Guelph and found its directives in the never-ceasing contests of Emperors and Popes for the leadership of the Christian world. In many parts of early fourteenth-century Italy, it is true, communal localism was gradually giving way to somewhat larger states under the rule of signori. But as long as these new political creations had neither reached stability nor established traditions, and as long as the radius of consolidation was as a rule still small, the longing of the age for pacification through the Emperor or Pope only increased. Although many new developments which were eventually to merge in a new political order of the Peninsula had already started, the impact of the new beginnings could not be strongly felt until some spectacular catastrophe broke the continuity of the inherited conditions.

In contrast to the still medieval atmosphere in the Trecento, Italy in the Quattrocento, as is well known, presents the first example of modern inter-state conditions: a system of sovereign region-states each of which had absorbed an abundance of local autonomies, created new loyalties, and replaced the allegiance to the Empire or the Church. One of these new political organisms was a north-Tuscan region-state under the rule of the Florentine Republic; and it was precisely in the years around 1400 that the final transition to a system of regional states took place during struggles which shook all of north and central Italy to the core.

There can be no doubt about the depth of the impression made by the wars that decided the political structure which the Peninsula was to have in the Renaissance. The issue was an alternative between two diametrically opposed ways into the future. One possible outcome would be a system of equal states including princedoms and republics —an equilibrium of forces making Renaissance Italy in some respects akin to the Greek pattern of independent city-states and, in other respects, a miniature prototype of the modern western family of nations. The other conceivable development was the emergence out of the competition of the surviving Italian states of a national monarchy comparable to those of England, France, and Spain, but unparalleled as a threat of despotic power since north and central Italy knew neither parliaments nor estates general nor any other of the counterpoises to unfettered absolutism that feudalism elsewhere in Europe had left as its legacy to the modern nation-states.³ Confronted with this tremendous decision, the same pioneering generation of the early Quattrocento that saw the triumph of classicism in all fields of culture experienced on the political plane a contest which, in significance and sweep, was not matched until the end of the Quattrocento when the transalpine European powers invaded the Peninsula.

In many regards, this political struggle was bound to counteract the direction in which the rise of classicism was drawing the intellectual life of Florence and Italy. While humanistic classicists among the Florentine citizens began to turn away contemptuously from the medieval and Trecento traditions of Florentine culture and to discard the old standards of the civic way of life, Florence was thrown into a fight for her existence which put these native traditions and civic ideals to the decisive test.

Did the concurrence of a political trial with the intellectual revolution produce the rich ferment of the years around 1400? Whatever our final verdict will be, a history of the transitional crisis of the early Renaissance must start with an analysis of the tremendous dislocations which brought the Florentine Commonwealth into mortal danger and finally put her into the forefront of a political struggle that redrew the map of Italy for the Qua...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface to the Revised Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Changes in Politics and Historical Thought
• Part Two: Promise and Tradition in Politico-Historical Literature About 1400
• Part Three: The Rise of Leonardo Bruni’s Civic Humanism
• Part Four: Classicism and the Trecento Tradition
• Part Five: The Aftermath of the Crisis
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index