The Renaissance

Alison M. Brown

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429619205
• Edición: 3
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Europäische Geschichte der Renaissance

The Renaissance, now in its third edition, engages with earlier and current debates about the Renaissance, especially concerning its 'modernity', its elitism and gender bias and its globalism.

This new edition has been revised to include a discussion of Venice, Rome, Naples and Florence and their relationship with surrounding courts and smaller provincial towns. Brown provides a fresh insight into some of the main themes of the Renaissance, with humanism now being explored in relation to gender, the position of women and the response of religious reformers to the new ideas. The broad geographical scope, concluding with an examination of diffusion through trade with Constantinople, Portugal and Spain, allows students to fully explore how the Renaissance transformed into a global movement.

Key themes, such as humanism, art and architecture, Renaissance theatre and the invention of printing, are illustrated with quotations and exempla, making this book an invaluable source for students of the Renaissance, early modern history and social and cultural history.

Part 1
Introduction

1The 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, the image of a golden age in Florence is the most seductive. It is also the way most people idealized the Renaissance until quite recently. In listing as his ‘golden intellects’ the poets, writers and artists who revived subjects that had been forgotten or neglected in his day, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99) 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. Ficino’s letter for a long time provided first-hand evidence for describing the Renaissance as a dynamic period of revival. Now, however, few historians would interpret it uncritically as 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 [103, pp. 29–34].

The same is true of an even more influential account of the Renaissance, Lives of the Artists (titled in Italian The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects) by Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) [38] and [Doc. 5]. Written in the middle of the sixteenth century, Vasari’s Lives provides 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 century, 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 – like Ficino – was biased in praising the Renaissance largely in terms of Tuscan achievements. 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 before its decline.

This was an idea that appealed to later writers, especially in the nineteenth century, when people wanted to trace the origins of their newly won freedoms and secularism. But surely the arts are not like human bodies but instead create the culture and fashions of their day, which are becoming more out-of-date and getting farther away from us as time passes. It is also anachronistic to see the Renaissance as ‘modern’, as the nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt did in his path-breaking book, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which was first published in German, in Basel, in 1860. Burckhardt 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 interested in the Renaissance. But its scale and rich detail make it easy to overlook its implicit value judgements about progress, ‘civilization’, individualism and the state as ‘a work of art’ [65, parts 1–4]. Just how biased – but influential – it was can be seen in its impact on one writer at the time, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), who describes in Euphorion: being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance (1884, repr. 1899) how Italians ‘walked calmly through a life as well arranged as their great towns, bold, inquisitive and sceptical’ while the rest of Europe was ‘floundering among the stagnant ideas and crumbling institutions of the effete Middle Ages’ (p. 26).

She and her friends Walter Pater and J. A. Symonds, who both wrote influential books on the Renaissance, acted as conduits in transmitting Burckhardt’s ideas to the English-speaking world before his book became better known. Together, they popularized a view of it that survived long after it was first criticized for being too ideas based and unrelated to reality. A good way of understanding this is to compare the entry for ‘Renaissance’ in the 1875 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica with the 1929 edition. The later edition opens by repeating Symonds’s long original entry in the 1875 edition before correcting it with ‘recent research’ that stressed earlier ‘renascences’ as well as the impact of writers like Karl Marx (1818–83) and the sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), who were influenced (it says) by the material conditions of growing wealth, commerce and ‘city communities’ [162].

Burckhardt’s rich detail has also been criticized. For Ernst Gombrich, it is dangerous to assume that the Renaissance spirit or Zeitgeist influenced everyone and every aspect of life, when in fact we know that a large part of the population was totally unaffected by the new ideas. For this reason, he preferred to describe the Renaissance 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, in the same way that the later Pre-Raphaelite or Fauvist movements also tried to revert to a more authentic and primitive style of painting. His criticism stimulated a debate in the 1960s and 1970s that continues today, over whether the Renaissance is a movement or a period and how it differed from earlier and later classical revivals [102].

Since then, the debate has developed in many different directions, influenced by changes in historical models of explanation – from Marxism to poststructuralism and from gender history (that rereads Renaissance texts in order to identify and reinsert the missing voices of women and the illiterate into its history) to globalism, the latest mode, which interprets the Renaissance as part of the wider expansion of knowledge throughout a world experienced for the first time as a spherical and navigable globe. This helps to make the Renaissance seem relevant again today, but it can also distort the past if we interpret globalism through modern lenses as a capitalist market force (with as debatable an impact now as then). So in order to be able to place the Renaissance in its historical context and answer the questions that modern paradigms raise, this book will follow its development chronologically from its beginnings in Italy’s precocious city-states to its expansion into a wider movement for change that profited from a window of opportunity: that is, shifting power in the East and the temporary weakness of the Papacy and the German emperor in the West. Both encouraged new thinking and opened new intellectual and geographical horizons.

Understanding its wider implications mustn’t mean forgetting the excitement generated by the rediscovery of ancient books at the start of the movement. The love poet Ovid was described by Salutati ‘as a kind of door and teacher’ when his passion for poetry first flared up in his adolescence, and Catullus was described as an exile who had now ‘returned to life’, while Lucretius’s long-lost poem On the nature of things (De rerum natura) was exciting for its naturalism and its novel account of a world composed of atoms and space, later influencing artists and scientists from Leonardo da Vinci to Galileo Galilei [59, 113, pp. 8, 254]. The rediscovery of ancient statues like the Laocoön group and the paintings in Nero’s Golden House was greeted with equal enthusiasm – and so were new inventions, like Brunelleschi’s vast dome of Florence’s cathedral, ‘broad enough to cover all the people of Tuscany with its shadow’, or the inventions of gunpowder and printing and the discovery of the ‘newfound’ lands in America. They all challenged traditional ways of thinking, especially the belief in a God-centred world, stating instead that man, not God, was ‘the measure of all things’ – a secular view that lay at the core of its programme for change and later encouraged the tolerance and relativism of writers like Michel de Montaigne [Doc. 38]. Not everyone shared these new views, of course, or were aware of them. And the ideas and discoveries underlying them were often far from enlightened in encouraging a new elitism, as well as the growth of slavery and disease in the newly discovered lands, which represents the other face of ‘civilized’ Europe. As we’ve seen, humanists were propagandists for themselves and their age. But, like the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, their Renaissance represented a ‘capsule’ of values and concerns that they regarded as progressive and that gives the period coherence from this point of view.

So after discussing the concept of rebirth and how the fifteenth-century Renaissance differs from earlier and later revivals in Part 1, Part 2 will describe its historical context, from its beginnings in northern Italian communes and lordships to its take-off in Florence and development in Venice, Naples and Rome: the nodes in a network of interconnected and fiercely competitive cities that together helped to transform the classical revival into a widespread cultural movement. Part 3 will examine the new ideas and values charging this movement, and Part 4, their diffusion in Europe and beyond, especially through the propellants of commerce, printing and the theatre. The conclusion in Part 5 will assess the Renaissance in terms of its ‘globalism’, balancing its success as a modernizing and liberalizing movement with the more negative aspects of world-wide trade and colonization that helped to shift power from the East to the West. The bibliography has been updated to include recent work on the Renaissance, especially two excellent overall surveys, the wide-ranging Cambridge Companion edited by Michael Wyatt [211] and the elegant monograph by Virginia Cox, which is especially strong on literature and women in the Renaissance [78]. Respecting the strict confines of this Seminar Studies series and my own view of the Renaissance, 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 achievement of this dynamic period.

2The 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 popularized the concept of rebirth through the ritual of baptism that 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, xlvi, 118), and throughout the medieval period, 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 this time it caught on and became the battle-cry for cultural change. Shortly after this, his friend Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–75) described how the painter Giotto (c. 1267–1337) had ‘brought back to the light that art that had been buried for many generations’ and how Dante (1265–1321) had ‘restored to life’ the dead art of poetry. After Petrarch’s own death, Boccaccio praised him too 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 periodization of history. Although many different schemes survived into the Middle Ages, some dividing history into four ages, others into six, there was a fundamental contrast between pre-Christian and Christian chronology, which firmly separated the period before Christ (BCE) from the period after Christ (CE). There was a contrast too between the classical belief that history was cyclical (which St Augustine condemned as a ‘merry-go-round’ that prevented Christians from ‘keeping to the straight path in the right direction’) and the Christian view of history as progression towards the Last Judgement, when the world would end [8, pp. 487–8]. Petrarch was not necessarily influenced by the classical view of cyclical history, although later Renaissance historians would be, like Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) who believed that ‘everything that has been in the past and is in the present will be in the future’ [Doc. 3]. But Petrarch’s label of ‘dark ages’ for the period between classical and modern times (or what the fifteenth-century historian and papal secretary, Flavio Biondo [1392–1463], was the first to call the medium aevum, ‘the age in the middle’) was clearly polemical in contrasting this dark age with the ‘civilized’ and enlightened rebirth of his own day. 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 700 years, from the fall of the Roman Empire to the revival of self-governing Italian city-states in the twelfth century.

Rather than dismiss the idea of rebirth as a myth or a literary conceit invented by the humanists, we should perhaps see it as an attempt at a new beginning that disguised its newness by claiming to have cultural links with the ancient past, selecting what is to be remembered and what is to be discarded by labelling itself new and the preceding period dead (as De Certeau describes the French revolutionaries rewriting their past) [81, pp. 3–4]. From this point of view, the revived belief in cyclical history made the history of the Roman republic very relevant to self-governing communes in Italy then being threatened with despotic rule. For if culture in ancient Rome flourished during the republic and declined under the empire, the present revival or ‘re...