The Renaissance: A Short History Read online

  Constantinople was also known in the West to contain depositories of ancient Greek literature and a few scholars familiar with it. In 1397 the Greek scholar Manuel Chrysoloras was invited to lecture in Florence, and it was from this point that classical Greek began to be studied seriously, and widely, in the West. One Italian scholar, Guarino da Verona, actually went to Constantinople, and spent some years there in the circle of Chrysoloras. He returned to Italy in 1408, not only fluent in Greek but with an important library of fifty-four Greek manuscripts, including some of the works of Plato, hitherto unknown in the West. The rest of Plato was brought from Constantinople in the 1420s by Giovanni Aurispa. This was the first great transmission of classical Greek literature. The second occurred during the ecumenical council of Florence in the 1430s, an attempt to heal the schism between the Latin and Greek churches. The attempt failed, but the Greek delegation, which included a number of distinguished scholars, brought with them many important manuscripts that remained in Florence. A third batch arrived in the baggage of refugees escaping from Turkish rule to the West in the wake of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Meanwhile, the rediscovery of Latin classics continued with the work of, among others, Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), an indefatigable ransacker of monastic libraries in Europe, who brought to light more Cicero, Quintilian, and other authors.

  One reason why the humanists, while failing to dominate the old universities, got such a grip on society was their ability to infiltrate courts. They ran, in effect, a scholastic freemasonry, getting one another jobs and recommendations and chances to acquire patronage from the rich and powerful. Bracciolini, like Petrarch, worked in the papal service and attended the Council of Constance, 1414–18, where much trafficking in manuscripts was done. He also worked for a time for the English grandee Cardinal Beaufort. The humanists had ready pens, which could be used for political purposes, either in Latin or in the vernacular. Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) was made chancellor of Florence, whose interest he defended fiercely with his literary skills. The Visconti of Milan claimed that Salutati’s pen had done more damage than “thirty squadrons of Florentine cavalry,” to which the chancellor replied, “I would not restrain my words on occasions when I would not fail to use my sword.” Humanists were prominent in Florentine government, being chosen as chancellor on four occasions. Leonardo Bruni, for instance, who acquired administrative and diplomatic experience at the Papal Curia and was also the author of a laudatory history of Florence, based on classical models, was elected chancellor in 1427. When he died in 1444 the city ignored his will, which asked for a modest funeral and a simple slab gravestone, and gave him state obsequies on the Roman model and commissioned an elaborate Renaissance monument, on classic lines, from the sculptor Bernardo Rossellino, over his vault in the Franciscan church of Santa Croce.

  Behind this interest of the great and powerful in humanist scholarship was not just the itch to acquire propagandists but the desire to recreate the externals of imperial Rome—the Latin slogans, the designs and insignia—in the expectation that the reality of Roman power would follow. The imitation of antiquity became the fashion. Students at the private academy founded in Rome by Pomponio Leto (1428–98) not only studied ancient history but on occasions wore Roman dress, held Roman feasts, collected inscriptions and staged discussions alla romagna, even tended their gardens according to classical principles gathered from Virgil and Horace. In Florence, the Medici went further, erecting the recovery of classical antiquity almost into a principle of government. Indeed it is important to grasp that their power in Florence in the fifteenth century, though ultimately based on their money— they were a family of doctors turned bankers—was expressed by cultural leadership, for they had no formal authority or legal title until 1537, when Cosimo de’ Medici (1519–74) became duke of Florence and ultimately grand duke of Tuscany. It was through their cultural enthusiasm for the new, the perfect and the magnificent that they identified themselves with the fortunes of the city, which by about the year 1400 had become, self-consciously and emotionally, a citadel of the arts.

  The pattern was set by Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464), who dominated Florentine public life for an entire generation. Of course he was rich: his father’s personal wealth— more than eighty thousand florins in 1427—could have paid, it was estimated, the annual wages of two thousand workers in the wool industry. But he was also an enthusiastic would-be scholar. In 1427 he was in Rome helping Poggio Bracciolini to find antique inscriptions. He commissioned and paid for the translation of Plato by Marsilio Ficino, presented in one of the finest manuscripts of the whole Renaissance. At one point he was employing no fewer than thirty-five professional scribes in copying classics for his library. It was, significantly, his bookseller, Vespasiano da Bisticci, who wrote his Life, in which he asserted: “He had a knowledge of Latin which was astonishing in a man engrossed by public affairs.” He also used his money to add a chapel to the Franciscan church of Santa Croce and build living quarters for the novices and to construct a library for and restore San Lorenzo, the Badia church outside Fiesole—all public projects—as well as building the family palace in Florence, designed by Michelozzo, and patronizing all the leading masters, from Donatello down. This was in addition to subsidizing Florence’s armies and diplomacy to the point where, at the Peace of Lodi in 1454, the city was recognized as one of Italy’s five major powers, alongside Venice, the papacy, Milan and Naples.

  Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo “the Magnificent” (1449–92), while ruling Florence in fact though not in name, and with a rod not so much of iron as of gold and ivory, went one better than Cosimo. He was not only a scholar and patron of scholars, supporting the work of Ficino, like his grandfather, and of Pico della Mirandola and Angelo Poliziano in the translation and editing of Latin and Greek texts, but he was also a poet of distinction. His model was Petrarch, but his verses are full of original ideas, conceits and forms. They celebrate hunting, the woods, nature, the love of women; they deplore the brevity and transience of life; they exude joy and bawdy humor as well as sadness. They were read widely when first published; some are still read and enjoyed today. Lorenzo commissioned works from most of the great painters and sculptors of his day—Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, the Pollaiuoli, and Botticelli—and he built on a monumental scale. His son Giovanni became Pope Leo X, and his nephew, Giulio, Clement VII. His great-granddaughter Catherine married one king of France and was mother of three more. Yet Lorenzo was, as some would claim, the key figure in the entire Renaissance and the nearest to approach its ideal of the Uomo universale, chiefly because he was also an author in his own right.

  The Medici of Florence were not the only ruling family who identified themselves with the new culture—fortunately so, for it was the very competitiveness of the independent cities, and the regimes and rulers who strove to bolster their power with the embellishments of scholarship and art, that gave the Renaissance its thrust. It was one of the few times in human history when success in the world’s game—the struggle for military supremacy and political dominion—was judged at least in part on cultural performance. Often cultural patronage (like hypocrisy) was the homage that vice paid to virtue. Italian city rulers were often ruthless. Bernabo Visconti, who consolidated the power of his family in Milan in the fourteenth century, was barbarously cruel, and his nephew Gian Galeazzo (1351–1402) was an unscrupulous operator who extended Milan’s rule to cover the whole of Lombardy, parts of Piedmont and even slices of Tuscany. But he was a generous and discerning collector, a friend of scholars and a patron of the new learning. The Sforza family, who succeeded the Visconti in Milan, were notable patrons of Leonardo da Vinci and Bramante. Another humanist city was Ferrara, controlled by the Este family. It was a characteristic of humanism to pay almost as much attention to the education of ladies as of gentlemen. Ercole, duke of Ferrara from 1471 to 1505, had two beautiful and talented daughters, Isabella and Beatrice, both of whom received a thorough classical education. Isabella (1474–1539) marrie
d Francesco Gonzaga, marquis of Mantua, and lived there for nearly half a century. For much of the time she acted as regent for her husband, a professional soldier or condottiere. In the process she became the greatest of all female collectors and patronesses of the Renaissance. Her studiolo—a combination of study and collector’s cabinet of curiosities—became one of the finest in Italy, was decorated by Andrea Mantegna, Pietro Perugino, Correggio and other major artists, and became so crowded with books and objets d’art—jewels, medals, small bronzes and marbles, pieces of amber, a “unicorn’s horn” and other natural curiosities—that she added onto it a “grotto,” one of the earliest instances of what remained a fey but often charming art form of the rich for the next three hundred years. She owned a Michelangelo and a Jan van Eyck, and the inventory compiled after her death lists more than sixteen hundred items, from medals to stone vases.

  An even more famous studiolo was constructed for Federigo da Montefeltro (1422–82), one of the great characters of the Renaissance, whose unmistakable profile, with its jutting nose, the bridge of which had been indented by a sword blow, figures on many a Renaissance masterpiece. Like various other rulers of petty Italian states, he hired himself and his soldiers out for pay, and became one of the most successful of all the bloodstained condottieri, the outstanding master of what was then an honored profession. His family had dominated Urbino since the thirteenth century, and he ran the city for nearly forty years, the last eight as duke. This millionaire mercenary had acquired a good knowledge of Latin and much other learning, together with excellent taste, and in his retirement from war he expiated his sins by a great deal of discerning patronage of the arts and even a little religious piety. He transformed the old medieval home of his ancestors in Urbino into one of the finest palaces in Italy, military in external appearance but with magnificent interiors in the latest taste. At the heart of it was his studiolo, a masterpiece of inlaid wood arranged as a series of trompe l’oeil panels. There, the old warrior could converse with scholars and play the Uomo universale.

  Duke Federigo’s court was a model of its times, and it is no accident that when Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) decided to write a manual of courtly behavior, which should be both a treatise on good manners at the highest level and a popularization of Renaissance ideals, he made Urbino the setting. Il Cortegiano (The Courtier) is a series of imaginary dialogues between experienced members of the court, discussing and describing the ideal gentleman and gentlewoman and how they can be made fit for the best court society. The author, from Mantua, was well versed in the classics and had done court service not only at Urbino but under the Gonzagas in his home city and knew what he was writing about. When it was published in 1528 it won the approval of the authorities, but, more important, it delighted young people and has remained a classic ever since, albeit little read these days. In its time it was a winner, and no book did more to turn the notions of the Renaissance elite into the received wisdom of Europe. To complete Castiglione’s good fortune, he was made the subject of Raphael’s finest surviving portrait.

  However, while Castiglione was describing the sunny and elegant side of court life in the Renaissance, his contemporary Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was completing the picture with the darker and, it must be said, more realistic side. Il Principe (The Prince) was written in 1513, after Machiavelli, who had been involved in both the military and the diplomatic side of Florentine government, had been dismissed from office when the Medici returned to power in 1512. He was a historian as well as a man of the world, the author of books on Florentine history and the art of war. He was concerned not so much with ideals, as Castiglione purported to be, as with what actually happened in a rough and pitiless world. He told the reader, This is not what rulers ought to do but what I know from my own experience they actually do, or try to do, in order to outwit their internal and external enemies. It is not, as its critics maintained at the time and have ever since, a diabolical book, designed to discourage the virtuous and to corrupt the ambitious. It is the original work of realpolitik, not without a certain resigned wisdom, and a patriotic work too, written from the viewpoint of a proud Florentine who had seen republican ideals and local freedoms ruined by invading armies and recognized sadly that if the great cities of Italy were to survive as independent states they had to be ruled by shrewd men without illusions, who drew on the lessons of recent history.

  Castiglione soothed and Machiavelli shocked, but both provided valuable information of a do-it-yourself kind, and no two treatises did more to spread all over Europe the hard-won knowledge of an Italy that, by the date they were published, had lived through a cultural revolution more than a century old and a series of invasions that were destroying her liberties and torturing her soul. They were key items in the Renaissance export trade. But of course, just as Italian towns were quick to swallow and assimilate the changes in the printing trade and make them their own, so the rest of Europe was avid for Italian ideas and techniques, and had been so for the best part of two centuries.

  Yet the speed at which Italian ideas radiated across Europe was determined to a great extent by historical accident as well as by the availability of talent. Initially at least France was slow to respond, or appeared so. That was surprising. In the thirteenth century France, rather than Italy, seemed the cultural heart of Europe. Paris had by far the busiest university in the world, whose influence continued to grow as the century progressed. There were three major French-speaking courts, with Burgundy richer than the Kingdom of France in some respects, and Navarre also a Francophone cultural center of some importance. French as a language was maturing rapidly, and in 1250 or even 1300 a poet was more likely to follow French verse forms than Italian ones. Provence was also the theater of a poetical movement, and from 1309 to 1378 one of its cities, Avignon, was the seat of the papal court during its “Babylonian exile” from Rome, attracting men of letters and early humanists from all over the Latin West, including Petrarch, who occasionally wrote in French.

  But France could produce no Dante, which was probably decisive in the battle of tongues. Moreover, southern France was ravaged by endemic outbreaks of militant heresy and increasingly violent efforts to suppress them. From the 1330s it was the victim of periodic and devastating English invasions, in which Burgundy often joined, and from the 1420s onward the French crown was engaged in a long and costly effort to recover its lost provinces from English occupation. In the second half of the fifteenth century, France was acquiring the basis of its modern territorial composition, absorbing Gas-cony in 1453, Armagnac in 1473, Burgundy in 1477, Provence in 1481, Anjou in 1489 and Brittany in 1491. In the long run, this huge consolidation (followed by the annexation of Bourbon territory in 1527) was to make France the richest state in Europe by far. But at the time, the impact was absorbed by the consequences of Charles VIII’s decision, in 1494, to pursue his claim to the Kingdom of Naples by invading Italy. This incursion, catastrophic for Italy, became a source of weakness for France too, for it was repeated by Charles’s successors Louis XII and François I at great cost and to little effect, culminating in François’s catastrophic defeat and capture at the Battle of Pavia (1525).

  During the long decades of political and military preoccupations France was not, naturally, immune to the new Renaissance spirit. On the contrary: it was used to put a classical gloss on French expansionism. The French court was crowded with clever Italians, exiles from Florence and the papal court and from the factional fighting in Genoa and Milan, egging the Valois kings on in the hope that a French conquest of Italy would reverse their own fallen fortunes. The heroic shades of antiquity were invoked by French propagandists. Charles and Louis were compared to Hannibal, crossing the Alps. François was presented as conducting a dialogue with Julius Caesar (an Italian who had reversed the conquest by invading Gaul). This work was accompanied by Caesar’s Commentaries, in a version exquisitely illuminated by Albert Pigghe and Godefroy le Batave, which must rank as one of the finest of all Renaissa
nce manuscripts and is among the great treasures of the Bibliothèque Nationale. The invasions were also celebrated in medallions, enamels, statues, triumphal arches and prints, all in classical mode and often made with the help of Italian craftsmen. But the great French Renaissance writer was slow to appear. François Villon (1431–65?), the only outstanding fifteenth-century French poet, was curiously untouched by the Renaissance, and in the mere three thousand lines of his verses that have survived it is hard to find traces of the new spirit—he is the Middle Ages in all their brutal magnificence.

  However, in the long run the Renaissance struck France with shattering force. Charles VIII returned from Italy with a score of expert workmen, but it was François I who embraced the new culture enthusiastically on behalf of his country. He was employing Leonardo da Vinci in France as early as 1516, and he likewise brought over artists of the stature of Primaticcio and Rosso Fiorentino. These men worked alongside French artists like Jean Goujon and Jean Cousin to form the École de Fontainebleau, the first major Renaissance artistic center outside Italy. François carried through, with Italian assistance and inspiration, what is probably the largest program of châteaux or palace building in history, mainly in the Loire Valley.