Europe: A History (98 page)
Education played a capital role in Renaissance thinking. The humanists knew that to create a New Man one had to start from schoolboys and students. Educational treatises and experiments proliferated—from Vittorino da Feltre to Erasmus’s
Instruction of a Prince
. Their ideal, whilst conserving the bedrock of Christian instruction, was to develop both the mental and the physical talents of youth. To this end, gymnastics were taught alongside Greek and Latin. Vittorino’s academy in Mantua is often taken to be the first school of the new type. Later examples included the refounded St Paul’s School (1512) in London.
Renaissance music was marked by the appearance of secular choral music alongside polyphonic settings for the Mass. The supreme masters, Josquin des Prés (c.1445–1521) and Clément Jannequin (c.1485–1558), whose work was much
prized in Italy as well as France, painted panoramas in sound. Pieces such as Jannequin’s
Les Oiseaux, Les Cris de Paris
, or
La Bataille de Marignan
abound with joy and energy. The art of the madrigal was widely disseminated, plied by an international school of lutenists.
Textbooks of Renaissance art tend to divide the subject into three neat periods. The Early Renaissance of fifteenth-century ‘innovation’ is followed by the High Renaissance of’harmony attained’ in the mid-sixteenth century, and by imitative Mannerism thereafter. The great innovative figures include Paolo Uccello (1397–1475), conqueror of perspective, Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), master of realistic action, and Sandro Botticelli (1446–1510), the magical blender of landscape and human form. The three supreme giants are generally acknowledged to be Leonardo, Raphael Santi (1483–1520), and the mighty Michelangelo. The imitators, of course, were legion. But imitation is a form of flattery, and the treatment of the human face and body, of landscape and fight, was transformed. Raphael’s Madonnas are a world apart in spirit from medieval icons.
Yet over-neat classifications must be resisted. For one thing, innovation continued. Nothing could be more innovative in the use of form and colour than the daring canvases of Antonio Allegri (Correggio, 1489–1534), of the Venetians Tiziano Vercelli (Titian, 1477–1576) and Jacopo Robusti (Tintoretto, 1518–94), or of the Cretan Domenico Theotocopuli (El Greco, c.1541–1614), who found his way via Venice to Toledo. For another, the art of northern Europe, first prominent in Burgundy, developed strongly and independently. The German school forming around Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), Lucas Cranach of Nuremberg (1472–1553), the landscapist Albrecht Altdorfer of Regensburg (1480–1538), and the portraitist Hans Holbein of Augsburg (1497–1543), was in contact with the South, but was anything but derivative. Finally, one has to take account of powerful and original artists who were more closely connected with continuing medieval traditions. Such would include the extraordinary altar-carver Veit Stoss or Wit Stwosz (c.1447–1533), who worked in Germany and Poland, the mysterious Master of Grünewald (C.1460–1528), the fantastic Dutchman Hieronymus Bosch (d. 1516), with his visions of Hell, or the Flemish ‘peasant genre’ painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525–69).
Renaissance architecture is usually characterized by reactions against the Gothic style. The Florentine ‘classical style’, whose earliest example is to be found in the Pazzi Chapel (1430), had many admirers. The classical villas of Andrea Palladio (1518–80) became an obsession with the European nobility. His finely illustrated
Quattro Libri della Architectura
(1570), published in Venice, was placed in all respectable libraries. When gunpowder rendered castles obsolete, building funds were spent on magnificent palaces, notably in the aristocratic residences of the Loire; on the monuments to municipal pride in the burgher houses and arcaded squares of Germany and Holland; and on Italianate city halls from Amsterdam to Augsburg, Leipzig, and Zamość
Renaissance literature was characterized by an explosion of the vernacular languages, which saw the world afresh in every way. The tentative work of the
humanists gave way in the sixteenth century to the launch of full-blown national literatures. Indeed, the possession of a popular literary tradition in the vernacular was to become one of the key attributes of modern national identity. This tradition was established in French by the poets of the
Pléiade
, in Portuguese by Luiz de Camoens (1524–80), in Spanish by Miguel Cervantes (1547–1616), in Dutch by Anna Bijns (c.1494–1575) and Joost van den Vondel (b. 1587), in Polish by Jan Kochanowski (1530–84), in English by the Elizabethan poets and dramatists Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. In Italian, where the tradition was older and stronger, it was consolidated by Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) and Torquato Tasso (1544–95).
[SINGULARIS]
Not all of Europe’s linguistic communities produced serious literature. Those who lagged behind, principally in Germany, Russia, and the Balkans, were still preoccupied with religious pursuits. Apart from Luther and the
Narrenschiff
or ‘Ship of Fools’ (1494) of Sebastian Brant (1457–1527), the poetry of the Silesians, Andreas Gryphius (1616–69) and Martin Opitz (1597–1639), historiographer to the King of Poland, and the picaresque novel
Simplicissimus
of H.J.C. von Grimmelshausen (c.1625–76), little of note was published in Germany beyond religious tracts and popular
Volksbücher
such as the story of
Doktor Faustus
(1657)
[FAUSTUS]
.
In Central Europe, an important branch of literature continued to be wirtten in Latin. The chief exponents of neo-Latin poetry included the German Conrad Pickel, alias ‘Celtis’ (1459–1508), first poet laureate of the Holy Roman Empire; Ianus Pannonius (1434–72), the Hungarian; the Italians Fracastorius (1483–1553) and Alciati (1492–1550); and the Poles Dantiscus (1485–1548) and Ianicius (1516–43).
Clearly, the Renaissance had something in common with the older movement for Church reform. Humanists and would-be reformers both fretted against fossilized clerical attitudes, and both suffered from the suspicions of the ruling hierarchy. What is more, by encouraging the critical study of the New Testament, both led the rising generation to dream about the lost virtues of primitive Christianity, much as others had dreamt about the lost age of classical Antiquity. In this connection, but not in the happiest of metaphors, it used to be said that ‘Erasmus laid the egg and Luther hatched it’.
The Reformation
. None the less, it is not possible to view the Reformation simply as an extension of the Renaissance. Unlike humanism, it appealed to the deepest devotional traditions of the Middle Ages, and it rode on a wave of a religious revival which affected not just the scholars but the masses. It was launched by men who had every intention of keeping the Catholic Church intact, and who only redoubled their campaign for a cleansed and unified religion when one branch of the reforming movement began to break away. It had nothing at all to do with the humanist spirit of tolerance. The common well springs of Renaissance and Reformation, therefore, should not be allowed to conceal the fact that they grew into streams flowing in very different directions. A similar split developed within the movement for Church reform. What started as a broad religious
revival gradually divided into two separate and hostile movements, later known as the Catholic Reformation and the Protestant Reformation.
SINGULARIS
I
NDIVIDUALISM
is widely billed as one of the inherent qualities of ‘Western I civilization’, and Michel de Montaigne could claim to be one of the pioneer individualists:
The greatest thing on earth is to know how to belong to oneself. Everyone looks in front of them. But I look inside myself. I have no concerns but my own. I constantly reflect on myself; I control myself; I taste myself… We owe some things in part to society, but the greater part to ourselves. It is necessary to lend oneself to others, but to give oneself only to oneself.
1
The roots of individualism have been identified in Platonism, in Christian theology of the soul, in the nominalism of medieval philosophy.
2
But the main surge came with the Renaissance, which Burckhardt characterized by its brilliant individuals. The cultural interest in human beings, the religious interest in private conscience, and the economic interest in capitalist enterprise all put the individual centre stage. Starting with Locke and Spinoza, the Enlightenment elaborated the theme until the ‘liberty of the individual’ and ‘human rights’ joined the common stock of European discourse.
In the nineteenth century individualist theory developed along several divergent tracks. Kant had remarked that the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest was immoral; and it was left to John Stuart Mill On
Liberty
(1850) to reconcile the conflicting interests of individuals and of society. In
Socialisme et liberté
(1898) Jean Jaurès undertook a similar exercise in socialist terms. Yet there were always people ready to pursue the extremes. In
The Individual and His Property
(1844) Max Stirner condemned all forms of collective, whether ‘nation’, ‘state’, or ‘society’. In
The Soul of Man under Socialism
(1891) Oscar Wilde defended the absolute rights of the creative artist: ‘Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.’
In the twentieth century, both communism and fascism treated the individual with contempt. Even in democratic states, bloated government bureaucracies often oppressed those whom they were created to serve. The neo-liberal response gathered pace in the ‘Vienna School’ of the 1920s. Its leaders—Karl Popper (b. 1902), Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973), and Friedrich von Hayek (b. 1899)—all emigrated. Hayek’s
Road to Serfdom
(1944) and
Individualism and the Economic Order
(1949) educated the postwar neo-conservatives. A fervent disciple once indignantly proclaimed: ‘There is no such thing as society.’
3
Such excesses tended to present the citizen as a mere consumer of goods, services, and rights. Politics threatened to degenerate into a ‘culture of complaint’. At some point, the counter-tendency was due to reassert itself in the equally venerable tradition of Duty.
4
The religious revival, clearly visible at the end of the fifteenth century, was largely driven by popular disgust at the decadence of the clergy. Despite the declared intention of calling a General Council every ten years, the Church had not called one since the 1430s. The canonization of a long line of saints, from St Vincent Ferrer OP (cd. 1455) and St Bernardino of Siena (cd. 1450) to St Casimir of Poland (1458–84), could not detract from the blatant lack of saintliness in the Church as a whole. Europe was full of tales about simoniac bishops, nepotistic popes, promiscuous priests, idle monks, and, above all, the sheer worldly wealth of the Church.
Once again, the harbinger of things to come appeared in Florence. The ferocious hellfire sermons of a fanatical friar, Fra Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98), raised a revolt in the 1490s which temporarily drove out the Medici and which only ended with the friar’s own burning. In Spain, under Cardinal Cisneros, religious discipline was combined with energetic scholarship. The new school of theology at the University of Alcalá, founded in 1498, gave birth to the Polyglot Bible (1510–20). In Italy, under Cardinal Giampietro Carafa (1476–1559), the future Paul IV and co-founder c.1511 of the Oratory of Divine Love, an influential circle of Roman churchmen bound themselves to a regime of intense devotional exercises and practical charity. From them there arose a series of new Catholic congregations of clerks regular, neither monks nor friars—among them the Theatines (1523), the Barnabites (1528), the Jesuits (1540), and the Oratorians (1575).
The stirrings of religious revival coincided with the nadir of the Church’s reputation, reached during the papacies of Rodrigo de Borgia (Alexander VI, 1492–1503) and Giuliano della Rovere (Julius II, 1503–13). Alexander’s passions were for gold, women, and the careers of his bastard children. Julius gratified ‘an innate love of war and conquest’: he is remembered as the pope who rode into battle in full armour, the rebuilder of St Peter’s, the refounder of the Papal States. In 1509, when he was planning to pay for his wars and for St Peter’s through the sale in Germany of ‘indulgences’—paper certificates guaranteeing relief from punishment in Purgatory—Rome was visited by a young Augustinian monk from Wittenberg in Saxony. Martin Luther was shocked to the bones by what he saw. ‘Even depravity’, wrote Ranke, ‘may have its perfection.’
13
Within ten years Luther (1483–1546) found himself at the head of the first ‘Protestant’ revolt. His lectures as Professor of Theology at Wittenberg show that his doctrine of’justification by faith alone’ had been brewing for some years; and as a man wresding with his inner convictions, he had little patience with the gentle humanists of the day. He was inordinately rude and bad-tempered. His language was often unrepeatable. Rome, to him, was the seat of sodomy and the Beast of the Apocalypse.
Luther’s fury was brought to the boil by the appearance in Germany of a friar, Johann Tetzel, who was selling indulgences. Tetzel had been banned from the territory of the Elector of Saxony, who had no desire to see his subjects pouring large
sums into papal coffers. So by challenging Tetzel’s theological credentials, Luther was reinforcing the policy of his Prince. On 31 October 1517, All Saints’ Eve, he took the fateful step of nailing a sheet of 95 Theses, or arguments against indulgences, to the door of Wittenberg’s castle church. Or tradition so insists.
From that famous act of defiance several consequences flowed. First, Luther was embroiled in a series of public disputations, notably the one staged at Leipzig with Dr von Eck which preceded his formal excommunication (June 1520). In the course of his preparations he penned the primary treatises of Lutheranism—the
Resolutions, Liberty of a Christian Man, Address to the Christian Nobility of German Nation, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church of God;
and he publicly burned the papal Bull of Excommunication,
Exsurge Domine
. Secondly, German politics was split between the advocates and the opponents of Luther’s punishment. In 1521 the Emperor Charles V summoned Luther to appear under safe conduct before the Imperial Diet at Worms. Luther, like Hus at Constance, defended himself with fortitude:
