The Italian Renaissance (36 page)

There is an obvious parallel between the new conception of time and the new conception of space; both came to be seen as precisely measurable. Mechanical clocks and pictorial perspective were developed in the same culture, and Brunelleschi was interested in both. The paintings of Uccello and Piero della Francesca (who wrote a treatise on mathematics) are the creations of men interested in precise measurement working for a public with similar interests. Fifteenth-century narrative paintings are located in a more precise space and time than their medieval analogues.
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Changing views of time and space seem to have coexisted with a traditional view of the cosmos. This view, memorably expressed in Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, was shared in essentials by his sixteenth-century commentators, who drew on the same classical tradition, especially the writings of two Greeks, the astronomer–geographer Ptolemy and the philosopher Aristotle. According to this tradition, the fundamental distinction was that between Heaven and Earth.

‘Heaven’ should really be in the plural. In the centre of the universe was the Earth, surrounded by seven ‘spheres’ or ‘heavens’, in each of which moved a planet: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The planets were each moved by an ‘intelligence’, a celestial driver often equated with the appropriate classical god or goddess. This fusion of planets and deities had permitted the survival of the pagan gods into the Middle Ages.
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The importance
of the planets resided in their ‘influences’. As they sang in a Carnival song by Lorenzo de’Medici, ‘from us come all good and evil things’. Different professions, psychological types, parts of the body and even days of the week were influenced by different planets (Sunday by the Sun, Monday by the Moon, and so on). Vasari offered an astrological explanation of artistic creativity in his life of Leonardo, remarking that ‘The greatest gifts may be seen raining on human bodies from celestial influences.’ To explain the past or discover what the future has in store, it was normal to consult specialists who calculated the configuration of the heavens at a particular time. The humanist physician Girolamo Fracastoro gave an account of the outbreak of syphilis in Europe in terms of a conjunction of the planets Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the sign of Cancer. The philosopher Marsilio Ficino believed that the ‘spirit’ of each planet could be captured by means of appropriate music or voices (‘martial’ voices for Mars, and so on) and by making an appropriate ‘talisman’ (an image engraved on a precious stone under a favourable constellation).
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These beliefs had considerable ‘influence’ on the arts. Aby Warburg’s iconographical analysis of frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara showed that they represented the signs of the zodiac and their divisions into 36 ‘decans’.
¹⁰
The Florentine patrician Filippo Strozzi consulted ‘a man learned in astrology’, just as the treatises of Alberti and Filarete recommended, to ensure a good constellation before having the foundations of the Palazzo Strozzi laid on 6 August 1489.
¹¹
When a Florentine committee was discussing where to place Michelangelo’s
David
, one speaker suggested that it should replace Donatello’s
Judith
, which was ‘erected under an evil star’.
¹²
Raphael’s patron, the papal banker Agostino Chigi, was interested in astrology, and some of the paintings he commissioned refer to his horoscope.
¹³

Astrology was permitted by the Church; it was not considered incompatible with Christianity. As Lorenzo de’Medici put it, ‘Jupiter is a planet which moves only its own sphere, but there is a higher power which moves Jupiter.’
¹⁴
The twelve signs of the zodiac were associated with the twelve apostles. A number of popes took an interest in the stars. Paul III, for example, summoned to Rome the astrologer who had predicted his election (Luca Gaurico, whose brother Pomponio’s treatise on sculpture has
already been quoted) and gave him a bishopric. Yet there was a sense in which theology and astrology formed two systems which in practice competed with each other. The saints presided over certain days; so did the planets. People might take their problems to a priest or to an astrologer. It was largely on religious grounds that some leading figures of the period rejected astrology, notably Pico della Mirandola (who declared that ‘astrology offers no help in discovering what a man should do and what avoid’) and Fra Girolamo Savonarola.
¹⁵

Above the seven heavens and beyond the sphere of the ‘fixed stars’, God was to be found. In the writing of the period, God was indeed almost everywhere. Even commercial documents might begin with the monogram YHS, standing for ‘Jesus the Saviour of Mankind’ (
Jesus Hominum Salvator
). When disaster struck, it was commonly interpreted as a sign of God’s anger. ‘It pleased God to chastise us’ is how the Florentine apothecary Luca Landucci comments on the plague. When the French invasion of 1494 left Florence virtually unharmed, Landucci wrote that ‘God never removed His hand from off our head.’ The name of God constantly recurs in private letters, such as those of the Florentine lady Alessandra Macinghi degli Strozzi: ‘Please God free everything from this plague … it is necessary to accept with patience whatever God wants … God give them a safe journey’, and so on. Even Machiavelli ends a letter to his family ‘Christ keep you all.’
¹⁶
Of all the ways in which Christians have imagined God, two seem particularly characteristic of the period. The emphasis on the sweetness of God and the ‘pathetic tenderness’ of attitudes to Christ, which the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga noted in France and the Netherlands in the fifteenth century, can be found in Italy as well.
¹⁷
Savonarola, for example, addresses Christ with endearments such as ‘my dear Lord’ (
signor mio caro
), or even ‘sweet spouse’ (
dolce sposo
). Christocentric devotion seems to have been spread by the friars, not only the Dominican Savonarola but the Franciscans Bernardino da Siena, who encouraged the cult of the name of Jesus, and Bernardino da Feltre, who was responsible for the foundation of a number of fraternities dedicated to Corpus Christi, the body of Christ. The
Meditations on the Passion
attributed to the Franciscan saint Bonaventura was something of a best-seller in fifteenth-century Italy, with at least twenty-six editions, as was the
Imitation of Christ
, a devotional text from the fourteenth-century Netherlands, with nine editions.
¹⁸

This image
of a sweet and human Saviour coexisted with a more detached view of God as the creator of the universe, its ‘most beautiful architect’ (
bellissimo architetto
), as Lorenzo de’Medici once called him.
¹⁹
He was also imagined, in this trade-oriented urban society, as the head of the firm. Leonardo da Vinci addressed God as you who ‘sell us every good thing for the price of labour’. Giannozzo Manetti, a Florentine merchant and scholar, liked to compare God to ‘the master of a business who gives money to his treasurer and requires him to render an account as to how it may have been spent’.
²⁰
He transposed the Gospel parable of the talents from its original setting, that of a landlord and his steward, to a more commercial environment. Thus Renaissance Italians projected their own concerns on to the supernatural world.

The lower, ‘sublunary’ world on which man lived was believed to be composed of four elements – earth, water, air and fire – as illustrated in Vasari’s
Room of the Elements
in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The elements were themselves composed of the four ‘contraries’ – hot, cold, moist and dry.

There were also four levels of earthly existence – human, animal, vegetable and mineral. This is what has been called the ‘great chain of being’.
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The ‘ladder’ of being might be a better term because it makes the underlying hierarchy more evident. Stones were at the bottom of the ladder because they lacked souls. Then came plants, which had what Aristotle called ‘vegetative souls’, animals, which had ‘sensitive souls’ (that is, the capacity to receive sensations) and, at the top, humans, with ‘intellectual souls’ (in other words, the power of understanding). Animals, vegetables and minerals were arranged in hierarchies; the precious stones were higher than the semi-precious ones, the lion was regarded as the king of beasts, and so on.

More difficult to place on the ladder are the nymphs who wander or flee through the poems of the period; or the wood spirits who lived in lonely places and would eat boys (as the grandmother of the poet Poliziano used to tell him when he was small); or the ‘demons’ who lived midway between the Earth and the Moon and could be contacted by magical means (Ficino was one of those who tried). The philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi doubted whether demons existed at all.
²²
It seems, however, that he was expressing a minority view. When reading the poems of the period or looking at Botticelli’s
Primavera
, it is worth bearing in
mind that the supernatural figures represented in them were viewed as part of the population of the universe and not as mere figments of the artist’s imagination.

The status of another earthly power is even more doubtful: Fortune.
²³
Two common images of Fortune associated it, or rather her, with the winds and with a wheel. The wind image seems to be distinctively Italian. The phrase ‘fortune of the sea’ (
fortuna di mare
) meant a tempest, a vivid example of a change in affairs which is both sudden and uncontrollable. The Rucellai family, Florentine patricians, used the device of a sail, still to be seen on the façade of their church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence; here the wind represents fortune and the sail the power of the individual to adapt to circumstances and to manage them.
²⁴

The second image of fortune was the well-known classical one of the goddess with a forelock which must be seized quickly, because she is bald behind. In the twenty-fifth chapter of his
Prince
, Machiavelli recommended impetuosity on the grounds that fortune is a woman, ‘and to keep her under it is necessary to strike her and beat her’ (
è necessario volendola tenere sotto, batterla e urtarla
), while his friend the historian Francesco Guicciardini suggested that it is dangerous to try to make conspiracies foolproof because ‘Fortune, who plays such a large part in all matters, becomes angry with those who try to limit her dominion.’ It is difficult for a modern reader to tell in these instances whether the goddess has been introduced simply to make more memorable conclusions arrived at by other means, or whether she has taken over the argument; whether she is a literary device, or a serious (or at any rate a half-serious) way of describing whatever lies outside human control.
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To understand and manipulate the world of earth, several techniques were available, including alchemy, magic and witchcraft. Their intellectual presuppositions need to be discussed.

Alchemy depended on the idea that there is a hierarchy of metals, with gold as the noblest, and also that the ‘social mobility’ of metals is possible. It was related to astrology because each of the seven metals was associated with one of the planets: gold with the Sun, silver with the Moon, mercury with Mercury, iron with Mars, lead with Saturn, tin with Jupiter, and copper with Venus. It was also related to medicine because the ‘philosopher’s stone’ which the alchemists were looking for was also the cure for all illnesses, the ‘universal panacea’.

Jacob Burckhardt believed that alchemy ‘played only a very
subordinate part’ in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
²⁶
It is dangerous to make general assertions about the popularity of such a deliberately esoteric subject as alchemy, but the odds are that he was wrong. The Venetian Council of Ten took it more seriously when they issued a decree against it in 1488. Several Italian treatises on the subject from the later part of our period have survived. The most famous is a Latin poem, Giovanni Augurello’s
Chrysopoeia
, published in 1515 and dedicated to Leo X; there is a story that the pope rewarded the poet with an empty purse. A certain ‘J. A. Pantheus’, priest of Venice, also dedicated an alchemical work to Leo before inventing a new subject, ‘cabala of metals’, which he carefully distinguished from alchemy, perhaps because the Council of Ten were still hostile. On the other hand, some people treated the claims of the alchemists with scepticism. St Antonino, the fifteenth-century archbishop of Florence, held that the transmutation of metals was beyond human power, while the Sienese metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio suggested that it was ‘a vain wish and fanciful dream’ and that the adepts of alchemy, ‘more inflamed than the very coals in their furnaces’ with the desire to create gold, ought to go mining instead, as he did.
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There are only a few tantalizing indications of the possible relation between alchemy and art and literature. Alchemy had its own symbolic system, possibly adopted as a kind of code, in which, for example, a fountain stood for the purification of metals, Christ for the philosopher’s stone, marriage for the union of sulphur and mercury, a dragon for fire. To complicate matters, some writers used alchemical imagery as symbols of something else (religious truths, for example). The
Dream of Polyphilus
, an anonymous esoteric romance published in Venice in 1499, makes use of a number of these symbols, and it is possible that this love story has an alchemical level of meaning. Vasari tells us that Parmigianino gave up painting for the study of alchemy, and it has been suggested that his paintings make use of alchemical symbolism.
²⁸
Unfortunately, the fact that alchemists used a number of common symbols (while giving them uncommon interpretations) makes the suggestion impossible to verify.

Magic was discussed more openly than alchemy, at least in its white form; for, as Pico della Mirandola put it: