The Italian Renaissance (38 page)

Renaissance Italy was also remarkable for a view of the past taken by some artists and humanists, a view which was possibly more widespread. With the idea of the malleability of institutions, already discussed, went an awareness of change over time, a sense of anachronism or historical distance.
⁴⁹
The term ‘anachronism’ is literally speaking an anachronism itself because the word did not yet exist, but, in his famous critique of the authenticity of the document known as the
Donation of Constantine
, the humanist Lorenzo Valla did point out that the text contained expressions from a later period. He was well aware that ‘modes of speech’ (
stilus loquendi
) were subject to change, that language had a history.
⁵⁰
Another fifteenth-century humanist, Flavio Biondo, argued that Italian and other romance languages had developed out of Latin. Biondo also wrote a book called
Rome Restored
, in which he tried to reconstruct classical Rome on the basis of literary evidence as well as the surviving remains. In another book he discussed the private life of the Romans, the clothes they wore and the way in which they brought up their children.
⁵¹

By the later fifteenth century, this antiquarian sensibility had become fashionable. The humanist
condottiere
Federigo da Montefeltro once asked the humanist pope Pius II, who recorded the question in his memoirs, whether the generals of antiquity wore the same kind of armour as he did (
an prisci duces aeque ac nostri temporis armati fuissent
). In the
Dream of Polyphilus
, the Venetian romance already mentioned, the lover searches for his beloved in a landscape of temples, tombs and obelisks, and even the language is a consciously archaic Latinate Italian.
⁵²
Among the artists whose work illustrates the growing interest in antiquarianism are Mantegna and Giulio Romano. Like his master and father-in-law Jacopo Bellini, Mantegna was extremely interested in copying ancient coins and inscriptions. He was a friend of humanists such as Felice Feliciano of Verona. His reconstructions of ancient Rome in the
Triumphs of Caesar
or the painting of Scipio introducing the cult of the Cybele are the pictorial equivalents of Biondo’s patient work of historical reconstruction, even if they contain some ‘fantastic’ elements.
⁵³
As for Giulio Romano, his painting of Constantine in battle draws heavily on the evidence of Trajan’s Column, as Vasari pointed out in his life of the artist, ‘for the costumes of the soldiers, the armour, ensigns, bastions, stockades, battering rams and all the other instruments of war’.

Vasari himself shared this sense of the past. His
Lives
are organized around the idea of development in time, from Cimabue to Michelangelo. He believed in progress in the arts, at least up to a point, but he also believed that individual artists ought to be judged by the standards of their own day, and he explained: ‘my intention has always been to praise
not absolutely but, as the saying goes, relatively [
non semplicemente ma, come s’usa dire, secondo ché
], having regard to place, time, and other similar circumstances.’
⁵⁴

Another material sign of the awareness of the past is the fake antique, which seems to have been a fifteenth-century innovation. The young Michelangelo made a faun, a Cupid and a Bacchus in the classical style. He was essentially competing with antiquity rather than trying to deceive, but by the early sixteenth century the faking of classical sculptures and Roman coins was a flourishing industry in Venice and Padua in particular, so much so that the Italian engraver Enea Vico, in his
Discourses on Ancient Medals
(1555), told his readers how to distinguish genuine from faked artefacts. This response to two new trends, the fashion for ancient Rome and the rise of the art market, depended – like the detecting of the fakes – on a sense of period style. Texts too might be faked. Some humanists showed their skill by producing texts that they passed off as the work of Cicero and other classical writers, while others demonstrated the same kind of ability by identifying the fakes.
⁵⁵

This new sense of the past is one of the most distinctive but also one of the most paradoxical features of the period. Classical antiquity was studied in order to imitate it more faithfully, but the closer it was studied, the less imitation seemed either possible or desirable. ‘How mistaken are those’, wrote Francesco Guicciardini, ‘who quote the Romans at every step. One would have to have a city with exactly the same conditions as theirs and then act according to their example. That model is as unsuitable for those lacking the right qualities as it would be useless to expect an ass to run like a horse.’
⁵⁶
However, many people did quote the Romans at every step; Guicciardini’s friend Machiavelli was one of them.

Another paradox was that, at a time when Italian culture was strongly marked by the propensity to innovate, innovation was generally considered a bad thing. In political debates in Florence, it was taken for granted that ‘new ways’ (
modi nuovi
) were undesirable, and that ‘every change takes reputation from the city’.
⁵⁷
In Guicciardini’s
History of Italy
, the term ‘change’ (
mutazione
) seems to be used in a pejorative sense, and when a man is described, as is Pope Julius II, as ‘desirous of new things’ (
desideroso di cose nuove
), the overtones of disapproval are distinctly audible. Innovation in the arts was doubtless less dangerous, but it was rarely admitted to be innovation. It was generally perceived as a return to the past. When Filarete praises Renaissance architecture and condemns the Gothic, it is
the latter which he calls ‘modern’ (
moderno
). It is only at the end of the period that one can find someone (Vasari, for example) cheerfully admitting to being
moderno
himself (above p. 19).

Classical views of the physical constitution of man, and the distinction between four personality types (choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholy), were taken seriously by writers in this period, which was an important one in the history of medicine.
⁵⁸
These views are not without relevance to the arts. Ficino, for example, joined the suggestion (which comes from a text attributed to Aristotle) that all great men are melancholies to Plato’s concept of inspiration as divine frenzy, and argued that creative people (
ingeniosi
) were melancholic and even ‘frantic’ (
furiosi
). He was thinking of poets in particular, but Vasari applied his doctrine to artists and so helped create the modern myth of the bohemian (above, pp. 88–90).
⁵⁹

However, the major theme of this section is inevitably one which contemporaries did not discuss in treatises but was discovered (or, as some critics would say, invented) by Jacob Burckhardt: Renaissance individualism. ‘In the Middle Ages’, wrote Burckhardt, in one of the most frequently quoted passages of his essay, ‘… Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family or corporation, only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air … man became a spiritual
individual
, and recognized himself as such.’
⁶⁰
He went on to discuss the passion for fame and its corrective, the new sense of ridicule, all under the general rubric of ‘the development of the individual’. For the use of this ‘blanket term’ he has been severely criticized.
⁶¹
Burckhardt himself came to be rather sceptical about the interpretation he had launched, and towards the end of his life he confessed to an acquaintance: ‘You know, so far as individualism is concerned, I hardly believe in it anymore, but I don’t say so; it gives people so much pleasure.’
⁶²

The objections are difficult to gainsay, since urban Italians of this period were very much conscious of themselves as members of families or corporations.
⁶³
And
yet we need the idea of individualism, or something like it. The idea of the self, as the anthropologist Marcel Mauss pointed out more than half a century ago, is not natural. It is a social construct, and it has a social history.
⁶⁴
Indeed, the concept of person that is current (indeed, taken for granted) in a particular culture needs to be understood if we are to comprehend that culture, and, as another anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, has suggested, it is a direct path into that culture for an outsider.
⁶⁵

If we ask about the concept of person current – among elites, at least – in Renaissance Italy, we may find it useful to distinguish the self-consciousness with which Burckhardt was particularly concerned from self-assertiveness, and to distinguish both from the idea of the unique individual.
⁶⁶

The idea of the uniqueness of the individual goes with that of a personal style in painting or writing, an idea which has been discussed already (above, p. 28). At the court of Urbino, the poet Bernardo Accolti went by the nickname ‘L’unico Aretino’. The poet Vittoria Colonna described Michelangelo as
unico
. An anonymous Milanese poem declares that, just as there is only one God in Heaven, so there is only one ‘Moro’ (Ludovico Sforza) on earth. In his biographies, the bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci often refers to men as ‘singular’ (
singolare
).

There is rather more to say about self-assertion. Burckhardt argued that the craving for fame was a new phenomenon in the Renaissance. The Dutch historian Huizinga retorted that, on the contrary, it was ‘essentially the same as the chivalrous ambition of earlier times’.
⁶⁷
The romances of chivalry do indeed suggest that the desire for fame was one of the leading motives of medieval knights, so what Burckhardt noticed may have been no more than the demilitarization of glory. However, it is remarkable quite how often self-assertion words occur in the Italian literature of this period. Among them we find ‘competition’ (
concertazione
,
concorrenza
), ‘emulation’ (
emulazione
), ‘glory’ (
gloria
), ‘envy’ (
invidia
), ‘honour’ (
onore
), ‘shame’ (
vergogna
), ‘valour’ (
valore
) and, hardest of all to translate,
virtù
, a concept of great importance in the period referring to personal worth, which we have already met when discussing its complementary
opposite, fortune.
⁶⁸
Psychologists would say that, if words of this kind occur with unusual frequency in a particular text, as they do, for example, in the dialogue on the family by the humanist Leon Battista Alberti, then its author is likely to have had an above-average achievement drive, which in Alberti’s case his career does nothing to refute. That the Florentines in general were unusually concerned with achievement is suggested by the
novelle
of the period, which often deal with the humiliation of a rival.
⁶⁹
The suggestion is confirmed by the institutionalization of competitions between artists; by the sharp tongues and the envy in the artistic community, as recorded by Vasari, notably in his life of Castagno; and, not least, by the remarkable creative record of that city.

At any rate self-assertion was an important part of the Italian, and especially the Florentine, image of man. The humanists Bruni and Alberti both described life as a race. Bruni wrote that some ‘do not run in the race, or when they start, become tired and give up half way’; Alberti, that life was a regatta in which there were only a few prizes: ‘Thus in the race and competition for honour and glory in the life of man it seems to me very useful to provide oneself with a good ship and to give an opportunity to one’s powers and ability (
alle forze e ingegno tuo
), and with this to sweat to be the first.’
⁷⁰
For a hostile account of the same kind of struggle, we may turn to the Sienese pope Pius II (who was not exactly backward in the race to the top), and his complaint that ‘In the courts of princes the greatest effort is devoted to pushing others down and climbing up oneself.’
⁷¹
Leonardo da Vinci recommended artists to draw in company because ‘a sound envy’ would act as a stimulus to do better.
⁷²
Rivalry between artists was not confined to Tuscans such as Leonardo and Michelangelo but involved Raphael and Titian as well, to mention only the most famous names.
⁷³

It is not unreasonable to suggest that competition encourages self-consciousness, and interesting to discover that the Tuscan evidence for this kind of individualism is once again richer than anything to be found elsewhere. The classic phrase of the Delphic oracle, ‘know thyself’, quoted by Marsilio Ficino among others, was taken seriously in the period, although it was sometimes given a more worldly interpretation than was originally intended.

The most direct evidence of self-awareness is that of autobiographies
or, more exactly (since the modern term ‘autobiography’ encourages an anachronistic view of the genre), of diaries and journals written in the first person, of which there are about a hundred surviving from Florence alone.
⁷⁴
The local name for this kind of literature was
ricordanze
, which might be translated ‘memoranda’, a suitably vague word for a genre which had something of the account book and something of the city chronicle in it, and was focused on the family, but none the less reveals something about the individual who wrote it – the apothecary Luca Landucci, for example, who has been quoted more than once in these pages, or Machiavelli’s father Bernardo, or the Florentine patrician Giovanni Rucellai, who left a notebook dealing with a variety of subjects, a ‘mixed salad’ as he called it.
⁷⁵
Even if these memoranda were not intended to express self-awareness, they may have helped to create it. Rather more personal in style are the autobiographies of Pope Pius II (written, like Caesar’s, in the third person, but none the less self-assertive for that), Guicciardini (a brief but revealing memoir), the physician Girolamo Cardano (a Lombard, for once, not a Florentine) and the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini.