The Italian Renaissance (43 page)

There is certainly a case for arguing that some at least of the states of Renaissance Italy were precociously bureaucratic, thanks to Italian urbanization and the consequent spread of literacy and numeracy, discussed above; thanks to the existence of republics, where loyalty was focused not on the ruler but the impersonal state; and thanks to the existence in Italy of the capital of a huge international organization, the Catholic Church. The distinction between public and private was certainly drawn quite explicitly by some contemporaries, such as the speaker in Alberti’s dialogue on the family who rejected the idea of treating
the former in any way as if it were the latter (
ch’io in modo alcuno facessi del publico privato
).
³⁷
There was an institutional means of preventing officials confusing public and private to their own advantage: the
sindacato
. When an official’s term of office expired in Florence, Milan and Naples, he had to remain behind until his activities had been investigated by special commissioners or ‘syndics’. The pope’s dual role as head of the Church and ruler of the Papal States also encouraged awareness of the distinction between an individual and his office.
³⁸

Again, full-time officials were relatively numerous, especially in Rome, and a doctorate in law was something of a professional training for them. Some had tenure and developed a corporate ethos. Fixed money salaries were not uncommon, and some of them were relatively high. In Venice at the beginning of the sixteenth century, secretaries in the chancery averaged 125 ducats a year, about the salary of branch managers of the Medici Bank. Attempts were made to ensure appointment by merit rather than by purchase, favour or neighbourhood. In Rome, too, the role of secretaries increased in importance in the period.
³⁹

In the greater Italian states, there was considerable demarcation of function between officials. In Milan under Ludovico Sforza, for example, there was a secretary for ecclesiastical affairs, a secretary for justice and a secretary for foreign affairs, who was in turn served by subordinates who specialized in the affairs of different states.
⁴⁰
In Florence and Venice specialist committees were set up, concerned with trade, naval affairs, defence, and so on. In Rome in the later sixteenth century, Pope Sixtus V set up ‘congregations’ or standing committees of cardinals with specialized functions ranging from ritual to the navy. It was in Renaissance Italy that diplomacy first became specialized and professionalized.
⁴¹

The importance of written records in administration was increasing. In the fifteenth century, a bishop of Modena was already declaring that he did not want to be a chancellor or ambassador and live in ‘a world of paper’ (
un mundo de carta
).
⁴²
The most striking examples of the collection of information come from the censuses, notably the Florentine
catasto
of 1427, dealing with every individual under the rule of the Florentine
Signoria
.
⁴³
It was, of course, less difficult to undertake a census of a small state like Florence than of a large one like France. As for the filing and retrieval of information, some sixteenth-century rulers such as Cosimo de’Medici,
grand duke of Tuscany, and popes Sixtus V and Gregory XIII, took a particular interest in the setting up of archives.
⁴⁴
There was also increasing awareness, in Rome in particular, of the need for budgeting – in other words, for calculating income and expenditure in advance.
⁴⁵

One is left with an impression of Italian self-consciousness and innovation in the political field as in that of the arts. In so far as a bureaucratic mode of domination had developed, it is useful to speak of a ‘Renaissance state’. All the same, the extent and speed of change must not be exaggerated. Italy had no lack of courts, and at court, as we have seen, public administration was not separated from the private household of the ruler; loyalty was focused on a man, not an institution, and the ruler by-passed the system whenever he wished to grant a favour to a suitor. In appointments and promotions, the prime necessity was the prince’s favour. As Pius II remarked in his complaint of the miseries of courtiers, ‘at the courts of princes, what matters is not what you do but who you are’ (
non enim servitia in curiis principum sed personae ponderantur
).
⁴⁶

At the court of Rome, official positions were regularly sold, especially in the reign of Leo X, and the department of the Datary grew up to deal with this business.
⁴⁷
Offices were also sold in the states of Milan and Naples.
⁴⁸
The buyer of the office might not exercise it in person but ‘farm’ it – in other words, pay a substitute to perform the duties for the fraction of the proceeds, like the ‘vicar’ in a parish. Offices were seen as investments and were expected to bring in an income. However, official salaries were often inadequate. In Milan in the middle of the fifteenth century, the chancellor of the duke’s council was paid little more than an unskilled labourer. Administrators relied on presents, fees and other perquisites, such as the right to a proportion of confiscated goods.

Even the administration of republics was in many ways far removed from Max Weber’s model of an impersonally efficient bureaucracy. Indeed, in some respects, such as the corporate ethos of officials, Florence seems to have been less bureaucratic than Milan.
⁴⁹
The official system may have stressed equality and merit, but one also has to take into account what Italians today call the
sottogoverno
, the underbelly of the administration. In Venice, for example, some offices were bought, sold and given as dowries. In any Italian state of this period it is difficult to
overestimate the importance of family connections and also of what was known euphemistically as ‘friendship’ (
amicizia
) – in other words, the links between powerful patrons and their dependents or ‘clients’. The many surviving letters addressed to members of the Medici family in the years immediately before Cosimo came to power in 1434 give a vivid impression of the importance of
amicizia
to both parties. These letters give substance to the contemporary complaint by Giovanni Cavalcanti that the Florentine commune ‘was governed at dinners and in private studies [
alle cene e negli scrittoi
] rather than in the Palace’.
⁵⁰

Many of the political conflicts of the time were struggles between rival ‘factions’ – in other words, between groups of patrons and clients. Perugia, where the Oddi fought the Baglioni, and Pistoia, where the Panciatichi fought the Cancellieri, were notorious for their factionalism. As Machiavelli put it in the twentieth chapter of his
The Prince
, it was necessary ‘to control Pistoia by means of factions’ (
tenere Pistoia con le parti
). Local rivalries continued to give some substance to the venerable party terms ‘Guelf’ (originally a supporter of the pope) and ‘Ghibelline’ (a supporter of the emperor) as late as the sixteenth century. The importance of patronage in political and social life gave its force to the Italian proverb ‘You can’t get to heaven without saints’ (
Senza santi non si va in Paradiso
), picturing the next world in the image of this one. The patronage of artists and writers formed part of this wider system.

At this point we may return to the links between politics and culture. Following Norbert Elias, it has been argued that Renaissance Italy illustrates the links between ‘state formation’ and ‘civilization’.
⁵¹
More precisely, we might say that the organization of both political and artistic life was taking increasingly complex and sophisticated forms in Italy, which was in these ways ahead of many other parts of Europe. Given the contrast between different Italian regimes, a more precise question is also worth asking. Which was the better form of government for the arts, the republic or the principality?
⁵²
Contemporaries discussed the question, but their opinions were divided. Leonardo Bruni argued, as we have seen (p. 32), that Roman culture flourished and died with the republic, and Pius II suggested that ‘The study of letters flourished most of all at Athens, while it was a free city, and at Rome, while the consuls ruled the commonwealth.’
⁵³
On the other hand, the fifteenth-century humanist Giovanni Conversino da Ravenna complained bitterly: ‘Where
the multitude rules, there is no respect for any accomplishment that does not yield a profit … everybody has as much contempt for the poets as he is ignorant of them, and will rather keep dogs than maintain scholars or teachers.’
⁵⁴

The fact that the two great republics, Florence and Venice, were the cities where most artists and writers originated is an obvious point in favour of the Bruni thesis. However, it is not enough to record a correlation; we have to try to explain it. Although it is impossible to measure the achievement drive, it is reasonable to expect it to be greater in republics because they are organized on the principle of competition, so that parents are more likely to bring up their children to try to excel over others. One might also expect this drive to be stronger in Florence, where the system was more open, than in Venice, where the major public offices were virtually monopolized by the nobility. So it was better for artists and writers to be born in a republic; they had a better chance of developing their talents.

After these talents had been developed, however, patronage was needed, and in this case it is less easy to say which political system benefited artists and writers most. In republics there was civic patronage, at its most vigorous in Florence in the early fifteenth century, when artisans still participated in the government, while Brunelleschi was elected to one of the highest offices, that of ‘prior’, in 1425. It was helped by
campanilismo
, a sense of local patriotism fuelled by rivalry with the neighbouring commune and expressed architecturally in the magnificent town halls of the period (the Sienese deliberately built their tower higher than that of Florence). Civic patronage was weaker in the later fifteenth century and weaker in Venice than in Florence, despite the official and quasi-official positions of Bembo, Titian and others. It is not surprising to find artists who had been born and trained in republics attracted to courts – Leonardo to Milan, Michelangelo to Rome, and so on. An enterprising prince who was willing to spend the money could make his court an artistic centre fairly quickly, by buying up artists who were already in practice. What he could not do was to produce artists. Whether young men chose to follow the career of artist or not depended, as we have seen, on the social structure.

One reason for the trend towards bureaucratic government not going further was that impersonal administration was impossible in what was still essentially a face-to-face society. Only two cities, Naples and Venice,
had populations over 100,000. Loyalty to one’s quarter of town, or ward, or
rione
(as in Rome), or
sestiere
(as in Venice) was strong, a loyalty which has survived – whatever the reason – among the
contrade
of Siena today and is symbolized in the famous annual race, the
palio
.
⁵⁵
Within the quarter, the neighbourhood (
vicinanza
) was a meaningful unit, a stage for local dramas of solidarity and enmity. In Florence, the neighbourhood, or more exactly the
gonfalone
(a quarter within the quarter, or a sixteenth of the city), was a focus for political activity, as has been shown by studies of the ‘Red Lion’ and ‘Green Dragon’.
⁵⁶
The parish was often a community, and so was the street, which was frequently dominated by a particular trade, such as the goldsmiths in Via del Pellegrino in Rome. Cities were small enough for the sound of a particular bell, such as the
marangone
in Venice or the bell in the Torre del Mangia in Siena, to announce the opening of the gates, or the beginning of the working day, or to call the citizens to arms or to a council.
⁵⁷
Official impersonality was hindered by the fact that citizens might know officials in their private roles.

Renaissance Florence seems in some ways more like a village than a city, in the sense that so many of the artists and writers with whom we are concerned knew one another, often intimately. A vivid illustration of relationships in this face-to-face society is the meeting of experts called by the
Opera del Duomo
of Florence in 1503 to decide where to display Michelangelo’s
David
. Present were thirty men, mainly artists, including Leonardo, Botticelli, Perugino, Piero di Cosimo, Cosimo Rosselli, the Sangallos and Andrea Sansovino, all recorded in the minutes as discussing one another’s suggestions. ‘Cosimo has said exactly where I think it should go’, says Botticelli, and so on.
⁵⁸

However, Italian society was certainly complicated enough to need an elaborate system of classification. The range of occupations was expanding, especially what we now call ‘professions’ – not only lawyers and physicians, but professors, managers and secretaries.
⁵⁹
A simple way of illustrating this complexity is to quote a few examples of annual income, in lire, in order to show the range in variation, which works out at 3,500 to 1.
⁶⁰