The Italian Renaissance (5 page)

I
n the age of the cultural movement known as the Renaissance, more or less the two centuries 1350–1550, Italy was neither a social nor a cultural unit, although the concept of ‘Italia’ existed. It was simply ‘a geographical expression’, as Count Metternich said in 1814 (nearly half a century before Italy would become a unified state). However, geography influences both society and culture. For example, the geography of the region encouraged Italians to devote more attention to commerce and the crafts than their neighbours did. The central location of the peninsula in Europe, and easy access to the sea, gave its merchants the opportunity to become middlemen between East and West, while its terrain, one-fifth mountainous and three-fifths hilly, made farming more difficult than it was in England (say) or France. It is hardly surprising that Italian cities such as Genoa, Venice and Florence should have played a leading part in the commercial revolution of the thirteenth century, or that in 1300 some twenty-three cities in north and central Italy had populations of 20,000 or more apiece. City-republics were the dominant form of political organization at this time. A relatively numerous urban population and a high degree of urban autonomy underpinned the unusual importance of the educated layman (and to a lesser degree the educated laywoman). It would be difficult to understand the cultural and social developments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries without reference to these preconditions.
¹

In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, a number of city-states lost their independence, and in the 1340s Italians, like people elsewhere in Europe and in the Middle East, were hit by slump and plague. However, the tradition of the urban way of life and of an educated laity survived and was central to the Renaissance, a minority movement that probably meant little or nothing to the majority of the population. Most Italians, about 9 or 10 million people altogether, were peasants, living
for the most part in poverty. They too had a culture, which is worth study, can be studied and has been studied, but it is not the subject of this book, which is concerned with new developments in the arts in their social context.

The aim of this book is to place, or re-place, the painting, sculpture, architecture, music, literature and learning of Renaissance Italy in their original environment, the society of the period – its ‘culture’ in the wider sense of that flexible term. In order to do this it is advisable to begin with a brief description of the main characteristics of the arts at this time. In this description the stress will fall on the viewpoint of posterity rather than that of contemporaries. (Their point of view is discussed in
chapters 5 to 7
). Although they sometimes wrote of ‘rebirth’, they did not have a clear and distinct idea of the Renaissance as a period. They were interested in poetry and rhetoric, but our idea of ‘literature’ would have been foreign to them, while a concept something like our ‘work of art’ was only just beginning to emerge at the end of the period.

This description will emphasize characteristics common to several arts more than those which seem to be restricted to one of them, and attempt to present the period as a whole (leaving the discussion of trends within it to
chapter 10
). The cultural unity of the age will not be assumed (as it was, for example, by Jacob Burckhardt), but it will be taken as a hypothesis to be tested.
²

The conventional nineteenth-century view of the arts in Renaissance Italy (a view still widely shared today, despite the labours of art historians) might be summarized as follows. The arts flourished, and their new realism, secularism and individualism all show that the Middle Ages were over and that the modern world had begun. However, all these assumptions have been questioned by critics and historians alike. If they can be saved, it is only at the price of radical reformulations.

To say that the arts ‘flourished’ in a particular society is to say, surely, that better work was produced there than in many other societies, which leads one straight out of the realm of the empirically verifiable. It no longer seems as obvious as it once did that medieval art is inferior to that of the Renaissance. Raphael has been judged a great artist and Ariosto a great writer from their own time to the present, but there has been no such consensus about Michelangelo, Masaccio or Josquin des Près, however high their reputation now stands. All the same, few would quarrel with the suggestion that Renaissance Italy was a society where
artistic achievements ‘clustered’.
³
The clusters are most spectacular in painting, from Masaccio (or indeed from Giotto) to Titian; in sculpture, from Donatello (or from Nicola Pisano in the thirteenth century) to Michelangelo; and in architecture, from Brunelleschi to Palladio. The economic historian Richard Goldthwaite asks, ‘Why did Italy produce so much art in the Renaissance?’ Not only ‘more art’, but also ‘a greater variety’.
⁴

Literature in the vernacular is a more difficult case. After Dante and Petrarch comes what has been called the ‘century without poetry’ (1375–1475), which is in turn followed by the achievements of Poliziano, Ariosto and many others. The fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries are great ages of Italian prose, but the fifteenth century is not (partly because scholars preferred to write in Latin).
⁵
In the realm of ideas, there are many outstanding figures – Alberti, Leonardo, Machiavelli – and a major movement, that of the ‘humanists’, most exactly defined as the teachers of the ‘humanities’.
⁶

The most conspicuous gaps in this account of Italian achievements are to be found in music and mathematics. Although much fine music was composed in Renaissance Italy, most of it was the work of Netherlanders, and it is only in the sixteenth century that composers of the calibre of the Gabrielis and Costanzo Festa appear. In mathematics, the famous Bologna school belongs to the later sixteenth century.
⁷

It is more useful to investigate innovation rather than ‘flourishing’ in the arts because the concept is more precise. In Italy, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were certainly a period of innovation in the arts, a time of new genres, new styles, new techniques. The period is full of ‘firsts’. This was the age of the first oil-painting, the first woodcut, the first copperplate and the first printed book (though all these innovations came to Italy from Germany or the Netherlands). The rules of linear perspective were discovered and put to use by artists at this time.
⁸

The line dividing new from old is more difficult to draw in the case of genres than in the case of techniques, but the changes are obvious enough.
In sculpture we see the rise of the free-standing statue, and more especially that of the equestrian monument and the portrait-bust.
⁹
In painting, too, the portrait emerged as an independent genre.
¹⁰
It was followed rather more slowly by the landscape and the still-life.
¹¹
In architecture, one scholar has described the fifteenth century as the age of the ‘invention’ of conscious town planning, although some medieval towns had been designed on a grid plan.
¹²
In literature, there was the rise of the comedy, the tragedy and the pastoral (whether drama or romance).
¹³
In music, the emergence of the
frottola
and the madrigal, both types of song for several voices.
¹⁴
Art theory, literary theory, music theory and political theory all became more autonomous in this period.
¹⁵
In education, we see the rise of what is now called ‘humanism’ and was then called ‘the studies of humanity’ (
studia humanitatis
), an academic package which emphasized five subjects in particular, all concerned with language or morals: grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and ethics.
¹⁶

Innovation was conscious, though it was sometimes seen and presented as revival. The classic statement about innovation in the visual arts is that of the mid-sixteenth-century artist-historian Giorgio Vasari, with his three-stage theory of progress since the age of the ‘barbarians’. The same pride in innovations is noticeable in his description of his own work in Naples, the first frescoes ‘painted in the modern manner’ (
lavorati modernamente
). He makes frequent contemptuous references to what he calls the ‘Greek style’ and the ‘German style’ – in other words, Byzantine and Gothic art.
¹⁷
Musicians also thought that great innovations had been made in the fifteenth century. Johannes de Tinctoris,
a Netherlander living in Italy, writing in the 1470s, dated the rise of modern composers (the
moderni
) to the 1430s, adding that, ‘Although it seems beyond belief, there does not exist a single piece of music regarded by the learned as worth hearing which was not composed within the last forty years.’
¹⁸

This disrespectful attitude to the past suggests the possibility that one reason for the central place of Italy in the Renaissance was the fact that Italian artists had been less closely associated with the Gothic style than their colleagues in France, Germany or England. Innovations often take place in regions where the previously dominant tradition has penetrated less deeply than elsewhere. Germany, for example, was less deeply affected by the Enlightenment than France, and this facilitated the German transition to Romanticism. Similarly, it may have been easier to develop a new style of architecture in Florence in the fifteenth century than in Paris or even Milan.

All the same, Renaissance Italians had not lost their reverence for tradition altogether. What they did was to repudiate recent tradition in the name of a more ancient one. Their admiration for classical antiquity allowed them to attack medieval tradition as itself a break with tradition. When, for example, the fifteenth-century architect Antonio Filarete referred to ‘modern’ architecture, he meant the Gothic style which he was rejecting.
¹⁹
His position was not unlike that of the rebels and reformers of late medieval and early modern Europe, who regularly claimed to be going back to the ‘good old days’, before certain evil customs had become established. In any case the enthusiasm for classical antiquity is one of the main characteristics of the Renaissance movement, which cultural historians have to make intelligible, whether they discuss it in terms of the affinity between the two cultures, as a means of legitimating innovation in a traditional society, or as an extension to the arts of the political glamour of ancient Rome.

In architecture, this tendency to imitate the Greeks and Romans is particularly obvious. The treatise by the Roman writer Vitruvius was studied, and ancient buildings were measured, in order to learn the classical ‘language’ of architecture, not only the vocabulary (pediments, egg-and-dart mouldings, Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns, and so on) but also the grammar, the rules for combining the different elements. In the case of sculpture, such innovations as the portrait-bust and the equestrian statue were ancient genres revived.
²⁰
In the case of literature, it is
again easy to see how writers of comedy imitated the Romans Terence and Plautus, writers of tragedy, Seneca, and writers of epic, Virgil.

Painting and music are more intriguing cases because classical models were not available (the Roman paintings now discussed by scholars were discovered only in the eighteenth century or later). The lack of concrete exemplars did not rule out imitation on the basis of literary sources. Botticelli’s
Calumny
and his
Birth of Venus
, for example, are attempts to reconstruct lost works by the Greek painter Apelles.
²¹
The literary criticism of classical writers such as Aristotle and Horace was pressed into service to provide criteria for excellence in painting on the principle that, ‘as is poetry, so is painting’.
²²
Discussions of what Greek music must have been like were based on passages in Plato or on classical treatises such as Ptolemy’s
Harmonika
.
²³
However, this interest in Greek music comes relatively late, in the sixteenth century. For this reason the idea of a musical ‘Renaissance’ in the fifteenth century has been challenged.
²⁴

Contemporary descriptions of changes in the arts are indispensable sources for understanding what was happening, but, like other historical sources, they cannot be taken at their face value. Contemporaries generally claimed to be imitating the ancients and breaking with the recent past, but in practice they borrowed from both traditions and followed neither completely. As so often happens, the new was added to the old rather than substituted for it. Classical gods and goddesses did not drive the medieval saints out of Italian art but coexisted and interacted with them. Botticelli’s Venuses are difficult to distinguish from his Madonnas, while Michelangelo modelled the Christ in his
Last Judgement
on a classical Apollo. In sixteenth-century Venice, inventories of furnishings show that religious paintings in the ‘Greek’ style (in other words, icons) continued to be displayed.
²⁵
Architecture in particular developed hybrid forms, partly classical and partly Gothic.
²⁶
As we have seen (above, pp. 12–14), cultural hybridity and cultural translation are much older than our own age of globalization.