The Italian Renaissance (8 page)

T
he problem of explaining the clustering of so many outstandingly creative individuals in this period – as in the case of ancient Greece and Rome – is one which has concerned historians since the Renaissance itself. The humanist Leonardo Bruni believed that politics was the key to the problem. Like Tacitus, he thought that the end of the Roman Republic had meant the decline of Roman culture. ‘After the Republic had been subjected to the power of a single head, those outstanding minds vanished, as Tacitus says.’ Conversely, he suggested (at least by implication) that the literary achievements of the Florentines were the result of their liberty.
¹
A hundred years later, Machiavelli remarked that letters flourish in a society later than arms; first come the captains, then the philosophers.
²

It was Giorgio Vasari, however, who first offered a detailed analysis of the problem. Vasari is, of course, the most indispensable source for the art history of the Italian Renaissance: a writer who was also an artist (though he lived towards the end of the period, so that he is as far away from Masaccio as we are from the Pre-Raphaelites, and his information is correspondingly second- or third-hand). We use him, as some Renaissance architects used the ruins of ancient Rome, as a quarry for raw material. However, we should remember that he was himself, in collaboration with the Florentine scholar Don Vincenzo Borghini, a serious historian.
³
Although he was concerned most with individual achievement, Vasari found room in his lives of painters, sculptors and architects for what we might call the social factor. Impressed by the clustering of talents of the order of Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio, he commented that ‘It is Nature’s custom, when she creates a man who really excels in some profession, often not to create him by himself, but to
produce another at the same time and in a neighbouring place to compete with him.’
⁴

Vasari also addressed himself, in his life of Perugino, to the problem of explaining the outsized contribution of Florence to the arts, placing into the mouth of Perugino’s teacher the suggestion that three incentives were present in that city which were generally lacking elsewhere.

The first was the fact that many people were extremely critical (because the air was conducive to freedom of thought), and that men were not satisfied with mediocre works … Secondly, that it was necessary to be industrious in order to live, which meant using one’s wits and judgement all the time … for Florence did not have a large or fertile countryside round about it, so that men could not live cheaply there as they could in other places. Thirdly … came the greed for honour and glory which that air generates in men of every occupation.

Modern readers may find this emphasis on the air as the ultimate cause rather difficult to take seriously, but this difficulty should not prevent them from seeing that Vasari has offered explanations of what we would call an economic, social and psychological kind, in terms of challenge and response and the need for achievement.

It was only in the eighteenth century, however, that what contemporaries called the ‘history of manners’, which more or less coincides with what we describe as cultural and social history, became the object of systematic study. Voltaire, for example, tried to shift the attention of historians from wars to the arts. His
Essay on Manners
(1756) made the point – in language not unlike Vasari’s – that the sixteenth century was a time when ‘nature produced extraordinary men in almost all fields, above all in Italy’.
⁵

Enlightenment writers offered essentially two explanations for this phenomenon: liberty and opulence. Lord Shaftesbury explained the ‘revival of painting’ by the ‘civil liberty, the free states of Italy as Venice, Genoa and then Florence’.
⁶
If Gibbon had written the history of Florence which he once planned, it is likely that the relation between liberty and the arts would have been a central theme, as it was in his famous
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. In any case the book he failed to write, or something like it, was produced only a few years later by the Liverpool banker William Roscoe.
⁷
His
Life of Lorenzo de’Medici
(1795) began as follows:

Florence has been remarkable in modern history for the frequency and violence of its internal dissensions, and for the predilection of its inhabitants for every species of science, and every production of art. However discordant these characteristics may appear, they are not difficult to reconcile … The defence of freedom has always been found to expand and strengthen the mind.

The liberty theme was developed still further in the
History of the Italian Republics
(1807–18) by the Swiss historian J. C. L. S. de Sismondi.

A common Enlightenment view was that liberty encouraged commerce, while commerce encouraged culture. As Charles Burney, the historian of music, put it, ‘All the arts seem to have been the companions, if not the produce, of successful commerce; and they will, in general, be found to have pursued the same course … that is, like commerce, they will be found, upon enquiry, to have appeared first in Italy; then in the Hanseatic towns; next in the Netherlands.’
⁸
The social theorists of Scotland agreed. Adam Ferguson noted that ‘the progress of fine arts has generally made a part in the history of prosperous nations’; John Millar of Glasgow pointed out that Florence led the way in ‘manufactures’ as well as in the arts; and Adam Smith planned to write a book about the relationship between the arts and sciences and society in general in which it is likely that – as in his
Wealth of Nations
– the city-states of Italy would have had a prominent place.
⁹

The Scottish theorists dreamed of a science of society on Newtonian lines. It is not unfair to describe their model of cultural change as a mechanical one. At much the same time, an alternative, organic model was being created in Germany. J. J. Winckelmann took the important step of replacing the lives of artists, in the manner of Vasari, by a
History of Ancient Art
(1764), in which he discussed the relation between art and the climate, the political system, and so on, in order to make art history ‘systematically intelligible’.
¹⁰
J. G. Herder did much to develop the history of literature, which he saw as growing naturally out of particular local environments. Where the Scottish theorists had discussed cultural changes in terms of the impact of commerce, Herder saw art and society as parts of the same whole. ‘As men live and think, so they build and inhabit.’ In the case of Italy, he stressed the ‘spirit’ of commerce, of industry, of competition.
¹¹
A similar stress on the organic unity of a given culture can be found in the
Philosophy of History
(1837) of the philosopher G. W. F.
Hegel, who described the arts (like politics, law and religion) as so many ‘objectifications’ of spirit, the ‘spirit of the age’. Discussing the Renaissance, Hegel suggested that the flowering of the arts, the revival of learning and the discovery of America were three related instances of spiritual expansion.
¹²

Karl Marx was also interested in the place of the Renaissance in world history. Rejecting Hegel’s emphasis on consciousness (‘life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life’), he returned to the eighteenth-century concern with the relation between the arts and the economy, though he showed more interest than Ferguson or even Adam Smith in the precise relationship between material production and what he called ‘cultural production’ (
geistige Produktion
). Marx and Engels (1846) suggested that the cultural ‘superstructure’ was shaped by the economic ‘base’ and that, in the case of the Italian Renaissance, ‘Whether an individual like Raphael succeeds in developing his talent depends wholly on demand, which in turn depends on the division of labour and the conditions of human culture resulting from it.’
¹³
A complementary point about ‘supply’ rather than ‘demand’ and the role of the individual in the history of the Renaissance was made by the Russian Marxist Plekhanov (1898) when he wrote that, ‘If … Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci had died in their infancy, Italian art would have been less perfect, but the general trend of its development in the period of the Renaissance would have remained the same. Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo did not create this trend; they were merely its best representatives.’
¹⁴

It should by now be obvious that Jacob Burckhardt’s famous study of
The Civilization of the Renaissance
in Italy, first published in 1860 and still influential, stands in a long tradition of attempts to relate culture to society. Burckhardt’s discovery of Italy was, like Winckelmann’s, one of the great experiences of his life. He came from an art-loving patrician family of Basel, which when he was born in 1818 was still a quasi-city-state, much like Florence. In the middle of the eighteenth century, a member of a rival family expressed the hope that ‘Heaven would deliver us from these Medicis!’
¹⁵
Burckhardt himself was something of a ‘universal man’ who sketched, played the piano, and wrote music and poetry.

Renaissance Italy was for him not unlike an idealized version of the world
of his youth, as well as an escape from the modern, centralized, industrial society he hated. Himself a ‘good private individual’, he saw the Renaissance as an age of individualism.
¹⁶
In this sense his interpretation was a contribution to what has been called the nineteenth-century ‘myth of the Renaissance’.
¹⁷
His ‘essay’, as he called it, also owes a good deal to his predecessors. Like Voltaire and Sismondi, he emphasized the importance for Renaissance culture of the wealth and freedom of the towns of northern Italy. Burckhardt’s approach also owes something to Herder, Hegel, and perhaps Schopenhauer, despite the fact he claimed to put forward no philosophy of history, preferring to study what he called ‘cross-sections’ through a culture at particular moments in time. He shared with the philosophers a concern with the polarities of inner and outer, subjective and objective, conscious and unconscious. His study of Renaissance Italy resembles Hegel’s discussion of ancient Greece in its stress on the growth of individualism and its awareness of the state as a ‘work of art’. Like Herder and Hegel, Burckhardt believed that some periods, at least, should be seen as wholes, and in his
Reflections on History
he analysed societies in terms of the reciprocal interaction of three ‘powers’: the state, culture and religion.
¹⁸
In so doing he made explicit his method in
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
.

One does not have to be a Marxist to be struck by the absence from both studies of a fourth ‘power’: the economy. Burckhardt admitted this himself. To a younger friend he wrote fourteen years after the publication of his
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
that ‘your ideas about the early financial development of Italy as the foundation (
Grundlage
) of the Renaissance are extremely important and fruitful. That was what my research always lacked.’
¹⁹

What that study also lacked, as its author again admitted, was any serious discussion of Renaissance art. Burckhardt had been collecting material on the prices of paintings and on patronage, and these and other papers were found after his death with instructions that they were not to be printed. His executors were able to print three late essays on the art collector, the altarpiece and the portrait. But these essays, fascinating as they are, do not fill the gap.
²⁰
Nor does the volume on the architecture of Renaissance Italy, despite its occasional remarks on the functions of buildings. It is possible that the gap was left deliberately. Although he was interested in the relation between the three ‘powers’, each shaping and in turn being shaped by the other two, Burckhardt also believed that ‘the connection of art with general culture is only to be understood loosely and lightly. Art has its own life and history.’

This last remark was made by Burckhardt in conversation with his pupil Heinrich Wölfflin, who was in a sense his intellectual heir. Wölfflin is often described as a supporter of an autonomous (or even isolationist) art history, but his approach was more subtle and somewhat ambivalent. He distinguished two approaches to innovation in the arts: the ‘internalist’ approach with which he is generally associated, which accounts for change in terms of an inner development, and the ‘externalist’ approach, according to which ‘to explain a style … can mean nothing other than to place it in its general historical context and to verify that it speaks in harmony with the other organs of its age.’
²¹
The illuminating observations on historical context which Wölfflin sometimes produced (such as the remarks on the social history of gesture, below p. 250) are enough to make one regret the self-denying ordinance by which he generally restricted himself to explanations of style in intrinsic terms. As a result, Burckhardt’s intellectual heritage passed not to Wölfflin but to Aby Warburg.

Aby Warburg’s life is reminiscent of more than one character in the novels of his contemporary Thomas Mann. The eldest son of a Hamburg banker, he rejected the world of business for the world of scholarship. It is hardly surprising that he should have been fascinated by the Medici. Warburg was not a pupil of Burckhardt’s, but in 1892 he sent the older man his essay on Botticelli, and the generous comments on this ‘fine piece of work’ suggest that Burckhardt thought that this study of a painter’s contacts with poets and humanists did not diverge in essentials from his own. It was a testimony, wrote Burckhardt, to ‘the general deepening and many-sidedness’ that research on the Renaissance had reached.
²²
Warburg was indeed many-sided. He treated the history of art as part of the general history of culture and disliked any kind of intellectual ‘frontier control’, as he called it. On the other hand, he was faithful to the maxim that God is to be found in the details (‘
Der liebe Gott steckt im Detail
’). To interpret the paintings of Botticelli, for example, he went to the poems of Poliziano and the philosophy of Ficino. Warburg’s interests
extended to social and economic history; in his own work the concept of the Florentine ‘bourgeoisie’ played a considerable part, while his friend the economic historian Alfred Doren dedicated to him a study of the Florentine cloth industry.
²³